Labor and Labor Movements' 2005 Section Awards
The Labor and Labor Movements Section prizes were presented at the Business Meeting of the ASA on Sunday August 14, 2005 at 11:30 a.m. Congratulations to the award winners. The award announcements are followed by brief descriptions of the recipients' works.
Best Student Paper:
Book Award:
Book Award Honorable Mentions:
2005 Book Committee members were:
2005 Best Student Paper Committee members were:
BRIEF DESCRIPTIONS OF AWARD WINNERS
David Fitzgerald, Best Student Paper Award for "Mexican State Responses to Labor Emigration, 1900-2004."
This well written, empirically grounded paper does an excellent job of contextualizing the process of labor emigration, situating it within a historical series of shifting intra-state political currents, alignments, and conflicts, all conditioned by the unequal relationship between Mexico and the United States. The paper shows not only how state policies facilitated the expansion and contraction of labor emigration streams, but convincingly demonstrates that "the state" is not a single coherent entity at all, but a collection of actors with different and sometimes contradictory goals, operating in varying regional, local, and sectoral contexts.
Steven Lopez, Re-organizing the Rust Belt
This beautifully written and painstakingly researched book offers an honest, critical and hopeful view of the contemporary American labor movement.
Three features of this book are critical to its extraordinary quality. First, Lopez relies primarily on participant observation, a method that has been greatly under-utilized in the recent research on U.S. labor. This method enables him to probe the internal life of the union. By moving beyond the union's leadership and staff, beyond its organizing propaganda and beyond retrospective accounts of organizing drives, Lopez crafts a far richer, more honest and more critical view of "New Labor" than other recent studies have been able to achieve.
Second, the breadth of Lopez' experiences within the union exposed him to both the good and bad aspects of "new labor." His answers to questions about *why* some unions, some campaigns and some tactics don't work, push far beyond the more popular debates about what works and what doesn't, and brings us to deeper and more sociologically interesting discussions about *why* it has been so hard to change the internal culture of US unions.
Finally, Lopez situates recent struggles by service sector unions in their proper historical and geographical context. While he underscores the crucial role that service sector unions can and will play in the 'new economy,' he reminds us that their successes and failures are dependent, too, on the unions that have preceded them, geographically as well as sectorially. Re-organizing the Rust Belt extraordinary original research and brilliant analytic insight. It is a worthy winner of the first Sociology of Labor Book Award.
Chun Soonok, They Are Not Machines
This book is simultaneously an account of the rise of the democratic unions in South Korea and an analysis of how the workers in these unions were the foundation of the Korean economic miracle. Focusing on the struggles of women workers in the textile and garment industries in South Korea, They are Not Machines begins with an analytic description of the conditions faced by teen-age women workers in these industries, working 100+ hour per week, sleeping in the factories and receiving unimaginably low wages. The book then traces the seminal role of these young women in building the larger Korean labor movement, and the role of the working class in the dynamics of Korean development.
One of our committee members summed up the virtues of Chun's scholarships in this way: "It is inspiring in the most flattering sense-the story inspires us, as citizens and as scholars, to see what the nits and grits of working class organizing is really like. And it is challenging in the most fundamental way-it calls on us to rethink our understanding of what it took to industrialize and humanize the Korean economy."
Beverly Silver, Forces of Labor
This empirically rich and powerfully argued book utilizes a long term and global framework to offer a bracingly fresh analysis of the role of labor under capitalism. It demonstrates that a U.S.-centric view distorts our understanding of labor and deprives us of the analytic power we gain through historical and comparative analyses of the world-system. It mines a new lode of data on labor unrest worldwide and conducts in-depth analyzes of both 'old' and 'new' industries to examine and theorize the concatenated migration of industrial production and labor unrest from country to country. It weaves this evidence into an exciting new analysis that enriches our understanding of labor process, labor organizing, industrial location and industrial structure.
What emerges from Forces of Labor is nothing less than a new perspective that integrates the agency of the working class into our understanding of the dynamics of global capitalism.
PAST AWARD RECIPIENTS
Best Student Paper:
- David Fitzgerald
Department of Sociology
University of California, Los Angeles
"Mexican State Responses to Labor Emigration, 1900-2004."
Book Award:
- Steven Henry Lopez
Department of Sociology
Ohio State University
Reorganizing the Rust Belt: An Inside Study of the American Labor Movement (University of California Press)
Book Award Honorable Mentions:
- Chun Soonok
Centre for Culture and Information Studies
Sungkonghoe University in Seoul
They Are Not Machines: Korean Women Workers and their Fight for Democratic Trade Unionism in the 1970s (Ashgate)
Beverly Silver
Department of Sociology
Johns Hopkins University
Forces of Labor: Workers' Movements and Globalization since 1870 (Cambridge University Press)
2005 Book Committee members were:
- Michael Schwartz, Committee Chair
State University of New York, Stony Brook
[email protected]
Heidi Gottfried
Wayne State University
[email protected]
Ruth Milkman
University of California, Los Angeles
[email protected]
Daisy Rooks
University of California, Los Angeles
[email protected]
Kim Scipes
University of Illinois, Chicago
[email protected]
2005 Best Student Paper Committee members were:
- Rick Fantasia, Committee Chair
Smith College
[email protected]
Jeff Sallaz, Previous Recipient
University of California, Berkeley
[email protected]
Teresa Sharpe
University of California, Berkeley
[email protected]
Rachel Sherman
Yale University
[email protected]
BRIEF DESCRIPTIONS OF AWARD WINNERS
David Fitzgerald, Best Student Paper Award for "Mexican State Responses to Labor Emigration, 1900-2004."
