Manufacturing crisis under globalisation: middle-class precarity in Dave Eggers’s <i>A Hologram for the King</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Large swaths of homo economicus americanus today confront chronic unemployment or under-employment in a period of tremendous offshoring of the production of goods and services, high consumer debt, static or declining disposable incomes, and shrinking governmental supports, even as large income gains and increasing wealth concentration are enjoyed by the rich and hyper-rich. In recent years, Dave Eggers has authored a number of post-postmodern novels that address the divergent trajectories of various contemporary American economic actors. This essay investigates one of these works, A Hologram for the King (2012), which details the long decline of the American manufacturing sector since the late seventies through globalisation, and the angst and material suffering of downward economic mobility that this has occasioned. Through qualitative and quantitative analyses, this essay examines Hologram’s depiction of middle-class precarity and its repudiation of American exceptionalism, as well as its anticipation of the Trump Administration’s global trade wars. Finally, in its conclusion, the essay takes up philosophical and political issues related to economic globalisation in contemporary American and global society.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.031 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".