The "Disappearing Middle": A Sociological Perspective
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This chapter begins with some observations on the disappearing middle hypothesis, pointing out that prevailing theoretical formulations are weak and imprecise. It argues that these formulations ignore the social relations of agriculture and, in some versions, represent a pseudo-theory that misconstrues an empirical pattern as a theoretical proposition. The chapter presents North American census data which support the empirical proposition that medium-sized, full-time "family farms" have tended to decline relative to subfamily and "capitalist" farms. Federal Census officials do not make farm-household-level data available to researchers, as has been done in Canada. The American family farm has long been said to be under assault and its future very much in doubt accordingly, there is a strong tendency for American observers to be preoccupied with understanding why the family farm is disappearing and with how its demise can be attenuated or reversed.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.048 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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 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".