We Are “Dogs of the Docks”: Maintaining Occupational Entitativity in the Face of Diminishing Stigma
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This longitudinal study explores how and why a historically stigmatized occupation, longshore workers, choose to maintain the tainted nature of their occupation even as the stigma that once characterized their work largely fades. Relying on data collected from 72 interviews, supplemented with observational and archival data over a 70-year period, we examine how factors both internal (e.g., changes in hiring practices) and external (e.g., technological advances) to the occupation influence longshoremen’s response to diminishing stigma. Significantly, we find that longshoremen work to actively disengage from certain forms of stigma (e.g., theft ), while simultaneously strategically retaining other forms (e.g., violence). Our data suggests that to retain the stigmas that they consider central to the maintenance of their entitativity, longshoremen employ various strategies, including reviving past stigmas and overemphasizing current taint. Answering why an occupation would actively insist on retaining parts of their stigma, we find that longshoremen’s stigma allowed them to enact and justify occupational closure when their jobs – once reviled – become coveted. In contrast to previous work on occupational stigma cooptation, we find stigma being used to repel outsiders, reinforce misconceptions, and maintain negative occupational evaluations. Our findings contribute to the literatures on stigma, entitativity, and occupational closure.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".