Search

Printers have long been considered the epitome of the skilled blue-collar craftsmen. The complexity and variety of the work process, the state of technology in the industry, and the role of strong unions in maintaining shop floor autonomy have been important factors in preserving high levels of skill, and thus power, among printers. Recently, however, all this has been changing. The steady decline of industrial profit margins after World War II has led many large printing establishments to introduce more sophisticated printing technologies, particularly computerized typesetting processes, which have routinized work tasks and led to a decline of skill among printing craftsmen. In this paper, we provide substantive and empirical evidence for these processes with a time-series analysis of data from the printing industry for the years 1931-1978. We find support for our theory of industrial transformation. Specifically, our data suggest that skill levels in the industry have indeed declined and, moreover, that these declines are largely due to the shift to more capital-intensive printing techniques. Our arguments also support the view that social relations of production between employers and employees influence the nature of technology utilized in an industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the relationship between intelligence and occupation and, secondly, relates occupation to various aspects of migration. The relationship between occupation and test intelligence has been the subject of considerable investigation. There tends to be a hierarchy of occupational structure which is closely related to test intelligence, whether the classification is based on the subject's parental occupation or on his own occupation. The material for the investigation consists of the Ohio State University Intelligence Test scores for about 5,000 boys and girls who were high school seniors in 116 Missouri communities in 1939-41. There seems to be a distinct tendency for the brighter boys and girls in rural areas and small towns of Missouri, to find their occupational levels in the higher prestige occupations, especially the professional groups, while those who perform more poorly on tests are more likely to become manual worker and farmers with somewhat lower rankings on the prestige scale.

The introduction of programmable machines into blue-collar machining occupations affords an opportunity to study the conditions under which occupational skill upgrading occurs with technological change. How do workplaces that permit blue-collar occupations to take on programming responsibilities differ from those that do not? This paper presents a contingency model explaining how this choice of job design is mediated by four types of factors: techno-economic forces, internal labor market structures, institutional mechanisms for governing the labor-management relationship, and the organizational context. The data are from a 1986-87 national survey of production managers in a size-stratified random sample of manufacturing establishments in 21 industries. A multivariate logistic regression analysis reveals that the technology and product market alone do not determine job design. The least complex organizations (small plant, small firm) tend to offer the greatest opportunities for skill upgrading, independent of techno-economic conditions -- a finding at variance with current labor market segmentation theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is based on a sample of 1491 Canadian manual workers from three different industries-printing, automobile, and oil. These industries were selected to represent three basic types of sociotechnical systems that have been identified in recent literature-craft, mass and continuous process production systems. The main hypothesis is that worker integration in the organization differs by type of socio--technical system-being highest is the continuous process system, represented by the oil industry and lowest in the mass production system, represented by the automobile industry. Integration is investigated in five areas: (1) relationship with fellow workers, (2) relationship with first line supervisors, (3) labor-management relations, (4) status structure of the organization, and (5) evaluation of the company. The outstanding finding is that the oil worker is much more integrated regarding the above five areas of the organizational system than are auto workers. Printers fall in between, being closer to oil workers than to auto workers. The implications of worker integration in the organization for receptivity toward industrial change and alienation from the job are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tensions between the demands of the knowledge-based economy and remaining, blue-collar jobs underlie renewed debates about whether schools should emphasize career and technical training or college-preparatory curricula. We add a gendered lens to this issue, given the male-dominated nature of blue-collar jobs and women’s greater returns to college. Using the ELS:2002, this study exploits spatial variation in school curricula and jobs to investigate local dynamics that shape gender stratification. Results suggest a link between high school training and jobs in blue-collar communities that structures patterns of gender inequality into early adulthood. Although high school training in blue-collar communities reduced both men’s and women’s odds of four-year college enrollment, it had gender-divergent labor market consequences. Men in blue-collar communities took more blue-collar courses, had higher rates of blue-collar employment, and earned similar wages relative to otherwise comparable men from non-blue-collar communities. Women were less likely to work and to be employed in professional occupations, and they suffered severe wage penalties relative to their male peers and women from non-blue-collar communities. These relationships were due partly to high schools in blue-collar communities offering more blue-collar and fewer advanced college-preparatory courses. This curricular tradeoff may benefit men, but it appears to disadvantage women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The orders of