Larry W. Isaac

AHISTORICISM IN TIME-SERIES ANALYSES OF HISTORICAL PROCESS: CRITIQUE, REDIRECTION, AND ILLUSTRATIONS FROM U.S. LABOR HISTORY*

Most time-ordered analyses of historical processes are rendered ahistorical because the premises that direct quantitative inquiry obscure changing historical relations through time. These conventional practices stem from three problematic presuppositions: (1) the separation of theory and history, (2) ahistorical conceptions of time, and (3) methodological autonomy and the primacy of the theory of statistical technique. We illustrate how these premises shape sociological-historical investigation by examining several quantitative historical analyses of labor organization and conflict. Reanalysis of the same historical series with temporally moving covariance analysis demonstrates theoretically important historical contingency as well as the error of presupposing temporal homogeneity in historical relationships. Our critique of conventional practice and our reanalysis enable us to pose alternative premises to ground quantitative historical research in the interdependence of history and theory, in historical conceptions of time, and in the historicization of quantitative methodology. Our redirection aims at moving us closer to historical actuality, that is, to historical relations and processes, when we use time-series data and analytic procedures.

Racial Insurgency, the State, and Welfare Expansion: Local and National Level Evidence from the Postwar United States

This paper addresses systematically the possible nexus between insurgent political action and the state apparatus, concentrating specifically on the relationship between urban riots and welfare or reliefgiving activity in the postwar United States. The theoretical warrant for the analysis has its genesis in Piven and Clowards influential thesis relating insurgency and relief giving in capitalist society. This perspective is juxtaposed with the orthodox developmental perspective of welfare institutions, and the causal processes and underlying images of the state are compared. A critical review of the empirical work on the riot-welfare relationship suggests several deficiencies and questions which we attempt to redress and address, respectively, in a cross-level empirical analysis of (a) changes in welfare expenditures from 1960 to 1970 in a panel of U.S. cities and (b) annual changes in national aggretate relief-program categories for the postwar United States (1947-76). The results of the city-level analysis, parallel to several similar studies, provide extremely weak to no support for the hypothesized riot-welfare relationship. However, the postwar timeseries analysis provides consistently strong evidence that the urban riots played an important role nationally in the short-term expansion of the extent of relief giving across several major program categories. The conclusion considers the implications of the findings for theories of (a) welfare institutions in late capitalism, (b) the state in late capitalism, and (c) collective action and insurgency.

Takin’ It from the Streets: How the Sixties Mass Movement Revitalized Unionization1

Was the militant zeitgeist of the “long sixties” social movement wave harmful, irrelevant, or revitalizing for labor militancy and union growth? The authors extend research on intermovement relations by examining the influence of ascendant militancy of the new left–inspired mass movement wave on the organizational fortunes of labor. Time‐series models buttressed by secondary historical evidence show that “the movement,” as radical flank, did stimulate a militant oppositional culture that moved from the streets into workplaces. That oppositional culture was especially significant in the public sector, where it fueled union recognition strikes which, in turn, helped push the extension of collective bargaining laws in that sector, opening the door for union growth. The authors consider implications for social movement theory and labor movement revitalization.

Movements, Aesthetics, and Markets in Literary Change: Making the American Labor Problem Novel:

One path to cultural innovation in artistic and literary fields is differentiation of a genre into new subgenres. But what are the dynamics at work in such a process? This article addresses that question by identifying and explaining the emergence and trajectory of a new fiction subgenre—the American labor problem novel—during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. I make a theoretical case for the intersection of social movement fields and cultural production fields showing, through a historical sociological analysis, that this subgenre was the joint product of: (1) a shift in literary aesthetic practice resulting from the rise of realism, (2) the subgenres dialogical character, (3) collective contention surrounding the rise of labor movement militancy, and (4) the exigencies of literary and popular culture markets. The historical conjuncture of these processes contributed to a repository of cultural constructions of class in storied form, as novelists sought to both entertain and educate readers about the emerging realities of class-contentious industrial society. This study demonstrates the fruitfulness of merging sociology of culture theory and social movement outcome perspectives when analyzing cultural change.