This well written, empirically grounded paper does an excellent job of contextualizing the process of labor emigration, situating it within a historical series of shifting intra-state political currents, alignments, and conflicts, all conditioned by the unequal relationship between Mexico and the United States. The paper shows not only how state policies facilitated the expansion and contraction of labor emigration streams, but convincingly demonstrates that "the state" is not a single coherent entity at all, but a collection of actors with different and sometimes contradictory goals, operating in varying regional, local, and sectoral contexts.
Steven Lopez, Re-organizing the Rust Belt
This beautifully written and painstakingly researched book offers an honest, critical and hopeful view of the contemporary American labor movement.
Three features of this book are critical to its extraordinary quality. First, Lopez relies primarily on participant observation, a method that has been greatly under-utilized in the recent research on U.S. labor. This method enables him to probe the internal life of the union. By moving beyond the union's leadership and staff, beyond its organizing propaganda and beyond retrospective accounts of organizing drives, Lopez crafts a far richer, more honest and more critical view of "New Labor" than other recent studies have been able to achieve.
Second, the breadth of Lopez' experiences within the union exposed him to both the good and bad aspects of "new labor." His answers to questions about *why* some unions, some campaigns and some tactics don't work, push far beyond the more popular debates about what works and what doesn't, and brings us to deeper and more sociologically interesting discussions about *why* it has been so hard to change the internal culture of US unions.
Finally, Lopez situates recent struggles by service sector unions in their proper historical and geographical context. While he underscores the crucial role that service sector unions can and will play in the 'new economy,' he reminds us that their successes and failures are dependent, too, on the unions that have preceded them, geographically as well as sectorially. Re-organizing the Rust Belt extraordinary original research and brilliant analytic insight. It is a worthy winner of the first Sociology of Labor Book Award.
Chun Soonok, They Are Not Machines
This book is simultaneously an account of the rise of the democratic unions in South Korea and an analysis of how the workers in these unions were the foundation of the Korean economic miracle. Focusing on the struggles of women workers in the textile and garment industries in South Korea, They are Not Machines begins with an analytic description of the conditions faced by teen-age women workers in these industries, working 100+ hour per week, sleeping in the factories and receiving unimaginably low wages. The book then traces the seminal role of these young women in building the larger Korean labor movement, and the role of the working class in the dynamics of Korean development.
One of our committee members summed up the virtues of Chun's scholarships in this way: "It is inspiring in the most flattering sense-the story inspires us, as citizens and as scholars, to see what the nits and grits of working class organizing is really like. And it is challenging in the most fundamental way-it calls on us to rethink our understanding of what it took to industrialize and humanize the Korean economy."
Beverly Silver, Forces of Labor
This empirically rich and powerfully argued book utilizes a long term and global framework to offer a bracingly fresh analysis of the role of labor under capitalism. It demonstrates that a U.S.-centric view distorts our understanding of labor and deprives us of the analytic power we gain through historical and comparative analyses of the world-system. It mines a new lode of data on labor unrest worldwide and conducts in-depth analyzes of both 'old' and 'new' industries to examine and theorize the concatenated migration of industrial production and labor unrest from country to country. It weaves this evidence into an exciting new analysis that enriches our understanding of labor process, labor organizing, industrial location and industrial structure.
What emerges from Forces of Labor is nothing less than a new perspective that integrates the agency of the working class into our understanding of the dynamics of global capitalism.
PAST AWARD RECIPIENTS
- 2005 Distinguished Scholarly Book Award
- Steven Henry Lopez for Reorganizing the Rust Belt: An Inside Study of the American Labor Movement (University of California Press).
- Chun Soonok for They Are Not Machines: Korean Women Workers and their Fight for Democratic Trade Unionism in the 1970s (Ashgate).
- Beverly Silver for Forces of Labor: Workers' Movements and Globalization since 1870 (Cambridge University Press).
- David Fitzgerald for "Mexican State Responses to Labor Emigration, 1900-2004."
- Rick Fantasia for his article, "Dictatorship OVER the Proletariat: Deprivations of Work and Labor in the United States,"Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales 138: 3-18.
- Moon-Kie Jung for "Interracialism: The Ideological Transformation of Hawaii's Working Class." 2003. American Sociological Review 68: 373-400.
- Marc Dixon and Vincent Roscigno for their "Status, Networks, and Social Movement Participation: The Case of Striking Workers." 2003. American Journal of Sociology 108: 1292-1327.
- Jeffrey Sallaz for "Manufacturing Concessions: Attritionary Outsourcing at GM's Lordstown, USA Assembly Plant."
- Teresa Sharpe for "Union Democracy and Successful Campaigns."
- Jason Moore for "Remaking Work, Remaking Space, Spaces of Production and Accumulation in the Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1865-1920."
2005 Best Student Paper Award
2004 Distinguished Scholarly Article Award
2004 Best Student Paper Award