Ontario teacher unions' confidence in postmodern society: a multiple case study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We live in a postmodern world, characterized by rapid dissemination of information through technology, the decline of the factory system, decentralized decision-making, and workplace intensification (Hargreaves, 1994). In such a context, so different from the modern industrial world, some question the relevance of unions (Verma & Kochan, 2004). In this thesis, I argue that unions-and teacher unions in particular-are not only relevant in this postmodern world, but crucial. As the world adapts to shifts in global power, immigration, work, and resource allocation (Canton, 2006; Friedman, 2007; Gratton, 2011; OECD, 2008; Quinlan, 2011), and as those shifts influence education (Toole & Seashore Louis, 2002), teacher unions are needed to meet both the traditional industrial and professional interests of their membership and also to address broader democratic and social justice issues affecting those within and beyond their membership. However, to meet those demands and to be viable organizations in today's postmodern world, teacher unions must be confident. This exploratory multiple case study, conducted in the Interpretive tradition, is based on Rosabeth Moss Kanter' s (2006) Theory of Confidence, which asserts that confident or winning organizations exhibit or promote accountability, collaboration, and initiative. The study sought to determine the extent to which the members of one teacher union in Ontario, Canada-the Ontario English Catholic Teachers Association (OECTA)-perceived their union as confident. Data were collected through observations; an examination of the documents on OECTA's website; and interviews with thirty OECTA members, including provincial executives, local executives, staff representatives, and rank-and-file members. The results of the study indicated that OECT A generally demonstrates accountability, collaboration, and initiative, and thus is a confident organization; however, like many organizations, it can improve in these areas in the short, mid, and long term.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.027 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".