Building the Wholesale: the development of the English CWS and British co-operative business 1863–90
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The English Co-operative Wholesale Society (CWS), established in 1863, emerged in the nineteenth century as a key component of the British co-operative movement, selling to retail societies many of the commodities they sold on to their members and customers. But the CWS had to compete with private wholesalers in supplying retail societies, a situation which made the CWS’ relationship with the wider movement quite problematic. This article explores the establishment and development of the CWS during the first quarter century of its existence, and the strategies it employed to maximise its trade with societies, which included major involvement in manufacturing, and the development of global commercial activity. It is argued that in contrast with the picture of British enterprise offered by such commentators as Chandler, the CWS was in many respects a highly efficient organisation for its time, which successfully developed its role in the quite dysfunctional federation which was the co-operative movement. Indeed, it is argued that the CWS achieved a level of organisational and managerial sophistication which would not be seen in most British non-co-operative business until well into the twentieth century.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
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".