Jeffrey Haydu

Making use of the past : Time periods as cases to compare and as sequences of problem solving

This article examines methodological issues that arise when using information from one historical period to illuminate another. It begins by showing how the strengths and weaknesses of methods commonly used to compare institutions or regions reappear in comparisons between times. The discussion then turns to alternative approaches. The use of narrative and of path dependency to construct explanatory sequences are strategies that strike a welcome balance between causal generalization and historical detail. But these approaches typically fail to identify either the causal mechanisms or the trajectories that link events in different eras. These gaps can be filled by rethinking sequences of events across periods as reiterated problem solving. Successive U.S. industrial relations regimes since 1900 are used to illustrate this methodological strategy.

Counter Action Frames: Employer Repertoires and the Union Menace in the Late Nineteenth Century

This article explores collective action frames associated with U.S. employer mobilization against unions in the late nineteenth century. The study makes several contributions to the literature on framing processes. First, it emphasizes that the interests and identities of counter-mobilizing elites are no less problematic than those of challengers. The character of labor protest did not in itself dictate how employers would construct the actors and issues at stake in industrial conflict. Second, it adds another explanation for why certain frames prevail, supplementing discussions of strategic framing and frame resonance. From among a larger repertoire of possibilities, proprietary employers adopted those anti-union frames that corresponded with diagnostic categories and identities constructed in other organizational settings. My focus here is on frames deployed in the arenas of municipal reform and status group formation as well as industrial relations. Finally, the case suggests that for elite counter-mobilization, the development of oppositional identities may also involve social closure, as higher status groups construct hierarchies of social honor.

Business citizenship at work: Cultural transposition and class formation in Cincinnati, 1870-1910

This article links class analysis and institutionalism through a case study of late‐19th‐century employers. Class analysis extends institutionalism by highlighting an additional source of cultural transposition—a generalized identity summarized here as “business citizenship.” Institutionalism, in turn, shows how civic associations worked to unify employers and foster an overarching class consciousness. The case study provides an overview of class formation among Cincinnati employers and illustrates how business citizenship carried over from the realms of political reform and high culture to personnel management and industrial training. Some comparative observations suggest this pattern of class formation and cultural transposition was typical.

Frame Brokerage in the Pure Food Movement, 1879–1906

The US campaign for ‘pure food’ from the 1880s through 1906 featured a diverse coalition of groups with quite different ways of defining the problem, identifying the relevant actors, and balancing political and consumerist tactics. This paper examines how these differences in framing, rather than undermining cooperation or impeding success, helped to broaden the coalition for pure food and to win passage of the 1906 Food and Drug Act. It pays particular attention to the ways in which womens groups acted as frame brokers, translating pure food issues into a maternalist language and, in so doing, contributing both new support and new tactics to the campaign. The case study is used to address more general issues in the relationship between framing and (1) coalition-building and (2) tactical repertoires.

Willing workers : the work ethics in Japan, England, and the United States

Based on findings from several international surveys concerning work environment and job attitudes, Sengoku discusses and analyzes the differences in and cultural bases of the work ethics of Japan, England, and the United States. In his comparisons of different national work settings and of different generations of Japanese workers, Sengoku probes the anatomy of a significant change that is taking place in Japan today--the erosion of traditional values among the new generation of Japanese workers to the point that American youth may actually be more work-oriented now than their Japanese counterparts.

Three layers of history in recurrent social movements: the case of food reform

Abstract Using the understudied genre of food reform movements for illustration, we advocate greater attention to recurrent social movements. Analysis of these movements calls for combining three levels of historical analysis. One links the incidence and character of mobilization to long-term, large-scale historical changes; the second shows how periods of activism are also animated and shaped by specific historical contexts; and the third tracks legacies from earlier to later periods, thus both tracing additional causal influences and connecting separate cases into coherent sequences. The social movements literature includes excellent examples of each type of historical account. Combining types is much less common. Doing so, we contend, offers methodological advantages for scholars comparing and sequencing mobilization around similar problems in different historical periods. We develop the argument from three eras of food protest: Grahamites in the 1830s and early 1840s, dietary reformers and food safety campaigners of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and organic advocates who gained popular support beginning in the late 1960s.

Advances in Comparative-Historical AnalysisAdvances in Comparative-Historical Analysis, edited by MahoneyJamesThelenKathleen. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 305 pp.

