Power, Narrative, and Fossil Fuels: Meaning‐Making and the Co‐Optation of Workers’ Struggle
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Discursive power operates through narrative to shape subjective perceptions of meaningful work within capitalist societies, where work as employment is required for survival. This article theorises the relationship between labour alienation and the adoption of narratives that create meaning while rationalising and defending the class structure. It presents an empirical example of how discursive power interacts with the material and structural realities of fossil fuel workers in the formation of extractive subjectivities. We asked workers from two of North America's most prominent regions of historical fossil fuel extraction—northern Alberta, Canada, and West Texas, United States—to narrate their experiences and perspectives. Drawing on their words, we explore the resonance between workers’ accounts of alienation, the rationalisations they articulate, and the narratives circulated by fossil fuel capital. Our findings have implications for those working toward more just and ecological societies within the polarised contexts of energy and climate.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.047 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| 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".