Post-industrial Service Research Articles

Sweatshop: The History of an American Idea by Laura Hapke and Sweated Work, Weak Bodies: Anti‐Sweatshop Campaigns and Languages of Labor by Daniel E. Bender

Sweatshop: History of an American Idea Laura Hapke. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004. Sweated Work, Weak Bodies: Anti-Sweatshop Campaigns and Languages of Labor Daniel E. Bender. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004. Laura Hapke's book Sweatshop: History of an American Idea and Daniel Bender's book Sweated Work, Weak Bodies: Anti-Sweatshop Campaigns and Languages of Labor are complementary works both published in 2004 by Rutgers University Press. Bender covers the topic from the late nineteenth century through the 1930s; while Hapke starts in the 1940s and continues to the present. first part of Hapke's book, The Surveyed, depicts the sweatshop's development from the Massachusetts Lowell Mills of the 1840s to New York's Lower East Side tenements of the 1890s. Gender differences concerning sweatshops are made apparent by the authors, particularly in terms of the role of men and women in the sweatshops and in labor organizations such as the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU). Hapke focuses on the role of women after the Shirtwaist Strike of 1909-1910 and the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire of 1911, in which 146 people died in a modern tenement built without sanitation and safety considerations. While the sweatshop workplace was condemned by the 1920s, the idea lived on among many workers into the 1930s. Hapke's second part entitled Sweatshop Aesthetics details the New Deal's pictorial treatment of the sweatshops and their workingclass subjects in the chapter called Newsreel of Memory: WPA in the Great Depression. Hapke takes the idea and substance of the sweatshop into the post-World War II industrial and postindustrial world. New ethnic and racial groups, blacks, Asians, and Latinos, replaced the Jews and Italians. While the Age of Affluence (1945-1953) was the time of the unionized sweatshop, the sweatshop jobs were quickly outsourced, immigrant labor serviced new illegal sweatshops, and increasingly Americans worked in postindustrial service jobs. Older unions, particularly the Amalgamated Clothing Workers and the ILGWU, merged to form UNITE, an organization pledged to unionize the new sweatshops in American, but as Hapke points out Americans disagreed about the nature of the modern sweatshops, as witnessed by the controversy revolving around the 1998 Smithsonian Institution's exhibit Between a Rock and a Hard Place: A History of Sweatshops 1820 to the Present held at the National Museum of American History. …

Heavy Constraints on a “Weightless World”?

Abstract. Late 1990s claims of a shift toward a new economy in the United States and other developed economies were said to accelerate earlier trends reducing the material content of production. The shift toward a postindustrial services economy is said to have been accentuated by application of new information and communications technologies, dramatically reducing the material content of production. This offers the possibility for continuous economic expansion unconstrained by resources supply. This paper provides a critical analysis of these trends in relation to resource use by developed economies. It shows that trends toward a lower material content of production are occurring, and this has led to poor demand conditions for primary producers. Nevertheless, these trends fall well short of eliminating Western economies’ dependence on key resources. This paper shows the changing role of resources in economic activity among developed economies.

Red Lodge and the Mythic West: Coal Miners to Cowboys. By Bonnie Christensen. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002. xxiv, 312 pp. $34.95, isbn 0-7006-1198-3.)

Tracing the history of Red Lodge, Montana, from the late nineteenth century to the present, Red Lodge and the Mythic West by Bonnie Christensen explores the cultural construction and transformation of public identity in the West during the twentieth century. Christensen examines the ways in which city boosters, civic leaders, and tourist promoters consciously shaped and adapted a series of public identities for the town that drew on idealized versions of western history to serve present-day needs. She argues that the story of Red Lodge reflects a broader process of identity formation that took place in towns across the West in an effort to sustain viable communities as industrial extractive economies gave way to postindustrial service economies. Established on part of the Crow Indian Reservation in 1887 by Northern Pacific Railroad officials needing an accessible source of coal, Red Lodge, Montana, was the product of government-supported corporate interest. Early boosters sought to divorce the town from popular wild West imagery by promoting Red Lodge in Turnerian terms as an agrarian community of pioneer farmers and democratic egalitarianism. According to Christensen, this contradictory imagery established a pattern of “fractured public identity” (p. xii) as Red Lodge evolved from an industrial mining town to a “Wild West environmental community” (p. 210).

