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The Workplace, Technology, and Theory in American Labor History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2008

Philip Scranton
Affiliation:
Rutgers University, Camden

Abstract

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Type
Scholarly Controversy
Copyright
Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. 1989

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References

NOTES

For their valuable comments on earlier drafts of this essay, the author wishes to thank Joan Scott, Robert Post, Helmut Gruber, David Montgomery, Len Wallock, and Judith McGaw.

1. Brody, David, “Labor History in the 1970s,” in The Past Before Us, ed. Kammen, Michael (Ithaca, 1980), 263, 265, 268.Google Scholar

2. Stansell, Christine, “A Response to Joan Scott,” International Labor and Working-Class History 31 (Spring 1987): 25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3. MacKensie, Donald, “Marx and the Machine,” Technology and Culture 25 (1985):480–81.Google Scholar

4. Barnett, George, “The Introduction of the Linotype,” in Barnett, , Chapters on Machinery and Labor (Carbondale, 1969; reprint of 1926 ed.), 329Google Scholar; Cockburn, Cynthia, “The Material of Male Power,” Feminist Review 9 (1981):4158CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Baron, Ava, “Contested Terrain Revisited: Technology and Gender Definitions of Work in the Printing Industry, 1850–1920,” in Women, Work and Technology: Transformations, ed. Wright, Barbara (Ann Arbor, 1987), 5883.Google Scholar

5. Winner, Langdon, Autonomous Technology (Cambridge, Mass., 1977), 1357.Google Scholar

6. MacKensie, “Marx and the Machine,” 476–77; Hughes, Thomas, “The Order of the Technological World,” History of Technology 5(1980):115Google Scholar; Tucker, Robert, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader, 2d ed. (New York, 1978), 595.Google Scholar

7. Smith, Merritt Roe, Harper's Ferry Armory and the New Technology (Cambridge, Mass., 1977)Google Scholar; Noble, David, Forces of Production (New York, 1984)Google Scholar; Hounshell, David, From the American System to Mass Production (Baltimore, 1984)Google Scholar; McGaw, Judith, Most Wonderful Machine (Princeton, 1987).Google Scholar Among labor historians, three notable studies that treat both gender and technology (in the broad sense) are: Cooper, Patricia, Once a Cigar Maker: Men, Women, and Work Culture in American Cigar Factories, 1900–1919 (Urbana, 1987)Google Scholar; Benson, Susan Porter, Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890–1940 (Urbana, 1986)Google Scholar; and Baron, Ava and Klepp, Susan, “If I Didn't Have My Sewing Machine …,” in A Needle, A Bobbin, A Strike, ed. Jensen, Joan and Davidson, Sue (Philadelphia, 1984).Google Scholar

8. Montgomery, David, The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865–1925 (New York, 1987), 1, 2.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9. Ibid., 2–3, 44.

10. Ibid., chap. 4, quotes from 179, 191; on selectivity in focus, see 2–3; on clothing and textiles, 116–23, 154–70. For a fuller treatment of women's militancy, see Tax, Meredith, The Rising of the Women (New York, 1980)Google Scholar, and essays by Hyman, Colette, Cameron, Ardis, Waldinger, Roger, and Kessler-Harris, Alice in Women, Work and Protest: A Century of U.S. Women's Labor History, ed. Milkman, Ruth (Boston, 1985).Google Scholar

11. See Giddens, Anthony, The Class Structure of Advanced Societies (New York, 1975), chap. 6Google Scholar; Callinicos, Alex, Making History: Agency, Structure and Change in Social Theory (Ithaca, 1988), chap. 4.Google Scholar

12. A minimal sampling of this literature on theory and history would include Sahlins, Marshall, Culture and Practical Reason (Chicago, 1976)Google Scholar; Ricoeur, Paul, Time and Narrative (Chicago, 1984)Google Scholar; Scott, Joan, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” American Historical Review 94 (1986): 1053–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Connell, R.W., Gender and Power (Stanford, 1987)Google Scholar; Elster, Jon, Explaining Technical Change (New York, 1983)Google Scholar; Attridge, Derek et al. , eds., Post-Structuralism and the Question of History (Cambridge, Eng., 1987)Google Scholar; and Habermas, Jurgen, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge, Mass., 1987), each of which leads toward wider argumentation.Google Scholar

13. Klein, Burton, Dynamic Economics, (Cambridge Mass., 1977), 29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14. Ibid., 15, 25–26.

