Clifford L. Staples

Gender Differences in Sources of Self-Esteem

We explore gender differences in the importance of reflected appraisals, self-perceived competence, and social comparisons as sources of self-esteem

Class position, work experience, and health.

This paper develops a Marxist analysis of the relationships between class position, work experience, the psychological effects of this experience, and subsequent health outcomes. Specifically, it is argued that the structural imperatives of capitalist production make work for those in working-class positions subject to greater routinization and less control than work for those in other class positions. Routinization and control are argued, in turn, to predictably affect two key psychological variables, self-esteem and stress, which are further argued to affect health in predictable ways. Position in the capitalist labor process is thus linked to health via the psychological consequences of the immediate work experience it engenders. Survey data from workers, managers, supervisors, and semi-autonomous employees in five capitalist firms are used to test the descriptive adequacy of this model linking capitalism to ill health for those in working-class positions.

CROSS‐BORDER ACQUISITIONS AND BOARD GLOBALIZATION IN THE WORLD'S LARGEST TNCS, 1995–2005

Because of their size, power, and undemocratic nature, the cross-border activities of the worlds transnational corporations (TNCs) are of particular interest to sociologists. Previous research shows that over the past decade the boards of directors of the worlds largest TNCs have become more multinational, in other words are increasingly composed of individuals from different countries. During the same period there was also a dramatic increase in the number of cross-border TNC mergers and acquisitions (M&As). Anecdotal evidence suggests a connection between cross-border acquisitions and the increasingly multinational composition of TNC boards, and this study explores that relationship using data on the 148 largest TNCs and commercial banks. We find that a cross-border acquisition almost always results in a more multinational board of directors, that multinational boards are more likely to do cross-border deals, and that once a board becomes multinational it stays that way. The evidence also shows that multinational boards are concentrated in Europe, suggesting another dynamic between the integrating forces of the European Union and its TNCs. Because the results show increasing cross-national contact between the corporate elites who serve on multinational TNC boards, the results also provide some support for claims about the recent emergence of a “Transnational Business Class” or “Transnational Capitalist Class,” at least in Europe, although it is recognized that more study is needed to make the case that such a class is forming.

In search of a transnational capitalist class: Alternative methods for comparing director interlocks within and between nations and regions

Theorists of globalization have hypothesized the emergence of a transnational capitalist class that is becoming increasingly integrated across national borders. One method of evaluating this hypothesis has been to apply network analysis to study the frequency and pattern of transnational ties within global interlocking directorates. The results of such studies are mixed, both as regards the extent of transnational interlocking and its regional distribution. In an effort to resolve this ambiguity and advance the state of research in this area we undertake two main tasks. First, we submit the prevailing methodology used in such studies to a critical evaluation in which we identify and address some of its theoretical and methodological limitations. Second, we introduce and illustrate three alternative methods for assessing the extent and pattern of global interlocking directorates. Each method conceptualizes transnational interlocking in a slightly different manner and brings different aspects of the process into focus. Despite these differences, all four methods point to the conclusion that a transnational capitalist class is very far from being realized on a global scale. On the other hand, the combined evidence is much stronger and relatively consistent for the emergence of a more circumscribed transnational capitalist class, centered in the North Atlantic region, which has made significant strides in transcending national divisions within and between Europe and North America.

The Politics of Employment-Based Insurance in the United States

Analyses of the corporatization of U.S. health care typically focus on the political struggle between corporations and traditional health care providers, e.g., physicians. A neglected area of study is the struggle between corporations and their employees over the employment-based health insurance system. Yet, since this system is currently the primary mechanism for financing health care in the United States, an analysis of its historical development is critical to any understanding of the corporatization of U.S. health care. It is argued here that the employment-based health insurance system was a part of a political compromise between capital and labor that emerged after World War II. In exchange for control over production and increased worker productivity, corporations agreed to provide workers with steady wage increases and an expanded system of fringe benefits, or “corporate welfare.” But, by the late 1970s, rising health care costs created a corporate health care financing crisis that has prompted corporations to cut back employee health insurance coverage. The relative inability of workers to resist such cutbacks reveals the extent to which, by linking health care to wage labor, the “corporate welfare” system has made the U.S. working class more vulnerable to corporate power.

