Section Awards 2011
Distinguished Scholarly Monograph Award
Committee: Ian Robinson (Chair), Jeff Haydu, Tom Juravich, Ben Lind, Jeff Salaz, and Marcos Lopez.
The winner was: Jane Collins and Victoria Mayer. 2010. Both Hands Tied: Welfare Reform and the Race to the Bottom of the Low-Wage Labor Market. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Both Hands Tied is theoretically ambitious, showing how major trends in labor markets – the decline of manufacturing and its union jobs, the rise of low-wage service work, and capital’s abandonment of the principle of the family wage -- interact with changes in social policy driven by neoliberal ideas of individual motivation and the appropriate role of the state. Both Hands Tied masterfully integrates its account of the sources and likely consequences of these macro-level changes with a lively ethnography of 33 women, living in Racine and Milwaukee, Wisconsin who enter, remain on, or return to the Wisconsin Works program in 2003. Both Hands Tied is (sadly) persuasive in its claim that the experiences of these women can probably be generalized to the rest of the state, and perhaps, more broadly still.
Both Hands Tied shows that far from liberating women from a dependent, poverty-ridden existence, the structural and policy changes it analyzes have combined to lock women into poverty-wage work and dependent status from which it is very difficult to escape. It also shows how workfare rules and practices reinforce and feed back into labor market structural trends, negatively impacting workers who have never been part of the workfare system. It does this partly by creating an expanded pool of low cost labor for social reproduction work, thus driving down wages, and partly by training welfare recipients to accept such jobs and denying them basic labor rights that might have helped them contest this system. The authors show that the few women who achieve some modest upward mobility are able to do so only when they break the rules and successfully deceive their case workers. The exceptions thus prove the ugly rule that this study documents: neoliberal economic restructuring, combined with neoliberal social policy reforms, powerfully reinforce one another in deepening and institutionalizing female, minority and child poverty in this country.
It is hard to see how we can break out of the vicious circles of neoliberalism that Collins and Mayer document so well without substantially increasing the share of the working class that is organized into the labor movement. And it is hard to imagine organizing on a large enough scale to win policy victories in these areas without devising ways to organize effectively in the private service sector. That is, after all, where two thirds of all jobs – and an even greater share of the worst paid and least secure ones – are found. Many doubt that such workers can be organized on the requisite scale, but our runners-up this year both offer real analytic and empirical purchase on this vital question.
Jennifer Jihye Chun’s Organizing at the Margins: The Symbolic Politics of Labor in South Korea and the United States (Cornell UP, 2009), focuses on organizing struggles by janitors subcontracted to clean university buildings, household workers, and golf caddies. Perhaps Chun’s most important theoretical and practical point is that, while these workers have relatively little structural power, they can organize and deploy significant “symbolic capital.” That is, the injustice of their situation is so clear -- by accepted community standards – that they have a good chance of winning widespread public support if they can bring their normally invisible work situation to the attention of that public. They do this through what Chun calls “public dramas,” such as the on-campus worker rallies and administration building occupations by student supporters at Inha University in South Korea and Harvard in the United States. Chun’s cases show that worker and public pressure can bring about significant positive changes in employer behavior and improvements in employee compensation and job security. While Chun’s focus is entirely on unions as the catalysts to such coalitions, workers’ centers such as the Restaurant Opportunities Centers and Domestic Workers United have also won significant victories for restaurant and domestic workers by employing the same basic approach. They thus reinforce Chun’s message that organizing strategies based on developing and deploying symbolic capital are a promising way forward in this sector.
Marshall Ganz’s Why David Sometimes Wins: Leadership, Organization, and Strategy in the California Farm Worker Movement (Oxford UP, 2009) makes an equally vital point: as important as having the right strategy for a particular purpose and moment, is having the strategic capacity to understand when and how strategy must be changed. Few organizations, in the labor movement or elsewhere, are good at that. Ganz uses the case of the United Farm Workers, and its success where the much better resourced AFL-CIO and the Teamsters failed, both to demonstrate the importance of strategic capacity and to explore its sources. Ganz had already developed the concept “strategic capacity” in his 2000 AJS article. But with the space permitted by a book, he is able to use this framework to document and evaluate the evolution of the UFW -- not only its major victories, but also its losses – with the detail and nuance that 16 years as a UFW insider make possible. In the process, he provides us with analytic tools for understanding, evaluating and improving unions’ strategic capacity at a time when strategic innovation is vital.
Distinguished Scholarly Article Award, 2011
Committee: Anna Guevarra (Chair), Larry W. Isaac, Joshua Page, Gretchen Purser
The winner was: Romberg, Chris. “A Signal Juncture: The Detroit Newspaper Strike and Post-Accord Labor Relations in the United States.” American Journal of Sociology, 115(6):1853-94.