15. Ibid., 31, 37, 56 (extended quote from 56). Published the same year as Alfred Chandler's The Visible Hand, Klein's work has gone without notice among labor historians, but has been used to good effect by Cohen, Stephen and Zysman, John in Manufacturing Matters (New York, 1987) to analyze recent dilemmas in American industry.Google Scholar

16. Rosenberg, Nathan, Inside the Black Box: Technology and Economics (New York, 1982), 47Google Scholar; Noble, Forces of Production.

17. Salter, cited in Rosenberg, Inside the Black Box, 17; Paul David, cited in ibid., 16. See Robinson, Joan, Economics of Imperfect Competition (London, 1948; reprint of 1933 ed.), 337–43Google Scholar, for discussion of “disintegration.”

18. Rosenberg, Inside the Black Box, 245–79; Jeremy, David, Transatlantic Industrial Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1981)Google Scholar; Hounshell, From the American System, 4–5, 91, 189ff.

19. Soja, Edward, “Regions in Context: Spatiality, Periodicity, and the Historical Geography of the Regional Question,” Society and Space 3(1985):175–90Google Scholar, quotes from 176, 186–87.

20. Walker, Richard, “Technological Determination and Determinism: Industrial Growth and Location,” in High Technology, Space and Society, ed. Castells, Manuel (Beverly Hills, 1985), 226–64Google Scholar, quotes from 227, 233–34. See also Walker, , “Class, Division of Labour and Employment in Space,” in Social Relations and Spatial Structures, ed. Gregory, Derek and Urry, John (New York, 1985), 164–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

21. Walker, “Technological Determination,” 243–44; Michael Storper, “Technology and Spatial Production Relations,” in Castells, ed., High Technology, 265–83. Walker's approach to technological development is “realist” in acknowledging and working with varied, partial orderings across timespace. Accumulation projects are thus conceived as sharing broadly common aims, but are immersed in different contexts and contingent as to outcomes, rather than regarded as fulfilling the functional requirements of capitalism proceeding through its stages (as in Aglietta, Michael, A Theory of Capitalist Regulation [London, 1979]).Google Scholar Hence Walker maintains a distinction between determination and determinism.

22. Walker, “Class,” 179–82; Storper, Michael, “The Spatial Division of Labor: Technology, the Labor Process and the Location of Industries” (Ph.D diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1982).Google Scholar

23. Storper, Michael and Walker, Richard, “The Spatial Division of Labor: Labor and the Location of Industries,” in Sunbelt/Snowbelt, ed. Sawers, Larry and Tabb, William (New York, 1984), 1946.Google Scholar

24. Sayer, R.A., “Industry and Space: A Sympathetic Critique of Radical Research,” Society and Space 3(1985): 329, quotes from 5.Google Scholar

25. Ibid., 6–8.

26. Storper and Walker, “Spatial Division,” 42–43.

27. Sayer, “Industry and Space,” 10, 24; White, Hayden, “The Question of Narrative in Contemporary Historical Theory,” History and Theory 23(1984):l33CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Giddens, Anthony, Central Problems in Social Theory (Berkeley, 1979).CrossRefGoogle Scholar If citation indexes for the arts, humanities, and social sciences are any indicator, fewer than a dozen historians have taken note of Giddens in the past five years (1983–87), which contrasts with hundreds of citations by scores of sociologists, philosophers, and geographers.