A Theory of Global Capitalism: Production, Class, and State in a Transnational World

In articles and papers written over the past ten years or so, pulled together and developed in this book, William I. Robinson describes and imagines the trajectory of global capitalism that takes us beyond the early ‘internationalist’ or ‘imperialist’ formulations of Lenin into the World Systems perspective of Wallerstein and breaks through into a well-reasoned argument about the change from international to transnational capitalism. For Robinson, the world is, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, at the beginning of an epochal transformation from a capitalism organized primarily within the bounds of the nation-state, and where international trade involves the circulation of already finished commodities, to a transnational system of capitalist production, or the ‘global assembly line’, in which nation-states are less relevant to the production and circulation of commodities. Robinson’s perspective is rooted in a traditional Marxist emphasis on production, distinguishing his approach from discussions of globalization that focus on culture and ignore or downplay the role of production. In doing so, Robinson commits himself to a reflexive historical materialism entirely consistent, in my view, with Marx’s own writings. Citing statistics on the changing nature and composition of international trade as well as other more anecdotal sources, Robinson makes a highly plausible case that some time in the 1970s capitalism began to break free of the profit-constricting limitations of the nation-state – or at least those nation-states, such as the United States, where relatively strong union movements and popular pressure on nominally democratic governments had improved the lives of the national working classes and in so doing had restricted the profit to be made within the confines of national borders. The ‘break-out’ that occurred in the 1970s or thereabouts changed commodity production and circulation from a process that takes place within national borders to a process that transcends national borders (Chapter 1). Reflecting his commitment to a production-centered materialism, Robinson argues that with the emergence of global production, class formation is following suit, shifting from a national to a global level. Because global capitalist class formation is occurring first, and because most research so far has been done on the emerging transnational capitalist class, Robinson has most to say about transnational capital (Chapter 2), and relatively little to say about a transnational working class. This is unfortunate, but perhaps unavoidable at this point given that the workers of the world show little evidence of unity. Robinson does go on, however, to discuss institutions such as the IMF, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, etc. that are likely to eventually form what he calls the transnational state (Chapter 3). At present, not surprisingly given the relative power of transnational capital, the institutions and policies of this nascent transnational state currently tend to favor global capital at the expense of everyone else. Only as the transnational working class gains its footing and power (with perhaps the World Social Forum European Journal of Social Theory 8(4): 533–538

“A Strike of Girls”: Gender and Class in the British Metal Trades, 1913

Our intent is to investigate the nature of capitalist patriarchy by writing women workers back into the story of the Black Country Strike. Conventional accounts of this important conflict in the British midlands have depicted the outcome as a “victory for the workpeople,” but such claims have failed to capture how gender hierarchies and cross-class allegiances produced this “victory.” Specifically, we argue that unquestioned assumptions about the subordinate status of women provided the point of agreement around which working-class men, their union, and their employers worked out their (class) differences, resulting in both the preservation of capitalism and the reassertion of male superiority and authority.

Book Review: Against Management: Organization in the Age of Managerialism, by Martin Parker. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2002. 256 pp.

about it. “The fear that sexual language will trigger social chaos has historically fueled initiatives to regulate sexual speech” (p. 4). No wonder Mary Calderone was not optimistic about the progress of sexuality education in 1987: “It doesn’t seem to me we’ve made any progress at all in the past [ten] years. Any. On the contrary, it’s degenerated, because our children are exposed, not having any training in thinking, intellectualizing about one’s sexual aspects” (quoted in Irvine, p. 60). Silence has fostered ignorance, shame and a host of social problems like teen pregnancy and the wildfire spread of sexually-transmitted diseases. While I applaud Irvine’s conclusion that “[c]ivic dialogue about sex education is one important public arena for the negotiation of sexuality, morality, and citizenship” (p. 15), I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for that dialogue to take place in Canada. The “new” curriculum for the Province of Ontario, where I live and teach, has no mandated sexuality education on its agenda. The longer we go without this contested curriculum, the wider the spectrum of ethnicities and religions represented by the students in our classrooms grows. Against the chilling magnitude of imagined challenges, our children’s real lives are at stake. Reading Irvine’s study prompts me to ask how a just and caring society can justify maintaining such dangerous silences any longer.