Modes of Influence: The Making of the Calgary School
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Calgary School, a group of conservative academics at the University of Calgary including the historian David Bercuson and the political scientists Barry Cooper, Tom Flanagan, Rainer Knopff, and Ted Morton, has been recognized as an important intellectual formation on the Canadian right since the early-1990s. These Calgary Schoolers have been associated closely with the political rise of Stephen Harper, who was Prime Minister of Canada from 2006-2015. They have also been associated more generally with histories of neoliberalism and neoconservatism in Canada. This dissertation is the first comprehensive history of the Calgary School; it traces the intellectual history of the group from the mid-1960s to the mid-2000s. The Calgary Schoolers were united most of all by their outlook on the proper role of states in socio-economic life. In their critique of the intentional state, which they inherited from various thinkers in the transnational orbit of conservative ideas, the Calgary Schoolers opposed the notion that states can purposely direct civil society towards acknowledged goals and outcomes. To seek outcomes like economic equality, for example, was to engage in what Calgary Schoolers often maligned as “social engineering.” Sharing in this perspective as they did, the Calgary Schoolers then sought to extend the influence of their views, doing so in various “modes of influence.” The Calgary Schoolers established their authority as scholars, used that authority to undergird ventures into public view as polemicists, and associated themselves with people and institutions that could give practical weight to their positions. While resisting the idea that the Calgary Schoolers somehow made the neoliberal era in Canada, this dissertation shows how they made influence from within the confines of that era, recognizing the opportunities it afforded them and leveraging those opportunities for their ends.
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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 | 0.011 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.055 | 0.119 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.037 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.016 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.013 |
| 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".