During the famous textile workers' strike at Lawrence in 1912, a female striker was reportedly asked to explain the workers' demands. Her reply, which soon became the basis for many songs and legends, was beguilingly simple: Bread-and roses! Randy Hodson's Dignity at Work argues that sociologists of work have too long overlooked the lesson implied in this worker's comment, in effect a plea for respect, compassion, and recognition. By so neglecting the moral or symbolic side of work, Hodson reasons, we blind ourselves to the everyday struggles of workers seeking to defend their dignity against symbolic injuries and cultural slights. It is a lesson worth heeding. In a deceptively ambitious effort, Hodson's book combines humanistic concerns with more traditionally positivist methods, producing a lucidly written analysis of the organizational conditions that impact worker dignity, the nature of workers' responses to such challenges, and the outcomes with respect to worker well-being. While flawed in not insignificant ways, the book holds substantial importance for readers in varied branches of sociology. Of the several virtues of this book, four are especially notable. The first lies in its methodology: As Joyce Rothschild notes in her essay, Hodson has applied much the same methods that were used by anthropologists to generate the Human Relations Area Files. Codifying the population of Englishlanguage workplace ethnographies, he produces a rich store of observations that can be used in quantitative analysis, while nonetheless retaining the naturalism and authenticity of data initially gathered through in vivo means. The result manages to combine the precision and analytic breadth of survey data with the interpretive richness of ethnographic observation (as in the numerous quotes Hodson draws to illustrate particular findings). A second virtue of the book stems from the author's determination to take seriously the dimension of human agency and worker resistance, in effect responding to Ida Harper Simpson's call (1989) to bring the workers back in. This is one of the strongest aspects of Hodson's analysis, in that it helps us identify the structural determinants of worker resistance without losing sight of the workers' capacity to act back on their work situations and defend their own dignity at work. A third virtue lies in the author's effort to escape the theoretical straitjacket imposed by the use of a strictly materialist or classbased lens. Hodson argues in favor of addressing work relations not only along the vertical axis (the management/worker relation) but also horizontally, thus examining the nature of social relations among the workers themselves. This aspect of the wage labor nexus proves much more important than academic research has allowed, and has a value that may transcend Hodson's own analysis: Attending to the patterns of solidarity and alienation that emerge among workers themselves can help us better understand the allocative processes that shape the distribution of opportunity-a task only peripherly addressed in Hodson's book. A fourth contribution of Hodson's analysis lies in the comparisons he draws between the levels of resistance found among workers in different occupational groups. Assembly line workers, it turns out, typically lack the resources needed to resist mismanagement and abuse: The most they can do is to withhold their citizenship behavior (or degree of cooperation). Professional workers, by contrast, are able to resist managerial edicts, but they seldom seem willing to do so, given their positions as salaried employees. It turns out to be craft workers who are the least compliant group within the U.S. occupational structure, manifesting higher levels of behavioral and cultural resistance than any other occupational group. Ironically, it was precisely this group that deskilling theory declared to have been extinct. As these contributions indicate, there is much to admire here. Dignity at Work is an important contribution that should command much attention from researchers in the field.
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Nov 23, 2011
Jason M Pattit + 2
Open Access
