Social scientists have not helped the working class make strategic deci- sions. Unionists need to know how to carry on industrial conflict so as to provide concrete economic benefits for their members. Should unions strike or not strike? Should losses be avoided at all costs, or can unions afford to take chances? Does economism gut the class power of workers or provide a pragmatic strategy for increasing workers' wage gains? We can say with great confidence that workers should join unions; there is now an exhaustive and compelling literature demonstrating that union membership provides a wide...

This book benefited from the financial support of a French Government scholarship between 1976 and 1978. It sponsored a doctoral thesis in which initial theoretical, empirical, and historical reflections on acci- dents were developed and written while I was a student at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. The New Zealand Depart- ment of Labour funded a study on industrial accidents and night work during 1979-80. In 1982-83, the award of a postdoctoral fellowship by the University of Canterbury (New Zealand) permitted a first version of this book to be finished. In the...

In a review written in 1979, I noted that there was a paucity of research examining the effects of maternal employment on the infant and young child and also that longitudinal studies of the effects of maternal em- ployment were needed (Hoffman, 1979). In the last 10 years, there has been a flurry of research activity focused on the mother's employment during the child's early years, and much of this work has been longi- tudinal. All of the studies reported in this volume are at least short-term longitudinal studies, and most of them examine the effects of maternal employment during the early...

A description of the jobs in a labor force, an "occupational" description of it, is an abstraction for describing the flow of concrete work that goes through one or more employing organizations; the flow of work proba- bly changes at a higher speed than the system for abstracting a descrip- tion of its occupations and jobs. A career system is an abstraction for describing the flow of workers through a system of occupations or jobs, and thus is doubly removed from the flow of work. The federal civil service, however, ties many of the incentives and much of the authority to the flow of work...

Over thirty years ago, Alfred North Whitehead wrote: "If America is to be civilized, it has to be done (at least for the present) by the business class who are in possession of the power and the economic resources . . . . If the American universities were up to their job, they would be taking business in hand and teaching it ethics and professional standards. " * To the intellectual elites of his time, there was something of a minor in Whitehead's view. Few of them saw business as a civilizing force heresy and even fewer, feeling that business was not to be tamed, relished the role of the...

Workers, Managers, and Technological Change: Emerging Patterns of Labor Relations contributes significantly to an important subject. Technological change is one of the most powerful forces transforming the American industrial relations In fact, the synergistic relationships between technology and indus system. trial relations are so complex that they are not well or completely understood. We know that the impact of technology, while not independent of social forces, already has been profound: it has transformed occupations, creating new skills and destroying others; altered the power...

Thisbook is the fruit of a number of years of assimilating another culture and learning about the evolution of its institutions, altogether an incr- iblyrich andrewarding experience. Ihopetopassonto the reader some of that richness in the belief that, even in a "globalizing" context, learning about other nations and cultures is more and more necessary. The reasons andvalues behind this belief are perhaps evident, but I amconvincedthat they bear repeating here. To begin with, the hasty generalizations that often liebehind the cynicism-and ultimately the violence-of ethnocentrism and xe- phobia...

My curiosity and concern about the working class in America stems from childhood memories of my father, a cabinetmaker, and of my oldest brother, an autoworker, who were passionately involved in the labor movement. Perhaps because they so wanted the working class to achieve greater social and economic justice and because they insisted it was not happening, I became curious to know the reasons why. Without even being aware of it, I began to explore a possible explanation-the internal diver- sity of the working class. In my studies of autoworkers (the prototype proletarians) in the United...

Work occupies a pivotal role in the daily activities and over the course of a lifetime of members of modern societies. In anticipation, work influ- ences education and training; it has much to do with shaping current earned income and status in the community; and in retrospect, it influ- ences retirement income and activities. It is a powerful force affecting personal associations. In our society work is deeply encased in moral and religious values: As Poor Richard says, A Life of Leisure and a Life of Laziness are two Things. Do you imagine that Sloth will afford you more Comfort than...

This book is a welcome reassertion of an old tradition of interdisdplinary research. That tradition has tended to atrophy in the last decade, largely because of an enormous expansion of the domain of neoc1assical economics. The expansion has fed on two sdentific developments: first, human capital theory; second, contract theory. Both developments have taken phenomena critical to the operation of the economy but previously understood in terms of categories separate and distinct from those with which economists generally work and sought to apply the same analytical techniques that we use to...