Popular Capitalism? Privatization and Demutualization in the 1980s and 1990s
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract While Margaret Thatcher publicly promoted a Puritan emphasis on thrift, hard work, and asceticism, the outcome of her policies stood in stark contrast to this side of her rhetoric. Her way of selling off nationalized industries allowed the British to have a heavily subsidized flutter on the stock market and increased the shareholder population to ten million investors. Reality, however, was a far cry from Thatcher’s slogan of a ‘share-owning democracy’, not least because the continued growth of large financial institutions meant that small shareholders had very little influence on corporate governance. Millions of people merely ‘stagged’ the privatization issues, meaning that they sold for a quick and easy profit in early trading. ‘Investors’ new and old applied the same short-term logic during the demutualization of major building societies like Halifax or Northern Rock during the 1990s, when ‘carpet-bagging’ became a national sport. Carpetbaggers opened accounts in societies ripe for demutualization not in order to save for a house, but to make a quick profit from selling their accounts once they were converted into shares due to the building society becoming a public company. This chapter places centre stage prominent carpetbaggers such as the former royal butler, Michael Hardern, who during the late 1990s campaigned to become a board member of all remaining building societies. The extent of ‘stagging’ and ‘carpet-bagging’ shows that popular capitalism was less an economic enfranchisement of the nation, and more an expressive culture of self-referential speculation, personal enrichment, and stock market gambling.
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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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 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".