Adapting to Decline: The Changing Business World of the Bourgeoisie in Saint John, <scp>nb</scp>, in the 1920s
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The regional economic crisis that descended upon the Maritimes in the 1920s wrought considerable change to the business world of the entrepreneurial bourgeoisie in Saint John, nb. While Maritime historiography - shaped, as Ian McKay has observed, by the ‘themes of dependency, underdevelopment and metropolis/hinterland interaction’ - has tended to portray the 1920s as a period of decline and crisis for the region's business leaders, the experience of bourgeois Saint John suggests that the period was also one of important economic transformation. Drawing upon a variety of sources, including the business and local press, company papers, and other archival materials, this article analyses the ways in which bourgeois Saint John residents adapted their accumulation and development strategies to the changing economic circumstances of the decade. The city's bourgeoisie moved away from the old political economy of urban industrialization, and towards an emerging political economy that centred on tourist promotion and resource development, and was more dependent upon state intervention and outside capital. In step with these developments, finance capital became a more important force in local business life, evident by the ascendance of financier Howard P. Robinson, while nationally competitive manufacturers such as Lewis Simms and the McAvity family continued to manage successful local enterprises. Collectively, bourgeois Saint John adapted to broader changes in Canadian capitalism during the 1920s, which produced a more ambiguous brand of ‘community-minded entrepreneurship’ than in past decades and set the stage for future developments.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.021 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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".