Developments in Labor Market Research: Recent Theory and Recent Data

Abstract

At the outset, the sociology of economic life was a subfield that depended as much, if not more, on insight than on careful empirical documentation. As recently as the 1950s, major works consisted of largely theoretical pieces like Parsons' and Smelser's Economy and Society. The integration of theory with rigorous data was a burden that economists, rather than sociologists, were more likely to shoulder. This changed, of course, with the advent of the new structuralism in sociological labor market research. Almost overnight, economic sociology was awash in a flood of regression coefficients, factor loadings, and logit parameters. But as their methods converged, sociologists' and economists' ideas about markets, and especially labor markets, seemed to spin apart. Although it once seemed possible that economic sociology might be a complement to economics per se, more lines were drawn than bridges built between the two fields. The articles included in this collection were hardly written with the aim of closing this gap, and good research is more likely motivated by a desire to solve empirical puzzles than by a desire to establish coherence between disparate disciplines. At the same time when examining samples of empirical work, including these, a neutral observor might find that there is often interdisciplinary agreement in practice, if not in principle, about identifying important variables. Competition and the extent of competition are exactly these sorts of variables. In the first article, Neil Fligstein and Roberto Fernandez focus explicitly on the role of differential competition as a force that structures the shape and dynamics of the labor market. Drawing not only on market and Marxian approaches, but also on the basic themes of neoclassical economic analysis, their article critiques most extant work for paying too much attention to firms; and not enough attention to workers, competitive positions. In their view, the problem with most recent sociological work on segmented labor markets is that having rediscovered institutional