Class Implications of a Mortgaged Economy: Reflections on Building a Sociology of Debt
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis examines the democratization of debt and its role in the formation and maintenance of the new middle class (NMC) in Canadian society.Through explicitly linking the concept of debt to the intensification of labour, class discourse evolves beyond the economic reliance on income and property holdings to encompass the social trade-offs that accompany the decisions to enter into debt relations and assume repayment obligations.Drawing on the history of debt and shifting moral views on debt it is shown how debt provides a common language that mitigates class conflict and creates the conditions for life-long employment as oversight mechanisms regulating indebtedness parallel changes that accompanied the transformation of work.A case study of microcredit further depicts how the extension of debt provides individuals with the capacity to create their own 'risk-biographies' within a limited set of outcomes.Semistructured interviews with retirees were conducted to supplement the secondary research and focused on the 'lived-class' experience.The interviews were analyzed using a phenomenographic approach that explored how debt knowledge is acquired, transmitted and used to maintain middle-class lifestyles.Topics of investigation included first experiences with debt, views on debtors, co-signing loans, comfort levels with financial instruments such as stocks and overall financial awareness.The research findings provide the foundational elements for the continued evolution of the sociology of debt as a means to locate the NMC and to assess the collateral being deployed to remain in good standing.
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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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.042 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".