precedence issued by the City of London between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries provide a measure of occupational status that has several advantages over modern prestige scales. A selection of the forty orders located shows dramatic changes in the status of occupations over this period, as do the records and chronicles of individual companies. Correlation coefficients suggest that both antiquity and wealth are important determinants of status, but the histories of the city companies suggest that organizational or political factors are also important. The investigation is not simply of historical curiosity; it suggests an alternative strategy for the study of occupational prestige in contemporary societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars recognize that labor market structure affects job mobility. However, existing research rarely considers the impact of structural change on mobility. I develop a model for how the size of organizational labor markets and the instability resulting from industry expansion, contraction, and equity reorganization influenced rates of internal mobility, external mobility, and unemployment during the industrial restructuring of the 1980s. Analysis of data from the Current Population Surveys, the Current Employment Statistics program, the Small Business Data Base, and the Mergers and Acquisitions database shows that structural change has predictable effects on job mobility and that labor market structure channels mobility in predictable ways. However, the results also show that the ability of labor market structure to buffer environmental turbulence was limited during the turbulent 1980s, and that the "flexible" character of American labor markets had important consequences for blue-collar and service workers in the American work force. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do intraclass struggles shape the political terrain on which ensuing struggles, within and between classes, are fought and resolved? Out attempt to answer this question focuses on the rivalry among the factions and parties involved in organizing American industrial workers from the late 1930s on. We assess how the political practices of the Communists and their rivals determined which political camp won power in the new CIO unions. A logit model shows that two ensembles of political practices "loaded the historical dice" in favor of the Communists. The chances that Communists would win union leadership were far higher: first, if the union had seceded from the AFL and joined the CIO from below, in an insurgent workers' movement, rather than from above, in a revolt of its top officers; and second, if the union had been organized independently, rather than by a CIO "organizing committee." Two other political practices indirectly favored the Communists: earlier Red union organizing in the industry (although its effects were contradictory); and forming the union as an amalgamated rather than as a unitary organization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The hypothesis that working class respondents are especially antagonistic toward the black and student movements is tested with a sample of white Los Angeles residents (N = 477). In support of the hypothesis, working class persons and those with less than a high school education (in contrast to those higher in the occupational and educational hierarchies) are more likely to: (a) express punitive attitudes toward student demonstrators, (b) oppose granting students more power, and (c) feel blacks are pushing too hard for things they don't deserve. To locate rationales that would explain these relationships, intervening and specification variables were introduced in the analysis. These variables are: respect for authority, belief in the American Dream, belief that the needs of the working man are neglected, and perceived powerlessness. Substantial support for these explanations of blue collar anger is found. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The pervasive use of the alienation framework in interpretative sociological works has generated a need for empirical studies of alienation it self. Empirical measures of powerlessness and normlessness are developed for political and economic areas, following the leads provided by Seeman's conceptual analysis. The alienation scales developed in the present study are combined with Srole's anomie scale and Seeman's status-orientation scale for factor analyses. The findings provide empirical support for Seeman's argument for the conceptual independence of alternative meanings of alienation, but do not support the sociological works hypothesizing significant relationships between mobility commitments and alienation. A high degree of similarity is found in the dimensional structure of alienation for samples of manual and non-manual workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There have been many studies on the effects of incentive systems. The method of such studies usually consists of measuring the response of workers to modification or installation of incentive plans, or of comparing factories with differing incentive plans. Strangely enough, there has been no interest in comparing the operation of incentive systems among factory workers with those among white-collar workers. This article started as an investigation of the attitudes and work relations of white collar workers. It was found in the process of investigation that comparisons could be made between the work organization of department store salesmen and of factory workers. Such comparisons throw light on the relationships between organization of work, attitudes of workers, and response to incentive systems. The purpose of this article is to show that these three things vertical mobility, an individualistic ideology, and a lack of restriction of output are functionally related. In explaining this relationship, the author do not assume that wherever vertical mobility exists, an individualistic ideology will always be evident. Neither do he asserts that an orientation or ideology of individualism always gives rise to a lack of restriction of output, because it is evident that belief and conduct are not always the same.