Barry Eidlin

Firm Entry and Wages: Impact of Wal-Mart Growth on Earnings Throughout the Retail Sector

This paper estimates the effect of Wal-Mart expansion on wages, benefits, and skill-composition of retail workers during the 1990s. We exploit the spatial pattern of Wal-Mart diffusion, radiating outward from the original store in Benton county, Arkansas, to control for potential endogeneity in store openings using both instrumental variable and control function approaches. Estimates from state and county level data suggest that store openings reduced both the average earnings and health benefits of retail workers. At the county level, a new Wal-Mart is found to reduce retail earnings, on average, by .5 to .9 percent. Moreover, we find that changes in skill-composition explain only a small part of compensation reduction, indicating that the decline in retail wages reflect a reduction in labor market rents.

Class vs. Special Interest

Why are US labor unions so weak? Union decline has had important consequences for politics, inequality, and social policy. Common explanations cite employment shifts, public opinion, labor laws, and differences in working class culture and organization. But comparing the United States with Canada challenges those explanations. After following US unionization rates for decades, Canadian rates diverged in the 1960s, and are now nearly three times higher. This divergence was due to different processes of working class political incorporation. In the United States, labor was incorporated as an interest group into a labor regime governed by a pluralist idea. In Canada, labor was incorporated as a class representative into a labor regime governed by a class idea. This led to a relatively stronger Canadian labor regime that better held employers in check and protected workers’ collective bargaining rights. As a result, union density stabilized in Canada while plummeting in the United States.

Missing Class: Strengthening Social Movement Groups by Seeing Class Cultures:

white Dutch into believing that Europe will be taken over by Muslim immigrants as a basis for opposing a Muslim woman’s choice of how she dresses. Not to be coerced into waiving their individual rights, some Dutch Muslim women put on the headscarf as an act of protest to rebel against a society they feel rejects them. As a result, Dutch national narratives of belonging are being revisited and redefined by changing demographics. Meanwhile, Germans view the headscarf as a social threat to their imagined homogeneity. While legal prohibitions are begrudgingly rejected as illiberal, the headscarf is limited to purely private acts. As such, public school teachers cannot wear the headscarf, lest it infect the minds of German schoolchildren with tolerance of Islam. In stark contrast, Christian symbols are permitted to be part of German public life because they are innocuous ‘‘cultural’’ relics as opposed to odious Muslim ‘‘religious’’ symbols. Socially constructed rules and outcome-oriented laws perpetuate arbitrary lines of demarcation for who may lay claim to an imaginary homogenous national identity. In the end, the authors insightfully shift the conversation from trite talk about Muslim women’s hair and bodies to the factors that define a country’s narrative of belonging and the way such factors are deployed to interpret and respond to changes in a nation’s demographics. In doing so, the book successfully elevates the quality of the so-called ‘‘headscarf debates’’ to focus on what matters most to us all: the need to belong.

When Solidarity Works: Labor-Civic Networks and Welfare States in the Market Reform EraWhen Solidarity Works: Labor-Civic Networks and Welfare States in the Market Reform Era, by LeeCheol-Sung. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016. 414 pp.

enough for graduate students and interested readers. The payoff for readers can be found in the narratives, offering deep insight into this contentious subject. It is a noteworthy contribution to the growing food studies literature, to the established literature on the global controversies surrounding food biotechnology, and to the more established social movements literature, and in this regard should be included in the libraries of anyone interested in those areas.

126.00 cloth. ISBN: 9781107174047.

Abstractions and hypothetical constructs are a necessary part of scientific inquiry, our collective effort to understand the social and natural world. The problem of hypostatization occurs when we confuse these abstractions and hypothetical constructs used to probe reality with reality itself. However, the attempt to avoid hypostatization by denying existence to social things can end up encouraging a tendency to hypostatize the constructs social science imposes on social reality. This paper advances a remedial approach to the problem of hypostatization. It advocates a practical ontology of the social, and attention to formulating falsifiable hypotheses. Lack of such a practical ontology of social reality encourages a seductive psychological disposition to hypostatize. It makes it difficult to envision how social reality might “kick back” at the constructs social science seeks to impose upon them and render them problematic. Improvement of our sense of social reality is the only effective means of combating is hypostatization. The clearer a researcher’s sense of social reality, the more falsifiable his/her hypotheses can be, the better reality can kick back and shatter hypotheses the researcher seeks to impose on it, and drive research forward.

The Pitfall of Hypostatization and the Reality of Social Things

Bolton would surely be pleased to know that Havel’s ‘The Power of the Powerless’ has now been translated into Arabic and is now hopefully circulating the streets of Cairo and beyond. However, his work is also premised on the continued existence of the academic enterprise known as area studies, which has allowed for a rich and interdisciplinary crosspollination of scholarship focused on different regions. Funding once flowed easily for scholars examining a region pivotal for its geo-strategic importance during the Cold War: that is no longer the case. Bolton’s seminal work reaffirms the relevance of dissent and area studies, for only by understanding the historically specific and contingent texture of closed societies can we imagine challenges to authoritarian power and possibilities for change.