Literacy, Lifelong Learning and the Basic Skills Agenda

Literacy is being given increased attention in most developed countries where economic thinking focuses on the assets that could be unlocked from human capital. Within the OECD the discourse within literacy has concerned itself almost exclusively on labour market issues whereas scholarly research on literacy addresses a much wider array of social as well as educational contexts. Under alternative policies inspired by principles and understandings of social capital there would be emphasis on the community based settings, the networks of relationships and social cohesion in which learning takes place and in which what is learned is practised. A range of contexts for the advocacy of literacy policies is explored from which are identified three broad justifications from three mutually reinforcing broad social changes. These relate to the impact of changing economic patterns in the wake of trade liberalisation and the post-industrial services and economy; the impact of cultural diversity and participatory ideals of society; and the impact of communications technology. The particular position of Scotland is explored in the context of a recent report on Adult Literacy and numeracy in that country.

Mobile Desire: Aesthetics, Sexuality and the `Lesbian' at Work

In recent writings on post-industrial economies the idea of the commodification of sexuality is highly visible. Yet many of these analyses tend to overlook the important debates in sexuality studies which have questioned both essentialist and utopic readings of the commodification aesthetic. In this article, I draw on some of these insights to think through the commodification of sexuality at work, especially in regard to the `lesbian' at work. In particular I ask if post-industrial service work may be currently constitutive of a `lesbian postmodern'. In so doing I suggest that the commodification aesthetic may be read as involving the making of sexual subjects at work. But I also consider the ways in which the terms of recognition of the `lesbian' at work may deny claims towards particular forms of workplace capital through a definition of performances of sexuality at work in terms of categories of immanence. I suggest this raises problems for arguments which suggest workplace justice in regard to sexuality may be best achieved through a politics of recognition, since the terms of recognition or visibility at work may themselves not be neutral.

Market, State, and the Quality of New Self-Employment Jobs among Men in the U.S. and Western Germany

Recent scholarship suggests that a new form of low-quality, contingent self employment is taking hold in postindustrial economies. Using longitudinal data on men from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and the German Socio-Economic Panel, I find that on average men in Germany and the U.S. do not fare poorly in self-employment, and in both countries a substantial number of new self-employment jobs offer prospects for earnings and stability that rival the wage-and-salary sector. However, there is far more variability in the U.S., with a higher proportion of self-employment jobs ranking among the best and the worst new jobs in the labor market. New entrepreneurs benefited more in the U.S. than in Germany from exploiting the demand for skilled postindustrial services in the self-employment market. At the same time, loosely structured labor markets and weaker worker protections contributed to a larger proportion of low-paying and unstable self-employment jobs in the U.S.

Market, State, and the Quality of New Self-Employment Jobs among Men in the U.S. and Western Germany

Recent scholarship suggests that a new form of low-quality, contingent self-employment is taking hold in postindustrial economies. Using longitudinal data on men from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and the German Socio-Economic Panel, I find that on average men in Germany and the U.S. do not fare poorly in self-employment, and in both countries a substantial number of new self-employment jobs offer prospects for earnings and stability that rival the wage-and-salary sector. However, there is far more variability in the U.S., with a higher proportion of self-employment jobs ranking among the best and the worst new jobs in the labor market. New entrepreneurs benefited more in the U.S. than in Germany from exploiting the demand for skilled postindustrial services in the self-employment market. At the same time, loosely structured labor markets and weaker worker protections contributed to a larger proportion of low-paying and unstable self-employment jobs in the U.S.

On the Limits of the Post-Industrial Society Structural Change and Service Sector Employment in Spain

The purpose of this paper is to examine the growth and the structure of employment in the service sector in the Spanish Economy from 1958 to 1989 and to draw comparisons with the trends exhibited by other European countries. In contrast to the explanation offered by the theory of stages, which assumes that growth in services is associated with the pattern of final demand, this research argues that, since the middle of the 1970s, the growth of market service employment is due to an increase in intermediate demand of services. In order to demonstrate this, an intersectoral analysis is applied to input output data which was homogenised for this research. This methodological approach enables employment in the service sector to be connected to the other sectors. Rejecting the idea that services are replacing manufacturing as the new engine of growth, the results show an increased dependence on market services by industrial production. The final part of the paper presents explanations for this trend.

