The morphing subject: analyzing the agency of mobile construction workers in the Alberta oil sands
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article contributes to existing scholarship on mobility regimes by examining how construction trades workers in the oil sands of northern Alberta, Canada undergo a transformation in keeping with the conditions of the resource industry fly-in fly-out (FIFO) regime. Labour studies in the construction industry emphasize its inevitable and high levels of mobile work, and the mobility regime literature emphasizes the systems and regulations that condition workers’ movements; but both literatures are in need of further exploration and explication of how movement and circulation might condition a transformation in worker subjectivity. We undertake a phenomenological examination of 25 interviews and over 100 hours of observations with workers conducted from 2014 to 2016 during a period of transition from boom to bust. We find that workers undergo an automorphosis in three key ways: into the immovability of the FIFO regime, into the logics of the circulation of oil capital and labour, and finally, into the overall objective conditions of FIFO-based resource extraction and its relentless but restless demands. We conclude by suggesting that mobile workers might thus develop a kind of ‘plastic agency’ that challenges us to revise the binary opposition between structural control and consciously adaptive subject.
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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".