To Counter “The Very Devil” and More: The Making of Independent Capitalist Militia in the Gilded Age1

This study addresses a neglected question in movement/countermovement dynamics, that is, why do countermovement activists select a particular organizational form in which to mobilize? Contrary to the standard assumption that selection is a simple function of challenging movement characteristics, this study suggests that selection is a matter of organizational correspondence: the extent to which a particular organizational model fits (a) the counterframed threat of the challenging movement, (b) the broader field of counterframed cultural‐political threats, (c) the characteristics of those embedded in countermobilizing networks, and (d) openings in the political structure. This argument is illustrated with primary data and secondary sources that allow a historical reconstruction of independent capitalist militia formations in Cleveland, Ohio, at the dawn of the Gilded Age.

Insurgent Images: Genre Selection and Visual Frame Amplification in IWW Cartoon Art

The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, aka ‘Wobblies’) developed a rich, extensive movement culture. Focusing on one genre – cartoons – within the Wobbly cultural arsenal, we extend social movement theory in two interrelated ways. First, by asking why Wobblies were attracted to cartoons as a key cultural form of insurgent media, we open the question of genre selection for social movement scholars. In this, Wobblies deployed cartoon art extensively because it was a form widely available in prevailing popular culture, corresponded well with IWW oppositional culture, and fitted nicely with production, circulation, and consumption considerations. Second, we ask what sort of work cartoons performed for this movement. We highlight the use of visual arts of protest as an important vehicle for extending movement framing work and develop the concept of visual frame amplification. Drawing on more than 300 IWW cartoons printed in the Industrial Worker between 1909 and 1913, we show that Wobblies used cartoons to amplify movement framing in ways that capitalized on the special features of the visual, in general, and cartoons, in particular, to (1) visually personify and concretize abstract ideas; (2) visually dramatize movement ideology, grievances, goals, and tactics; and (3) narrate features of struggle in a compact visual form. Visual caricature and parody provided additional cultural value-added that went beyond both the visual and framing to produce images that were at once uplifting, entertaining, and politically–culturally revolutionary in intent. In general, the cultural form through which movement framing is performed structures and generates genre-specific qualities not apprehended by framing theory or social movement scholarship generally.

Determinants and Behavioral Consequences of Psychological Modernity: Empirical Evidence from Costa Rica

A major goal of research on national development and underdevelopment is to specify and empirically test propositions drawn from theories emphasizing individual, societal, or international determinants. In this paper we examine a central premise of individual modernity theory that psychological modernity mediates the effects of background factors and directly affects individual behaviors thought to contribute to societal modernization. Several analytical tests were made using fifteen behaviors identified in the modernization literature and an index of modern behavior. Based on data collected from a stratified quota sample of 210 Costa Rican adult males, we (1) estimate separate ordinary least-squares regression equations of the behaviors as afunction of psychological modernity and background variables (age, rural-urban residence, education, occupation and income); (2) perform a similar analysis after forming indexes of background and behavioral indicators; and (3) estimate a full structural equation model of eight behaviors incorporating measurement error of psychological modernity and allowing the disturbances in the equations to be correlated. The results indicate that psychological modernity has, in most cases, a negligible effect on behavior when measurement is assumed to be perfect, and nonnegligible effects in the direction predicted for three of the eight behaviors when the measurement error in psychological modernity is taken into consideration. After evaluating design limitations and potential objections, we note that psychological modernity is important in determining only a limited number of behaviors and generally adds little to explaining behavioral variations beyond objective background characteristics. We conclude that psychological modernity appears more as an interpretative construct (and that only in several cases) than a pervasive source of modern behavior. Implications for national development and additional lines of research are discussed.

