Gregory Hooks

The Treadmill of Destruction: National Sacrifice Areas and Native Americans

When examining environmental justice and injustice, surprisingly few studies have examined the experiences of Native Americans. In filling this gap, we criticize and build on environmental and political sociology. We make the case and provide evidence that the U.S. military pursues a pattern of environmental “bads” that cannot be reduced to capitalism and that coercive state policies can mold the spatial distribution of people relative to environmental dangers. Our contribution, then, is both theoretical and substantive. First, we recast the environmental sociology literature by specifying the scope conditions under which a “treadmill of production” and a “treadmill of destruction” are applicable. Specifically, we argue that a “treadmill of destruction” is driven by a distinct logic of geopolitics that cannot be reduced to capitalism. Second, we provide empirical evidence of the “treadmill of destruction” by examining the environmental inequality endured by Native Americans at the hands of the U.S. military. We have collected data on a large number of military bases that have been closed but remain dangerous due to unexploded ordnance. We provide evidence that Native American lands tend to be located in the same county as such hazardous sites. In the twentieth century, the United States fought and won two global wars and prevailed in a sustained Cold War. The geopolitical demands of remaining the worlds leading military power pushed the United States to produce, test, and deploy weapons of unprecedented toxicity. Native Americans have been left exposed to the dangers of this toxic legacy.

Public Employment, Welfare Transfers, and Economic Well-Being across Local Populations: Does a Lean and Mean Government Benefit the Masses?

This study examines state provisioning of social welfare and employment and its consequences for local economic well-being. Do a larger public sector and more generous social welfare transfers help or harm local populations? To address this question, we derive hypotheses from two competing social policy schools, neoliberal and radical political economy. We assess how claims from both schools operate on the ground, through an empirical test using data for county populations for Keynesian (1970-80) and post-Keynesian (1980-90) decades. Findings do not support neoliberal views that a leaner and meaner government benefits U.S. populations. Rather, economic well-being of the population at large declines where social programs are less generous to poor residents. In both Keynesian and post-Keynesian periods, the state remains important in reducing income inequality and, to some degree, in promoting income growth. Finally, we find important differences within public employment, with state and local government having less beneficial effects.

Treadmills of Production and Destruction Threats to the Environment Posed by Militarism

The treadmill of production has identified and examined an inherent dynamic that results in the inexorable expansion of capitalism. Although it is argued that a number of benefits accompany this economic expansion, the treadmill of production literature has focused on the environmental costs. The treadmill of production embraces the legacy of C. Wright Mills with a focus on the entangled relationships between two aspects of Mills’s “power elite”—politics and economics. Building on Mills’s inclusion of militarism as one of the three pillars of the power elite, it is argued that there exists a treadmill of destruction that maintains a distinct logic relating to geopolitics and arms races that cannot be reduced to capitalism. The 20th century has witnessed unprecedented growth in the research, testing, storage, and employment of both conventional weaponry and weapons of mass destruction. In focusing on this development, the distinctive role the state plays in creating a treadmill of destruction is stressed.

The weakness of strong theories: the U.S. State's dominance of the World War II investment process

Before World War 11, the U.S. state played a negligible role in the investment process. But the state dominated the investment process during World War 11, and at wars end it owned 40 percent of the nations capital assets. This structural transformation offers an ideal opportunityfor refining theories of the state. The states investment policies were influenced by its warmaking agenda and by interagency infighting over the ends and means of state policy. I attempt to reconcile the states ascendance to international prominence with the confusion and disunity among the agencies that supplied industrialfinancing. I adapt leading theories of the state business dominance theory, structuralist Marxism, and state-centered theory to the middle range by identifying the institutional contexts in which the outcomes asserted by each theory are likely. Business dominance theory offers insights into state subsidy ofprivatefinancing -an institutional arena in which economic elites were dominant. Structuralist Marxism sheds light on the lending practices of the emergency civilian agency that financed and owned a number offactories. Because the state depended on monopoly sector firms during the war, many of the states investments represented a capital infusion rather than a threat to private control of the postwar investment process. State-centered theory offers insights when considering the militarys direct investments. The militaryfinanced and retained ownership of important factories in the nascent military-industrial complex.

Community Colleges, Budget Cuts, and Jobs The Impact of Community Colleges on Employment Growth in Rural U.S. Counties, 1976-2004

In the decades following World War II, a significant expansion of community colleges occurred throughout the United States. As the baby boom generation came of age, demand for higher education spiked, and policy makers allocated the requisite funding to expand institutions of higher education. This expansion, including vigorous funding from federal, state, and local units of government, was politically popular. This openhanded support ended in the latter decades of the twentieth century as hostility to paying taxes and to public spending mounted. In recent decades, community colleges have competed with other social expenditures, such as prisons and health care demands, for scarce public resources. And, in a number of states, community colleges have fared poorly in this competition. Using multivariate analyses and data gathered from several sources, including the American Association of Community Colleges, the authors examine the impacts of community colleges on local employment trends. Their research focuses on rural counties over four time periods between 1976 and 2004. This focus is important, as rural areas have faced severe and chronic economic decline over the study period. Their research (specifically for the 1976-1983 and 1991-1997 panels) provides evidence that established community colleges made a significant contribution to employment growth. However, for the most recent panel (i.e., 1998-2004), the coefficient for community colleges is negative. An examination of the interaction between community colleges and states’ fiscal contexts provides evidence that this decline may be the result of states cutting back their funding levels for community colleges.

