Bibliographic record
Abstract
My book The Idea of Luxury: A Conceptual and Historical Investigation was published in 1994 (still in print). While what follows is bound to be self-referential and also presumptuous in that it is premised on there being some interest in these reflections on the book a quarter of a century plus later. The partial defense is that the book has been extensively cited and widely acknowledged as an important and influential contribution. In the period since its publication I have written (often by invitation) some papers that take, sometimes tangential, aspects of the book’s discussion as their cue but have not revisited the book as a whole. This paper aims to take an, albeit still selective, overview of the book and reply to some of the criticisms to which it has been subject. I divide the paper into three sections. In Sections 1 and 2, I consider separately the two elements in the book’s sub-title before in Section 3 making some general remarks on the book’s implications for aspects of the contemporary study of luxury.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.032 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.015 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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".