Local identities, discourses, and institutional change: an examination of voluntary municipal amalgamation in Newfoundland and Labrador
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis examines the phenomenon of voluntary municipal amalgamation by observing four cases in the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador. This project draws on insights from scholarship in historical and discursive institutionalisms as well as rhetoric and identity discourses to explore the question of why communities voluntarily amalgamate. The comparative case study observes four cases of amalgamation debate in rural communities of Newfoundland and Labrador: three cases (Fogo Island, Roddickton-Bide Arm, and Trinity Bay North) in which amalgamation occurred; and one case (Labrador City and Wabush) in which the communities considered and decided against amalgamation. The results support the hypotheses that 1) amalgamation is chosen voluntarily when community members believe they are facing urgent challenges that are insurmountable as a single community and 2) resistance to amalgamation is identity-driven, and may be overcome by discourses related to regional identity and community survival. Using the independent variables of regional identity discourses and concern for community survival, a framework is proposed to assist policymakers and local government scholars when assessing the likelihood of voluntary amalgamation.
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 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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| 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 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".