No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
Class Formation in the Workplace: The Role of Sources of Income
Abstract
Efforts to operationalize “ownership” in class formation research have emphasized diferences in power among ownership categories and have neglected the crucial question of whether an individual works for profit or for a wage. The importance of this variable is highlighted with data from the Boston taxi industry in which drivers differ little in control over their work but differ greatly in the way their work is compensated. In recent years, fleet owners have consciously manipulated these differences to displace a unionized labor force that drives for commissions with ostensibly self-employed drivers who rent their cabs by the shift.
... Studie s of conflict in worker cooperatives employing a democratic decision-making process have recently multiplied (Galante r & Palay, 1991;Greenberg, 1986;Gunn, 1984;Hunt, 1992;Jackall, 1984;Mansbridge , 1982;Paton, 1978;Russell, 1983Russell, , 1984Russell, , 1995Stryjan, 1989). Unlike earlier research that focuse d on conflict between producer and service cooperatives and the capitalist environme nt (Coates, 1976;Cole, 1921;Digby, 1948;Pot-ter, 1891;Preuss, 1957;Williamson, 1975), contemporary research examines the local conditions that generate conflict among cooperative members. ...
... Recent studie s also disclose a variety of local sources of conflict in worker coope ratives. For example, situate d conflicts identified by Russell (1983Russell ( , 1984Russell ( , 1985 in his studies of produce r and service cooperatives in the Unite d State s can be grouped under thre e categories: ethnicity-based conflicts, conflicts between cooperative members and nonmembers, and conflicts related to the local division of labor. Jackall (1984), in his study of a cheese retail cooperative in Berkeley, California, depicts conflicts surrounding the allocation of preferred tasks, like baking the bread rather than servicing customers at the front counte r. ...
What conflict resolution mechanisms dodemocratic worker cooperatives generate and to whatextent could these mechanisms be called democratic? Thiscase study tries to address these questions by examining both conflict and conflict resolution in ademocratic organization, a 66-year-old taxi cooperative.The conflicts presented stem from three main sources:ethnic origin, local division of labor, andclass affiliation. These conflicts are resolvedthrough different processes, ranging from a joke-tellingritual to a formal tribunal composed of elected judges.Discussion centers on unique aspects of conflict resolution in a democratic worker cooperativeand their implications for studies of conflictresolution in nondemocratic firms.
... Sociologist Raymond Russell studied the occupational structure of the cab industries in Boston (Russell 1983) and Los Angeles (Russell 1984), 19 and also interviewed a number of drivers in other cities, including San Francisco. Interestingly, it was Charles Vidich, whom Russell met when both were working on Stewart Perry's study of San Francisco garbagemen (Perry 1978(Perry , 1984, who suggested that Russell should look at the structure of cab companies (Russell 1985: xiv). ...
... Predatory loans for permits, targeting immigrant drivers in particular, are a blight on the industry in many cities: e.g. Boston(Russell 1983); New York(Lobas 1990); Toronto(Facey 1999); Philadelphia(Russell 2004).20 Assuming they have put their name on the list. Some never do, for various reasons. ...
Playing for hire: Discourse, knowledge, and strategies of cabdriving in San Francisco
What conflict resolution mechanisms do democratic worker cooperatives generate and to what extent could these mechanisms be called democratic? This case study tries to address these questions by examining both conflict and conflict resolution in a democratic organization, a 66-year-old taxi cooperative. The conflicts presented stem from three main sources: ethnic origin, local division of labor, and "class" affiliation. These conflicts are resolved through different processes, ranging from a joke-telling ritual to a formal tribunal composed of elected judges. Discussion centers on unique aspects of conflict resolution in a democratic worker cooperative and their implications for studies of conflict resolution in nondemocratic firms.
Over the last decade official surveys have recorded a significant leap in the number of people registered as self-employed. However, relatively little research has focused on the relationships under which the self-employed actually work. Those which do, have chosen the manufacturing sector, and the classic examples of homeworking and subcontracting, as their primary focus. This paper helps to redress this bias by examining the conditions of work of those individuals who operate as franchisees under the self-employed label and who are predominantly located in the service sector. The paper analyses the contractual relationship between franchisor and franchisee with three questions in mind: where does the operational control of the business reside; what are the financial linkages between franchisor and franchisee; and who holds the ownership title to, and control of, the tangible and intangible business assets. On each, franchisees are found to occupy an ambiguous position, thereby giving rise to the notion of their being part of the `controlled self-employed'.
