Project-based industries and craft-like production: structure, location, and performance

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Older Workers: An Essential Resource for Massachusetts

The Massachusetts Jobs Council, the Governor’s principal advisory board on workforce development, established the Blue Ribbon Commission on Older Workers in 1997 to analyze the labor market for older workers in the Commonwealth and to recommend policies to improve the economic status of the older labor force. The Commission held numerous hearings, town meetings, and focus groups to solicit the views of older workers, employers, labor organizations, and training professionals, and it reviewed the findings of extensive research on older workers in Massachusetts

What Makes a District? "Created" Externalities in Craft-Like Manufacturing -- The Garment Industry

This paper documents the emergence of “new” industrial districts using evidence from longitudinal and retrospective studies of garment districts in France, Italy, the UK, and the United States. “Traditional” district externalities – proximity to customers and suppliers, access to skilled labor supplies, knowledge about products and production processes -- matter as much to the smaller craft-like firms that survive as they did to the larger firms that are now disappearing. However, we also find an emerging set of externalities being “created” by surviving firms that are “craft-like” in that they are quick and flexible in their production methods and tend to serve markets for more individualized products with short product cycles. We identify three distinct patterns among the new externalities being created by firms: (1) strengthening traditional sources of externalities, (2) intensifying market and/or social incentives for higher effort and lower costs, and (3) fostering a district-wide culture of broad-based Schumpeterian innovation by firms. While the institutional history of each district and the nation-specific structure of supply chains shape these responses, the patterns we observe transcend national boundaries

Modes of incorporation: a conceptual and empirical critique

Entering the debate over segmented assimilation, this paper seeks to refocus discussion on a core, but neglected claim: that inter-group disparities among immigrant offspring derive from differences in a contextual feature shared by immigrant and immigrant descendants: a nationality’s mode of incorporation.  The paper engages in both theoretical and empirical assessment.  We critically examine the concept of mode of incorporation, demonstrating that its operational implications have not been correctly understood; consequently, the core hypothesis has never been appropriately tested.  The second part of the paper implements those tests, making use of the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Survey.  We do so by using nationality as a proxy for mode of incorporation, systematically contrasting more advantaged against less advantaged nationalities.    We show: (a) that tests systematically varying modes classified as more or less advantageous yield inconsistent outcomes; (b) that positive or negative modes of incorporation are associated with few long-lasting effects; (c) that differences in governmental reception are particularly unlikely to be associated with interethnic disparities; and (d) that compared to theoretically relevant nationalities, neither Mexicans, a nationality assigned to a negative mode of incorporation, nor pre-Mariel Cubans, a nationality assigned to positive mode of incorporation, prove distinctive

In Search of the High Road: Meaning and Evidence

This article is the first in a series to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the ILR Review. We will be highlighting important research themes that have been featured in the journal over its many years of publication. In this article, Paul Osterman reviews research on the quality of jobs and recent debates over “High Road” and “Low Road” approaches to employment practices. Scholars and policy advocates frequently utilize the distinction between High Road and Low Road firms as a framework for efforts to improve the quality of work in low-wage employers. This article assesses the logic and evidence that underlies this construct. The author provides a definition of the concept and examines the evidence behind the assumption that firms have a choice in how they design their employment policies. He then takes up the assertion that firms that adopt a High Road model can “do well by doing good” and adds precision to this claim by reviewing the evidence that a profit-maximizing firm would benefit from following the High Road path. The article concludes by suggesting a research agenda and providing a framework for policy that flows from the conclusions drawn from the existing research base