Of Mops and Maids: Contradictions and Continuities in Bureaucratized Domestic Work

This paper explores domestic employment relations in the context of the growth of the post-industrial service sector and the “stalled revolution.” The data comes from fieldwork conducted among domestic workers, employers, and clients, as well as managers and owners of housecleaning agencies. By presenting a case study of the household service agency “Helping Hands Housekeeping,” I compare and contrast bureaucratized arrangements of paid domestic work with the “traditional” private employment arrangement, demonstrating how the bureaucratization of paid domestic work has (and has not) affected the relations, conditions, and experiences of this occupation. To sell their service, managers train workers to “care” for clients. In addition, HHH managers create a work culture of caring and service as a form of worker control and as a strategy to combat worker turnover. The gender ideologies and personalized management tactics used by these organizations mask the low pay, part-time hours and lack of benefits that persist within the more bureaucratized arrangements of paid domestic work. Workers also implement “strategic personalism” in their relations with employers and clients and may seek out personalistic relationships and use them to their advantage. This research challenges the modernist notion that more formal and structured work relations are sufficient to eliminate the emotional and psychological exploitation of domestic workers. Indeed, my fieldwork suggests that private employment arrangements offer workers more options and greater potential for negotiating wages and control over the work process than do the more rationalized organizations and relations of household service agencies.

The Changed South, 1947-1997

This paper traces change in the South in recent decades that has resulted from industrialization, the Sunbelt attraction, urbanization, and development of the service economy. The "Boombelt" along 1-85 in the Piedmont region attracted much of the industrial expansion, particularly in North and South Carolina, and Georgia. The largest metropolitan areas in the region now account for the largest share of manufacturing output. City-building has also been propelled by the expansion of white-collar service industries, including headquarters locations which are disproportionately concentrated in Virginia, Florida, and Georgia. The role of Atlanta at the top of the urban hierarchy in the region and the tremendous rate of growth of urban corridors on the southeast and west coasts of Florida stand out. Along with dramatic socio-economic change, the South also experienced significant political realignment, agricultural restructuring, and ethnicity shifts in the past fifty years making the region more like the rest of the nation. The South has become a major global player in economic growth but rural areas still lag behind.

The Fall and Rise of the Petty Bourgeoisie: Changing Patterns of Self-Employment in the Postwar United States

This article explores the historical trajectory of the self-employed segment of the labor force in the United States, particularly since 1940. Self-employment declined in the United States almost steadily from the 19th century to the early 1970s. Since then, it has risen every year. Explaining this reversal in the historical fortunes of the petty bourgeoisie is the central task of this article. We reach four basic conclusions: first, the reversal in the decline of the self-employed is statistically significant and robust across a range of definitions of self-employment rates. Second, this reversal is not a simple countercyclical response to the increase in unemployment since the middle 1970s. Third, part of the resurgence of self-employment result from the expansion of various postindustrial services that tend to have higher levels of self-employment within them. Within postindustrial sectors, however, there has not generally been any increase in self-employment. Fourth, a significant part of the expansion of self-employment is explained by a increase in self-employment within most of the traditional sectors of the industrial economy.

The new post-industrial state

With the socioeconomic restructuring of the 1970s and 1980s, the idea of a smooth transition to a post-industrial service economy has required significant revision. We outline three such revisions: the ideas of informatization, informalization, and dualism. The first two are reworkings of post-industrial theory so as to emphasize one or other undervalued trend in industrial society, and are in principle quite compatible. The third emphasizes inequalities in power and resources that are plausibly associated with developments seen as benign by the others. Each has distinct implications for democratic development. However, we argue that while elements of all three models are present in current trends, so that the future might be best seen as a compromise between them, in fact all approaches fail to grasp the real significance of socioeconomic and technological restructuring. A more fruitful approach, with distinctive policy implications, is proposed.