Eileen Tallman-Sufrin (1913-1999): organizing Eaton’s and organizing in Canada
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose This paper sets out to accomplish the following: expand our understand of Eileen Tallman-Sufrin as an important but overlooked Canadian labour leader, organizer and author of labour policy, to expand our understanding of the development of Canada’s labour history and some of its enduring characteristics thus contributing to more historical and contemporary and scholarly engagement, to bring into focus the contributions of women to both unionizing in Canada and as contributors to Canadian labour discourse and to illustrate the power of ficto-feminism as a critical biographical method for management history. Guiding this study are the following research questions: Who was Eileen Tallman-Sufrin, and what were her key accomplishments? And why is she not a more prominent figure in Canada’s labour history? This study aims to present the key contribution of a new discrete history of an important but neglected female labour organizer, which is distinctly feminist in composition. Design/methodology/approach Ficto-feminism is a way to surface neglected figures and consider their overlooked accomplishments and contributions. Combining aspects of autoethnography, fictocriticism and collective biography, Ficto-feminism is an explicitly feminist method for feminist historical inquiry, and it is distinguishable by the writing which emerges from its application, which is polemical, embodied, affective and full of resonance. For feminist writers, it is also a strategy to engage with female historical figures anew in contemporary discourse. Ficto-feminism also contributes to the growing feminist tradition in management and organizational studies, called writing differently. Findings Eileen Tallman-Sufrin led one of the most ambitious drives in Canada’s labour history, with one of the largest employers in Canada. Additionally, the effort was unprecedented in size and with a previously ununionized, white-collar, largely female workforce. Further, she is responsible for engaging thousands of women in organizing throughout Canada, including in leadership roles. She also offered training and penned a book, which unlike herself, has become a taken-for-granted contribution to labour history (and labour education) in Canada (The Eaton Drive). Additionally, she helped contribute to other women making scholarly contributions to Canada’s labour history. She also went on to write one of the most comprehensive comparative studies of labour relations legislation in Canada. The reasons for her relative obscurity are as follows: she was not a prominent figure in her own writing, often writing in a passive voice, and foregrounding the activity of the work instead of her role in it; women’s organizing history is limited and Canadian women’s organizing history even more so; women writing on labour history in Canada is also limited and sexism in the labour movement in Canada was profound. Originality/value Combining archival traces and interviews with Eileen Tallman-Sufrin, this paper features a fictitious conversation between the author and Eileen Tallman-Sufrin. This exchange not only gives insights into Eileen Tallman-Sufrin as a person but reinforces the importance of her accomplishments in the context of Canada’s labour history, management and organizational studies and management history. Unlike previous interviews, this new composite conversation is explicitly feminist, embodied and personal. As such, it is an agentive exercise for both subject and author, in service to feminism, management and organizational studies and management history. This study capitalizes on the utility of ficto-feminism to generate the equivalent of new documentary-style source material by offering a feminist reading of previously less consider or unconsidered primary and secondary sources. Ficto-feminism also achieves a bridge between criticism and narration, a key challenge in creating feminist histories.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 it