Worker and Community Ownership as an Economic Development Strategy: Innovative Rebirth or Tired Retread of a Failed Idea?
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A generation ago, American state and local experiments with worker and community ownership appeared unsuccessful. Does their current revival offer anything new to the field of economic development or is this merely a tired retread of a failed idea? Using historical analysis, case studies, and interview data from three U.S. regions, the author analyzes the current range of initiatives that seek to remove impediments, stimulate development, and provide direct technical and financial support to worker and community-owned enterprises. The author also identifies how these efforts differ from those in the past, with respect to scope, scale, and success orientation. Collectively, these differences suggest a focus on engaging with, rather than escaping from, market-based economic development. Key challenges are also identified: popular education, community capacity, competitive pressure, early-stage financing, and managing political content. While too early to assess outcomes, these differences suggest the possibility of more substantial results than in the past.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it