The man for the job. How working-class men express masculinity in the normative ambivalence of an occupational limbo
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper draws on an ethnography of a French industrial factory to examine how working-class men trapped in context of indefinite in-betweeneness, framed as an “organizational limbo,” navigate the multiple ambivalent norms at play. It explores how this confusing situation engenders ways to express masculinity that differ from the discursive and corporal manners that the literature usually associates with virility affirmation among French industrial workers. The data indeed show that, in the complex context under study regulated by differing and sometimes contradictory standards, being “the man for the job” has various and ambivalent meanings: workers paradoxically fail to be perceived “as real men” when they rely on a single set of practices expressing an immutable form of masculinity. The paper uncovers how these blurred, contradictory expectations and attitudes combine to drag workers into a spiral of unresolved gender politics. In so doing, this work opens up further research avenues on the role of in-betweenness and hybridity in the lived practices of contemporary class-gender identity formations.
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.
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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 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 it