This paper analyzes the 1995-2000 Detroit newspaper strike, which Rhomberg refers to as a “deviant” case through which to revise theories of strike activity and thereby contribute to our understanding of post-accord labor relations. The study is based on 100 interviews with a variety of informants including strikers and union leaders; company executives and representatives; non-striking employees; and local and national civic leaders and public officials. It is also based on news stories collected over a period of four years, on archival sources such as trial transcripts, and on various organizational documents. Not only is the empirical case fascinating and important, but all the more so due to Chris’ theoretical development of the methodological concept of the “signal juncture” of which the Detroit strike is an instance.
The concept of signal juncture is described as “moments of conflict that reveal a ‘collision’ of underlying developmental paths,” developed as an analytic tool for studying institutional continuity and change. Rhomberg creatively tethers the logic of deviant case analysis to that of path dependency theory. Conceptually related to but analytically distinct from its cousin concept—“critical juncture” a transformative case in which rules and relations change ushering in a new historical period—the signal juncture highlights a deviant case that departs from the dominant pattern without producing transformation but exposes the forces and countertendencies that are endogenous to continuous trends. As such, the model calls attention to—signals--internal structural tensions/contradictions that persist and within periods so it is useful conceptual vehicle for those of us interested in dialectical processes. This is a sophisticated theoretical and empirical analysis offering a major contribution to labor and labor movement scholarship and to historical sociology more generally.
Distinguished graduate student article award, 2011
Committee: Steve McKay (Chair), Manjusha Nair, Jennifer Seminatore, David Tope, Anna Wetterberg
The winner was: Lu Zhang. "From Detroit to Shanghai? Globalization, Market Reform, and Dynamics of Labor Unrest in the Chinese Automobile Industry."
Lu Zhang's timely and fascinating paper brings us deep into China's industrial heart to challenge the notion of the "helpless" Chinese workers. Extending the work of Beverly Silver, Ching Kwan Lee and others, Zhang draws on extensive and insightful interviews with both management and workers in the Chinese auto sector to reveal the dynamics of recent labor protests, the politics and structuring of labor force dualism, and the centrality of new labor laws to both the state's labor control strategies and workers' bargaining strategies. Her work will be a major contribution to the study of labor in China as well as the global trend towards institutionalizing labor force informalization.
Back to the awards main page.
Committee: Ian Robinson (Chair), Jeff Haydu, Tom Juravich, Ben Lind, Jeff Salaz, and Marcos Lopez.
The winner was: Jane Collins and Victoria Mayer. 2010. Both Hands Tied: Welfare Reform and the Race to the Bottom of the Low-Wage Labor Market. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Both Hands Tied is theoretically ambitious, showing how major trends in labor markets – the decline of manufacturing and its union jobs, the rise of low-wage service work, and capital’s abandonment of the principle of the family wage -- interact with changes in social policy driven by neoliberal ideas of individual motivation and the appropriate role of the state. Both Hands Tied masterfully integrates its account of the sources and likely consequences of these macro-level changes with a lively ethnography of 33 women, living in Racine and Milwaukee, Wisconsin who enter, remain on, or return to the Wisconsin Works program in 2003. Both Hands Tied is (sadly) persuasive in its claim that the experiences of these women can probably be generalized to the rest of the state, and perhaps, more broadly still.
Both Hands Tied shows that far from liberating women from a dependent, poverty-ridden existence, the structural and policy changes it analyzes have combined to lock women into poverty-wage work and dependent status from which it is very difficult to escape. It also shows how workfare rules and practices reinforce and feed back into labor market structural trends, negatively impacting workers who have never been part of the workfare system. It does this partly by creating an expanded pool of low cost labor for social reproduction work, thus driving down wages, and partly by training welfare recipients to accept such jobs and denying them basic labor rights that might have helped them contest this system. The authors show that the few women who achieve some modest upward mobility are able to do so only when they break the rules and successfully deceive their case workers. The exceptions thus prove the ugly rule that this study documents: neoliberal economic restructuring, combined with neoliberal social policy reforms, powerfully reinforce one another in deepening and institutionalizing female, minority and child poverty in this country.
It is hard to see how we can break out of the vicious circles of neoliberalism that Collins and Mayer document so well without substantially increasing the share of the working class that is organized into the labor movement. And it is hard to imagine organizing on a large enough scale to win policy victories in these areas without devising ways to organize effectively in the private service sector. That is, after all, where two thirds of all jobs – and an even greater share of the worst paid and least secure ones – are found. Many doubt that such workers can be organized on the requisite scale, but our runners-up this year both offer real analytic and empirical purchase on this vital question.