American Exceptionalism Revisited The Military-Industrial Complex, Racial Tension, and the Underdeveloped Welfare State

We examine Democrats’ decline in the House of Representatives from the mid-1930s to the late 1940s. Debates over American exceptionalism in the realm of social policy pay surprisingly little attention to a profound transformation that occurred during and after World War II: on the international stage, the United States emerged as the hegemon; at home, the Pentagon became the largest and most powerful agency in the federal bureaucracy. In modeling electoral losses suffered by Democrats, we show that World War II mobilization played an important role. First, Democrats lost ground in congressional districts where the nascent military-industrial complex was created, specifically in aircraft manufacturing centers. Second, the impact of aircraft manufacturing intersected with wartime in-migration of non-whites. Democrats suffered significantly greater losses where both non-white population and aircraft manufacturing employment increased. Our findings corroborate accounts of the social welfare state that stress partisan control and path dependence. Conservative congresses of the immediate postwar years left an imposing legacy, making it difficult to establish social welfare reforms for decades to come. Whereas most accounts of the rise and fall of the New Deal emphasize different aspects of domestic processes, we demonstrate that militarism and expansion of national security agencies undermined congressional support at a critical juncture. This intersection of wartime mobilization and social policy—and not an inherent and enduring institutional impediment to social welfare—contributed to underdevelopment of the welfare state and abandonment of universal social welfare programs in the United States.

Training in the Workplace: Continuity and Change

Rapid changes are occurring in the organization of production in advanced industrial societies. These changes result from new technologies, increased competition, and new production techniques. Increased training for workers has been identified as essential for remaining competitive in this rapidly changing environment. Research on the organization of work suggests that training is most likely to occur where workers are organized into internal labor markets that cultivate and retain their skills and is less likely to occur in organizations which rely on secondary labor markets. Our study of 20 manufacturing plants supports the hypothesis that approaches to training are strongly differentiated by the division between enterprises with and without internal labor markets. Training for advanced technologies and contemporary production techniques appears to grow out of existing institutionalized internal labor markets. Where such labor markets do not exist, training is less likely to occur or is superficial in nature. The effects of increased training thus do not appear to have “trickled down” into production systems employing less-skilled labor. Institutional strategies associated with a reliance on a low-wage labor force create barriers to the extension of training into new sectors of production. The effects of increased training thus may be quite localized and may serve to increase rather than diminish existing divisions in the labor force.

Prisons, jobs and privatization: The impact of prisons on employment growth in rural US counties, 1997-2004.

In this study of prison privatization we draw on the insights of a recent body of literature that challenges a widespread belief that prisons help to spur employment growth in local communities. We look to these studies to provide an empirically and theoretically grounded approach to addressing our research question: what are the benefits, if any, to employment growth in states that have privatized some of their prisons, compared to states with only public prisons? Our research makes use of a large, national, and comprehensive dataset. By examining the employment contributions of prisons, as recent research has done, we were able to corroborate the general findings of this research. To study prison privatization we distinguish between states in which privatization has grown rapidly and those states in which privatization has grown slowly (or not at all). Our findings lend support to recent research that finds prisons do not improve job prospects for those communities that host them. We contribute to this literature by demonstrating that new prisons in states in which privatization is surging impede employment growth in the host community. To explain this we highlight the significant reduction in prison staffing - in both private and public prisons - where privatization is growing quickly.

Military and Civilian Dimensions of America's Regional Policy, 1972-1994

This article examines the impact of federal properties on regional growth in the United States between 1972 and 1994, and provides evidence that these properties influenced and continue to influence regional growth. Documenting the impact of federal facilities (military and civilian) on regional growth from 1972 to 1994 allows examination of the differences among types of such facilities. For understanding regional dynamics, those that play a role in the nations science and technology program—whether military or civilian-have exerted a much stronger force on regional economies than others. The federal government has allocated a very large share of discretionary spending to national security, and thus there are far more national security facilities than there are civilian ones and their collective impact is significantly higher. Nevertheless, if the comparison is made on a per installation basis, individual civilian installations have made a contribution to local economies that is comparable to that of national security facilities.

Customized Training in the Workplace

Rapid changes in manufacturing technology and procedures have created a need for additional training for workers. Traditional postsecondary school vocational training is generally perceived as not adequately meeting this need because vocational training programs quickly become obsolete. Customized labor training, typically implemented at the workplace, is a possible alternative to vocational training. Such training programs are frequently oriented toward specific organizational needs rather than general skill development. In-depth interviews with personnel directors, trainers, and worker-students in 20 organizations using customized labor training programs specified three different settings that entail different background conditions and outcomes for customized training: large, unionized monopoly sector firms that have developed intensive training programs; smaller, periphery sector firms that use state support for training largely as a subsidy to underwrite initial orientation costs for workers; and new starts, many of them Japanese owned, that substitute training in communication skills and group processes for training in specific job skills. The implications of these different settings for the future of customized labor training are discussed.