Bibliographic record
Abstract
We study loose social collectives, which are social formations characterized by fluid forms of organizing, unclear or contested membership, and minimal hierarchy. Specifically, we focus on communities of practice (CoPs), which can be viewed as loose social collectives. Our objective is to examine the processes through which these collectives are organized and sustained. Our study is informed by the notions of organizationality and partial organizing. We conduct a longitudinal, qualitative multi-case study of CoPs. Our findings point to three types of work, namely facilitation work, boundary work and custodial work, which contribute to organizing and sustaining the collectives to varying degrees. We show how the different types of work sometimes attenuate and sometimes exacerbate the tensions experienced by the collective. The findings also indicate that material practices play a role and interact with human practices in organizing and sustaining the CoPs. Finally, we show how democratic, loose social formations can be permeated by hierarchical practices that are subtly enacted and that contribute to organizing processes.
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 | 0.007 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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".