Advances in Comparative-Historical Analysis champions scholarship that investigates the causes of important, large-scale social phenomena, relies on in-depth study of a few cases, and highlights the temporal dimensions of institutions. In this, editors James Mahoney and Kathleen Thelen have made the book a deliberate successor to Mahoney and Dietrich Rueschemeyer’s 2003 Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences. Unlike that earlier book’s essays, the contributions in this one are primarily by political scientists, and they speak to and take aim at mainstream political science. Common targets include rational choice theories that abstract individuals from social settings; large-N quantitative studies that gloss over the details of particular cases; and formal modeling and experimental studies that neglect historical context. Sociologists who read the volume will have ample opportunity to feel smug about their discipline, as when Paul Pierson has to remind fellow political scientists that power matters and can only be understood historically, or when Jacob Hacker, Paul Pierson, and Kathleen Thelen recommend that their colleagues pay less attention to individual voters and more to organized interests. But sociologists who take a broadly institutionalist approach and whose primary goal is causal analysis will also find much of value in the collection. To begin with, contributors offer a robust defense of causal complexity. In the studies that they celebrate as methodological exemplars, accounts of particular outcomes generally feature multiple and conjunctural causes; past events are recognized as having important and lasting consequences; and the contingencies of timing are highlighted—historical results can be altered by when things happen, in what sequence, and at what pace. These characteristics of causal accounts ensure that explanations will lack the broad generalizability that many social scientists covet. For the contributors, however, nuanced explanation and in-depth understanding rival wide applicability as measures of good research. To guide researchers in constructing richer analyses, contributors also offer a useful inventory of techniques of causal inference in comparative and historical research. The ‘‘advances’’ promised by the title are found not in any particular technique but in the authors’ compiling of an impressive checklist of logical moves made by skilled practitioners. Some items on the list come from reviewing the methods used in specialist literatures (Part II, ‘‘Agenda-Setting Work’’) on the developmental state (Stephan Haggard), welfare policy (Jane Gingrich), and authoritarian regimes (Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way). Others come in more programmatic surveys of tricks of the trade (Parts III and IV, ‘‘Tools for Temporal Analysis’’ and ‘‘Issues of Method’’). Readers are sure to find some of these tricks useful in their own research, whether in thinking through varieties of historical change or in designing comparative and historical tests to evaluate their causal hunches. In considering varieties of historical change, the contributors focus particularly on institutional legacies and mechanisms of institutional reproduction. Pierson’s chapter, for example, sorts through the ways in which social actors’ power at one point in time begets power down the historical line. Giovanni Capoccia explores what happens at critical junctures that makes these moments fateful. He defines critical junctures as not just instances when different directions are possible but also when actors are relatively unconstrained. One should, accordingly, pay close attention to the work of political entrepreneurs, to the assembly of political coalitions, and to the reconstruction of political preferences during critical historical moments. And Hacker, Pierson, and Thelen examine how the impact of institutions can ‘‘drift’’ in interaction with changing settings or be ‘‘converted’’ as their operations and rules are redirected and reinterpreted by powerful groups. With regard to evaluating causal hunches, contributors offer tips both for comparative Reviews 101

29.99 paper. ISBN: 9781107525634.

action frames, but also those referring to resource mobilization and political opportunity theories. Also, recent work on the global justice movement is largely ignored. On the other hand, the critical ethnographic approach has its advantages and its weaknesses. It is not always easy to distinguish between the researcher and the activist, and this might trouble some readers who prefer to see a clear separation between the two roles. In spite of these minor shortcomings, this is an excellent book which I would recommend to all those who are interested in social movements and transnational mobilizations, especially if they have been disappointed by previous analyses which fail to put the study of movements into a broader critical perspective.

Class and the Color Line: Interracial Class Coalition in the Knights of Labor and the Populist MovementClass and the Color Line: Interracial Class Coalition in the Knights of Labor and the Populist Movement, by GerteisJoseph. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. 274 pp.

quite simply the voices of the workers themselves. Born between 1775 and 1865, these seven individuals have remarkably varied profiles that serve to remind us of the great diversity among working people: they come from urban and rural communities in various regions of France; they range from highly skilled artisans to the lowliest laborers; they lead both sedentary and migratory lives; and they practice their skills in places as distinct as a small elite Parisian chair turning shop and a massive ironworks. Although Traugott chose these individuals largely because of the detailed accounts they give us of their trades, they also provide a wealth of personal details about everyday life, passionate reflections about their past mistakes and triumphs, and personal reactions to public and private events. Of course, it must be borne in mind that these workers were not, in all respects, typical. That they wrote and published memoirs sets them apart from their peers-for most people had neither the education, leisure time, nor inclination even to record such activities. Indeed, some of these workers ended up far from their humble roots, as elected officials, union organizers, and historians, and as travelers who ventured as far as Egypt, Algeria, Russia, Paraguay, and the United States. Even so, in terms of self-identity, they considered themselves representative members of the working class. Although one must always approach sources of this kind cautiously, historians of labor or the family are likely to be struck by the compelling recollections of events they may know well in the abstract: the human costs of economic dislocation, political revolution, conscription into the army, or the introduction of new machines. These memoirs tell us much about relations between workers and bosses, injustice in the workplace, connections to family and place, the pain of childhood abandonment (four of these seven people lost one or both parents as children), friendship and betrayal, the pride and embarrassments of regional difference, and the sheer physicality of manual labor. Moreover, given its chronological arrangement, the book gives a sweeping sense of the nineteenth century with its numerous transformations, as well as a deeper understanding of the consequences of both the predictable and unexpected changes that individuals experience in the course of a lifetime. Although specialists will certainly appreciate having this collection of memoirs (most of them available in English for the first time), history students are especially likely to find these personal reflections about life and work engaging and informative-thanks in part to an extremely helpful introductory chapter. Here the editor briefly but expertly sketches the social, political, and economic forces transforming France in the nineteenth century. Next, he describes the general living conditions of the working poor-housing, diet, illness and injury, infant mortality, wages, prices of goods-and thus provides a sort of general index with which to gauge the accuracy of the memoirs themselves. Finally, as a sociologist who clearly has reflected much about what it means to construct a life, Traugott also squarely addresses the often problematic status of autobiographical evidence. His thoughtful discussions on the difficulties of verification, on conventions and strategies of writing, and on questions of authenticity and representiveness provide avaluable lens through which to view the memoirs and a framework for evaluating various historiographical questions. Traugott encourages readers to think critically not only about autobiography, but also, by implication, about the wider variety of sources upon which historians rely every day. The French Worker would fit well in many college history courses, including both European surveys and courses that specialize on work, collective action, or the family. Readers will also appreciate the helpful tables, the map, and the nineteenth-century illustrations of work activities.