Labor in the New Urban Battlegrounds: Local Solidarity in a Global Economy

[Excerpt] Labor in the New Urban Battlegrounds is an energizing, optimistic book. By using the contemporary metropolis as a comparative laboratory to see what contexts and strategies contribute best to labor revitalization, Lowell Turner, Daniel Cornfield, and their collaborators generate a fresh sense of positive possibilities for labor and new insights as to how creative actors can best take advantage of those possibilities. Energizing optimism should not be confused with seeing things through rose-colored glasses. The book fully acknowledges the odds against labor revitalization and the structural obstacles to a more equitable society. Optimism is generated by pairing obstacles with possibilities, often brought to light by another city in which similar obstacles have been overcome with innovative strategies. This book builds on a new tradition of recent analyses of U.S. labor that compellingly contests previous premature obituaries of the labor movement while making a distinctive contribution. Its power is rooted in the comparative metropolis analytical theme and the editors\u27 skill in bringing a diverse baker\u27s dozen of substantive studies to bear on it. The individual chapters are empirically diverse, complementing a gamut of metropolitan areas in the United States with comparative cases from Europe. They employ varied methodological approaches to look at the social infrastructure and strategic choices that underlie urban successes and failures. Many chapters are in-depth case studies of individual cities, while others (e.g., Greer, Byrd, and Fleron; Hauptmeier and Turner) are paired comparisons. Still others (Applegate; Luce; Reynolds) draw their evidence from larger numbers of cities. One (Sellers) employs an ingenious analysis of cross-national data to draw inferences about differences in urban strategic possibilities. The result is much more powerful analytically than it would have been had the editors collected thirteen metropolitan case studies and then tried to figure out their comparative implications. Empirical range and methodological diversity augment the power of the volume, but the overarching focus on comparative metropolitan analysis is what gives the book its distinctive analytical punch. Even though a variety of organizations and social actors populate the stage—campaigns, nongovernmental organizations, individual unions, and ethnic communities—defining the urban area as the stage on which the dramas occur was a critical decision. From this decision flows the book\u27s special contribution to refocusing contemporary labor debates

Professions and inter-disciplinary teamwork in socially embedded bureaucracies: Synthesis and hypotheses on the impact of informal and formal organization

In order to maximize their productivity, inter-disciplinary multi-occupation teams of professionals need to maximize inter-occupational cooperation in team decision making. Cooperation, however, is challenged by status anxiety over organizational careers and identity politics among team members who differ by ethnicity-race, gender, religion, nativity, citizenship status, etc. The purpose of this paper is to develop hypotheses about how informal and formal features of bureaucracy influence the level of inter-occupation cooperation achieved by socially diverse, multi-occupation work teams of professionals in bureaucratic work organizations. The 18 hypotheses, which are developed with the heuristic empirical case of National Science Foundation-sponsored university school partnerships in math and science curriculum innovation in the United States, culminate in the argument that cooperation can be realized as a synthesis of tensions between informal and formal features of bureaucracy in the form of participatory, high performance work systems

Applying U.S. Research on Labor Union Membership Participation to South Korean Unions: An Assessment

The dynamic and organizationally complex, South Korean labor movement presents a unique opportunity for studying union membership participation. The uniqueness of this opportunity suggests that research designs which are adopted from U.S. research for researching South Korean labor unions should be consistent with the organizational complexities of unions, the labor law, and the culture of employment relations in South Korea. The dual image of South Korean labor union organization which is developed in this paper helps to reconceive U.S. concepts of union membership participation, union democracy and union bureaucracy for the South Korean labor movement. The dual image of South Korean labor union organization is also helpful for developing hypotheses about the determinants of membership participation inside South Korean labor unions. In light of the unique attributes of the dual image of South Korean labor union organization, U.S. research designs should be modified in order to pursue several enduring, interdisciplinary research themes about the character and determinants of union membership participation in South Korea. These themes conceive of the labor union as a socializing institution, as an opportunity structure, as a community, and as a stratified working class organization. Developing research designs which capture the unique attributes of the South Korean labor movement will enhance the theoretical and policy implications of the research results, as well as facilitate cross-national, comparative research on labor union membership participation