A Path-Dependent Approach to Communal Transformation: Reconciling Cognitive and Structural Views of Collective Community
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Cognitive views claim that ethnic, national, and racial communities are malleable and constantly transforming, while more structural accounts consider these collective communities highly static. This article considers communal transformations at the population level, combines aspects of cognitive and structural perspectives, and uses path dependence to explain why collective communities are transformative in some instances but much more rigid in others. It claims that communal boundaries are usually relatively static because communal structures reinforce them through three main mechanism of reproduction, all of which can reproduce communal frameworks through inclusion and exclusion: cost, power, and socialization. In turn, the article describes how two types of critical juncture create openings for more punctuated and extensive communal transformations. Constructive critical junctures occur prior to the existence of powerful mechanisms of communal reproduction and make possible the construction of new communal frameworks. Alternatively, transformative critical junctures are openings for change that result from the weakening or breakdown of extant mechanisms of reproduction and generally promote transformations in preexisting communal frameworks. To clarify and support the argument, the article provides a variety of examples and an analysis of transformations in the Quebecois collective community.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.043 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".