None-Too-Porous Boundaries

None-Too-Porous Boundaries: Labor History and the History of Technology PHILIP SCRANTON This article represents an attempt to assess the relationships be­ tween research in labor history and issues of moment in studies of the history of technology. To make this topic manageable, the dis­ cussion will be confined to matters concerning American industrial labor, excluding work in agriculture, extractive sectors, and service trades,1 in order to keep the focus on what might be termed the core of labor history studies, the articulation of the manufacturing base in the United States. The plan of exposition is tripartite, a customary craft practice among mental laborers. Initially, the thematic devel­ opment of American labor history will be summarized, followed by an assessment of elements that have divided and may link labor and technology research, concluding with a bundle of suggestions for fu­ ture inquiry, based on the state of our collective arts. American Labor History: An Overview The historiography of American labor studies breaks readily into two major eras, with a third perhaps at present dawning. The roots of the discipline lie in the Midwest, at the stronghold of institutional economics in the World War I decade, the University of Wisconsin. There John R. Commons erected labor history as an integral element Dr. Scranton is associate professor in the Department of History at Rutgers Uni­ versity, Camden, New Jersey. His study of development and decay in skill-intensive manufacturing, Figured Tapestry: Production, Markets, and Power in Philadelphia Textiles, 1885—1940, will be published in spring 1989 by Cambridge University Press. ■One must, having narrowed the span of the present article, acknowledge that im­ portant work has recently been done in all three of the excluded sectors. For agriculture, see Pete Daniel, Breaking the Land (Urbana, Ill., 1985), and T. J. Byres, ed., Sharecroppers and Sharecropping (London, 1983); for mining, Donald Miller and Richard Sharpless, The Kingdom of Coal (Philadelphia, 1985); and, in service trades, Susan Porter Benson, Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890— 1940 (Urbana, Ill., 1986), as representative of the current body of published work.© 1988 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040- 165X/88/2904-0002$01.00 722 Labor History and the History of Technology 723 in the analysis of industrial economies, assembling first the massive Documentary History ofAmerican Industrial Society, followed by the mul­ tivolume History of Labor in the United States, completed in the 1930s. Befitting adherents of the school of institutional economics, Com­ mons and his followers, most prominently Selig Perlman and Philip Taft, devoted themselves to chronicling the vagaries of American trade unionism, especially the “job-conscious” craft organizations that engendered the American Federation of Labor. This commitment to the study of pure-and-simple trade unions generally passed over the radical initiatives evident in efforts at cooperative, labor-managed production and the transformation-minded struggles by socialist ag­ gregations and the Industrial Workers of the World. It also led to a focus on collective bargaining, interunion rivalries over jurisdiction, and intraunion battles over organizational structure, funds, and power, rather than any emphasis on workplace relationships or the links between workers and their social and political communities. This is not to say that the Commons group operated from ivory towers or that they were indifferent to theorizing. Selig Perlman served the Commission on Industrial Relations as a species of secret agent in 1913—14, investigating labor relations at Lawrence, Massachusetts, in the wake of the great 1912 Bread and Roses IWW strike—at some risk to life and limb, as he noted in his reports to the commission staff. In the late 1920s, Perlman also attempted to draw together European and American patterns in his Theory of the Labor Movement (1928).2 Yet, as the literature produced by the third generation, the post-World War II scholars led by Philip Taft, amply demonstrates, institutional studies rooted in labor economics failed to advance be­ yond earlier boundaries. Although they continued to produce large tomes choked with detail, the “old institutionalists” occupied an in­ tellectual dead space even as Taft published the second half of his study of the AFL in 1959 and helped launch

Archaeology · Craft · Historiography · History of technology · Labor history · Labor relations · Political science · Sociology · American History and Culture · Historical and Cultural Archaeology Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law

• Crusades Against Crisis

  Open Access•Eric Arnesen•International Review of Social…•1990

  Add to list