Suchergebnisse

What are the implications of studying political phenomena where we don't know the outcome?1 How might we think through the differences in studying political events, interactions, processes and outcomes in "real-time," compared to historical approaches, where we study important events that have already happened (whether social movements, political change, etc.)? I come at these questions wearing two methodological hats within American politics: one as a political ethnographer, and the other as a toiler in the historically-oriented subfield of American political development. My use of political ethnography as an approach primarily rests on neo-positivist and realist ontological assumptions (Schatz 2009; Kubik 2009; Allina-Pisano 2009; Shapiro 2005). It is from these assumptions that I argue there are consequential differences when studying events or processes in hindsight versus real-time. I draw on my own fieldwork on diversity in American labor unions, union organizational change, and anti-Wal-Mart political campaigns to examine these issues.

The relative weakness of the American labor movement has broader political consequences, particularly for the ambitions of the Obama presidency. Absent a strong countervailing political constituency like organized labor, well-organized and more powerful stakeholders like business and industry groups are able to exert undue influence in American democracy, thereby frustrating attempts at political reform. I argue that it is impossible to understand the current political situation confronting the Obama administration without an account of the underlying sources of labor weakness in the U.S. In such an account two factors loom especially large. One is the role of the state in structuring labor market institutions and the rules of the game for labor-business interactions. The second is the distinctively racialized character of the U.S. political economy, which has contributed to labor market segmentation, a unique political geography, and the racial division of the U.S. working class. In our current post-industrial, post-civil rights racial and economic order, whether and how the labor movement can overcome its historical racial fragmentation will determine its possibilities for renewal and ultimately its political strength in relation to the Obama presidency. If the labor movement remains an uneven and weak regional organization hobbled by racial fragmentation, the Obama Administration's efforts to advance its core policy agenda will lack the necessary political force to be effective.

AbstractPopular discourse and academic scholarship both accent divisions between African American and immigrant workers. These debates most often focus on the question of job competition, positioning African Americans and immigrant workers asa prioriadversaries in the labor market. We take a different tack. Drawing upon a case study of hotel workers in Chicago, we identify ways in which workers themselves challenge and bridge these divisions. Specifically, we reveal how union organizing activities, such as diverse committee representation and inclusion of diversity language in contracts, counter notions of intergroup competition in an effort to build common cause that affirms rather than denies differences. We argue that these activities represent political efforts on the part of workers to contest and even reshape the racial and ethnic division of labor, thereby revealing competition as a socially contingent and politically mediated process.