28. Thompson, E.P., The Poverty of Theory (London, 1978)Google Scholar; Anderson, Perry, Arguments within English Marxism (London, 1980).Google Scholar Anderson regarded Thompson's notion of agency as conceptually confused and asserted: “The paradoxical result of Thompson's critique of Althusser is … actually to reproduce the fundamental failing of the latter, by a polemical inversion. For the two antagonistic formulae … are both claims of an essentially apodictic and speculative character–eternal axioms that in no way help us to trace the actual, variable roles of different types of deliberate venture, personal or collective, in history” (21). Montgomery's comment was in a letter to the author, 10 March 1988.

29. Walker, “Class,” 166, 168.

30. Abrams, Philip, “History, Sociology, Historical Sociology,” Past and Present 87(1980):316CrossRefGoogle Scholar, quote from 14. For an insightful effort to operationalize Giddens's structuration theory, coauthored by a veteran labor studies scholar, see Aronowitz, Stanley and Giroux, Henry, Education Under Siege (South Hadley, Mass., 1985), esp. chaps. 5 and 6.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

31. Abrams, “History, Sociology,” 12.

32. Ibid., 13; Kazin, Michael, “Struggling with the Class Struggle: Marxism and the Search for a Synthesis of U.S. Labor History,” Labor History 28(1987):497514, quotes from 509, 511.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

33. Lakatos, Imre, Philosophical Papers, vol. 1 (Cambridge, Eng., 1978), chap. 1.Google Scholar

34. Apart from Central Problems, Giddens's works include: New Rules of Sociological Method (London, 1976); Studies in Social and Political Theory (London, 1977); The Class Structure of Advanced Societies (New York, 1975); A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism (London, 1981); Profiles and Critiques in Social Theory (London, 1982); The Constitution of Society (Cambridge, Eng., 1984); and The Nation State and Violence (Berkeley, 1987). His “problematic of structuring” is at odds on many points with the “methodological individualism” and “rational choice Marxism” of Jon Elster and his colleagues. In addition to Explaining Technical Change, Elster's contributions include: Logic and Society (Chichester, Eng., 1978); Ulysses and the Sirens (New York, 1979); Sour Grapes (New York, 1983); Making Sense of Marx (New York, 1985); along with an edited collection Rational Choice (New York, 1986). See also Roemer, John, ed., Analytical Marxism (New York, 1986).Google Scholar This work needs to be drawn into critical relation with that of Giddens, for it represents an alternative, “fully-fledged paradigm” (Carling, Alan, “Rational Choice Marxism,” New Left Review 160[1984]:2462).Google Scholar For another appraisal of this approach, see Kieve, Ronald, “From Necessary Illusion to Rational Choice?Theory and Society 15(1986):557–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and a symposium in ibid, 11 (1982):453–539. Thoughtful critiques of Giddens may be found in Wright, Eric Olin, “Giddens' Critique of Marxism,” New Left Review 138(1983): 1133Google Scholar, and Callinicos, Alex, “Anthony Giddens: A Contemporary Critique,” Theory and Society 14(1985):133–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar, to which Giddens's reply is appended (167–74). Callinicos's perspective is expounded in Making History.

35. Burawoy, Michael, Manufacturing Consent (Chicago, 1979)Google Scholar; Burawoy, The Politics of Production (London, 1985).

36. David, cited in Rosenberg, Inside the Black Box, 16; Abrams, “History, Sociology,” 15.

37. Hounshell, From the American System, chaps. 3–5, esp. 202–13. For perspectives on technology and regions, see Scott, Allen J. and Storper, Michael, Production, Work, Territory: The Geographical Anatomy of Industrial Capitalism (Boston, 1986)Google Scholar, and Walker, “Technological Determination,” 245–55.

38. Klein, Dynamic Economics, 23–26, 259–64; Taggart, Herbert, Minimum Prices Under the NRA, Michigan Business Studies, vol. 7, no. 3 (Ann Arbor, 1936).Google Scholar

39. Kazin, “Struggling with the Class Struggle,” 508.

40. Harvey, David, “On the History and Present Condition of Geography,” Professional Geographer 36(1984):111, quote from 8.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

41. Kazin, “Struggling with the Class Struggle,” 514.