Jennifer Jihye Chun’s Organizing at the Margins: The Symbolic Politics of Labor in South Korea and the United States (Cornell UP, 2009), focuses on organizing struggles by janitors subcontracted to clean university buildings, household workers, and golf caddies. Perhaps Chun’s most important theoretical and practical point is that, while these workers have relatively little structural power, they can organize and deploy significant “symbolic capital.” That is, the injustice of their situation is so clear -- by accepted community standards – that they have a good chance of winning widespread public support if they can bring their normally invisible work situation to the attention of that public. They do this through what Chun calls “public dramas,” such as the on-campus worker rallies and administration building occupations by student supporters at Inha University in South Korea and Harvard in the United States. Chun’s cases show that worker and public pressure can bring about significant positive changes in employer behavior and improvements in employee compensation and job security. While Chun’s focus is entirely on unions as the catalysts to such coalitions, workers’ centers such as the Restaurant Opportunities Centers and Domestic Workers United have also won significant victories for restaurant and domestic workers by employing the same basic approach. They thus reinforce Chun’s message that organizing strategies based on developing and deploying symbolic capital are a promising way forward in this sector.
Marshall Ganz’s Why David Sometimes Wins: Leadership, Organization, and Strategy in the California Farm Worker Movement (Oxford UP, 2009) makes an equally vital point: as important as having the right strategy for a particular purpose and moment, is having the strategic capacity to understand when and how strategy must be changed. Few organizations, in the labor movement or elsewhere, are good at that. Ganz uses the case of the United Farm Workers, and its success where the much better resourced AFL-CIO and the Teamsters failed, both to demonstrate the importance of strategic capacity and to explore its sources. Ganz had already developed the concept “strategic capacity” in his 2000 AJS article. But with the space permitted by a book, he is able to use this framework to document and evaluate the evolution of the UFW -- not only its major victories, but also its losses – with the detail and nuance that 16 years as a UFW insider make possible. In the process, he provides us with analytic tools for understanding, evaluating and improving unions’ strategic capacity at a time when strategic innovation is vital.
Distinguished Scholarly Article Award, 2011
Committee: Anna Guevarra (Chair), Larry W. Isaac, Joshua Page, Gretchen Purser
The winner was: Romberg, Chris. “A Signal Juncture: The Detroit Newspaper Strike and Post-Accord Labor Relations in the United States.” American Journal of Sociology, 115(6):1853-94.
This paper analyzes the 1995-2000 Detroit newspaper strike, which Rhomberg refers to as a “deviant” case through which to revise theories of strike activity and thereby contribute to our understanding of post-accord labor relations. The study is based on 100 interviews with a variety of informants including strikers and union leaders; company executives and representatives; non-striking employees; and local and national civic leaders and public officials. It is also based on news stories collected over a period of four years, on archival sources such as trial transcripts, and on various organizational documents. Not only is the empirical case fascinating and important, but all the more so due to Chris’ theoretical development of the methodological concept of the “signal juncture” of which the Detroit strike is an instance.
The concept of signal juncture is described as “moments of conflict that reveal a ‘collision’ of underlying developmental paths,” developed as an analytic tool for studying institutional continuity and change. Rhomberg creatively tethers the logic of deviant case analysis to that of path dependency theory. Conceptually related to but analytically distinct from its cousin concept—“critical juncture” a transformative case in which rules and relations change ushering in a new historical period—the signal juncture highlights a deviant case that departs from the dominant pattern without producing transformation but exposes the forces and countertendencies that are endogenous to continuous trends. As such, the model calls attention to—signals--internal structural tensions/contradictions that persist and within periods so it is useful conceptual vehicle for those of us interested in dialectical processes. This is a sophisticated theoretical and empirical analysis offering a major contribution to labor and labor movement scholarship and to historical sociology more generally.
Distinguished graduate student article award, 2011
Committee: Steve McKay (Chair), Manjusha Nair, Jennifer Seminatore, David Tope, Anna Wetterberg
The winner was: Lu Zhang. "From Detroit to Shanghai? Globalization, Market Reform, and Dynamics of Labor Unrest in the Chinese Automobile Industry."
Lu Zhang's timely and fascinating paper brings us deep into China's industrial heart to challenge the notion of the "helpless" Chinese workers. Extending the work of Beverly Silver, Ching Kwan Lee and others, Zhang draws on extensive and insightful interviews with both management and workers in the Chinese auto sector to reveal the dynamics of recent labor protests, the politics and structuring of labor force dualism, and the centrality of new labor laws to both the state's labor control strategies and workers' bargaining strategies. Her work will be a major contribution to the study of labor in China as well as the global trend towards institutionalizing labor force informalization.
Back to the awards main page.