Literary Activists and Battling Books: The Labor Problem Novel as Contentious Movement Medium

Purpose – This paper extends research on social movement media by focusing on the use of a literary genre – realist fiction – namely, the labor problem novel in the context of the labor movement and countermovement in late 19th-century America. n nMethodology – I do a close reading of a significant early dialogical cluster of such novels to address three key questions: (1) Field position of authors – What was the position of these labor problem authors in relation to the movement field and literary field and how did that positioning matter? (2) Genre selection – What was it about the realist novel that attracted labor problem partisans to it? (3) Internal content – How did authors shape the internal structure and content of their stories? n nFindings – As literary activists, authors pivoted between the movement field and literary field selecting the novel for the special powers that it possessed relative to other historically available media. Authors produced stories with a good/evil binary attached to characters that stood for emerging social categories in young industrial America. During the Gilded Age (and beyond) the novel played an important role as medium for the labor movement and its opposition – characterizing collective actors, dramatizing forms of action, providing materials for claims of injustice or threats, solutions to social problems, and new categories and collective identities – all with powerful emotional appeal and entertainment value. n nImplications – This study suggests that social movement scholars might expand their purview of cultural media used by movements and also take genre and its selection by activists seriously. n nOriginality – This study demonstrates how literature – realist fiction – has been shaped by movement agents and played an important, but under-appreciated, role in the struggle over cultural supremacy in the context of movement–countermovement dynamics.

Striking Deaths: Lethal Contestation and the “Exceptional” Character of the American Labor Movement, 1870–1970

The decades between the Great Railway Strike of 1877 and the post-World- War-II institutionalization of organized labor in the US have been impressionistically characterized by labor scholars as the most violent and bloody to be found in any Western, democratic nation. A variety of different forms of labor repression have been identified and studied. Yet because of a lack of systematic data, none have been able to examine directly the incidence and contours of the ultimate form of violent repression in collective contention. We create the conceptual space for pursuing bloodshed and a new data set featuring deaths resulting from labor strikes as a new and promising direction in the American exceptionalism debate and in studies of comparative strikes. Through a painstaking search of the historical record, we produce the first systematic quantitative gauge of striking deaths between 1870 and 1970. These data permit a mapping of fatalities resulting from labor strikes across time, geographical region, and industry. After describing configurations of strike-based mortality, we suggest what these patterned variations may mean and identify additional questions that these data may help resolve in subsequent studies. We urge comparable data collections in other countries that would permit direct comparative-historical assessments of the magnitude and role of bloodshed in different labor movements.

“Movement Schools” and Dialogical Diffusion of Nonviolent Praxis: Nashville Workshops in the Southern Civil Rights Movement

While it is generally well known that nonviolent collective action was widely deployed in the US southern civil rights movement, there is still much that we do not know about how that came to be. Drawing on primary data that consist of detailed semistructured interviews with members of the Nashville nonviolent movement during the late 1950s and 1960s, we contribute unique insights about how the nonviolent repertoire was diffused into one movement current that became integral to moving the wider southern movement. Innovating with the concept of serially linked movement schools – locations where the deeply intense work took place, the didactic and dialogical labor of analyzing, experimenting, creatively translating, and resocializing human agents in preparation for dangerous performance – we follow the biographical paths of carriers of the nonviolent Gandhian repertoire as it was learned, debated, transformed, and carried from India to the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) and Howard University to Nashville (TN) and then into multiple movement campaigns across the South. Members of the Nashville movement core cadre – products of the Nashville movement workshop schools – were especially important because they served as bridging leaders by serially linking schools and collective action campaigns. In this way, they played critical roles in bridging structural holes (places where the movement had yet to be successfully established) and were central to diffusing the movement throughout the South. Our theoretical and empirical approach contributes to the development of the dialogical perspective on movement diffusion generally and to knowledge about how the nonviolent repertoire became integral to the US civil rights movement in particular.