This paper is designed to counter Oliver Williamson's hypothetical ‘Peer Group’ model of organization with a discussion of three prosperous populations of employee-owned firms: worked-owned scavenger companies, taxi cooperatives, and professional partnerships such as the large law firm. It will be shown here that these firms are formed, endure and prevail over their competition for reasons that Williamson, more than anyone else, has taught us to appreciate. In particular, this paper will argue that the metering problems and human asset considerations that are so prominently featured in Williamson's work are crucial for understanding the success of these firms.
One of the most consistent findings of research on racial inequality is that black males receive considerably lower income returns to education than white males. Weiss (1970, p. 154) found that, within specific age groups, black males received significantly lower returns to education than white males, whether education was measured as years of schooling or as achievement level. Siegel (1965) found that, net of occupation and region of the country, the difference in expected incomes of black and white males increased monotonically with education: at less than elementary education, blacks earned 1,400, and at the college level, to $3,800. Duncan (1969) has shown that even after controlling for family background, number of siblings, and occupational status black males still receive lower returns to education than white males.1
In this paper the financial incentives of executives are analyzed, theoretically and econometrically, with particular emphasis on the relationship between executive motivations and the sales-maximization hypothesis. Executive financial incentives are found to be primarily related to firm stock market performance. The sales performance of the firm has no consistent positive or negative effect on executive financial return. The structures of individual firms' compensation packages were tested for effects on firm performance. It was found that firms with executives whose financial rewards more closely paralleled stockholders' interests performed better in the stock market over the postwar period. For this sample of firms it was concluded that the hypothesis of present-value maximization better explains firm behavior than the hypothesis of sales maximization. It is the conclusion of this author that the sales-maximization hypothesis does not usefully characterize the "typical oligopolist," as has been asserte...
This is a revised version of a paper distributed, and presented orally in abbreviated form, at the San Francisco meetings of the Union for Radical Political Economics (URPE) in December 1974. The widespread interest which the paper aroused, then and subsequently, indicated both to the authors and to us that it should be made available to a larger audience. In proposing publication in MR, one of the authors wrote: "Many authors working within the Marxist tradition are unfamiliar with what we judge to be the most important ongoing research on the capitalist state. To cite one example, in the article 'The Tanzanian State' by Haroub Othman, which you published in the December 1974 issue of MR, the author says that, with the exception of Gramsci and Miliband, Marxists haven't written anything of importance on the state since Lenin. Such a view indicates to us that Othman is not familiar with recent and continuing work of Marxists on the capitalist state. I fear that such unfamiliarity is only too prevalent. It occurred to us that publication in MR would be the best way to reach the largest number and widest variety of interested people." Accordingly, we are publishing it, in two instalments. The authors are members of the San Francisco Kapitalistate Collective, which they explain as follows: " Kapitalistate: Working Papers on the Capitalist State is an international journal publishing Marxist research on the state—articles, theoretical notes, analyses of current events, reports on work in progress, book reviews, etc. There are a number of Kapltalistate collectives in the United States and other countries. The San Francisco Collective, in addition to participating in editorial, production, and distribution work for the journal, has written an essay on Watergate which appeared in Kapitalistate No.3. Currently the San Francisco collective is studying the role of political parties in the capitalist state. The present paper, while written by three of the members, is part of the work of the group as a whole." -THE EDITORS This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website , where most recent articles are published in full. Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.
This essay examines the shift toward "structural" explanations in recent studies of inequality. After reviewing this body of research and some of its shortcomings, we examine its theoretical underpinnings, comparing "structuralist" perspectives on work organization derived from institutional economics and neo-Marxism to more orthodox accounts based on neoclassical and "industrialism" theories. This discussion suggests areas where the different perspectives overlap and diverge. We conclude that work arrangements within the firm and their trend are the focus of most "structural" perspectives on positional stratification; thus, empirical studies grounded at the organizational level are more likely to inform current debates about the "structure of work" than is the growing body of research about structural effects on individual attainment or covariation among industrial/occupational characteristics. Toward that end, an agenda for future research is outlined, focusing on three aspects of work organization: (a) the units which comprise the structure of work and the dimensions underlying economic segmentation; (b) the effects of sectoral differentiation on technical and administrative arrangements within firms; and (c) temporal changes in how enterprises organize production. We provide some illustrations of the kinds of empirical data and research hypotheses required to link research on segmentation and stratification more closely to studies of organizations.
Recent studies have shown an improvement in the socioeconomic circumstances of black Americans. Yet a substantial difference remains, raising the question of what accounts for this difference. In this paper we examine the role of job authority (position in the authority hierarchies of organizations) as a source of this persistent discrepancy. Based on the comparison of samples of white (n = 1,088) and black men (n = 625) we find that: (1) the average job authority of black men is markedly lower than that of white men; (2) this discrepancy has its source in a number of factors including organizational characteristics, education, occupational position, and direct within-occupation exclusion from authority; (3) black men receive a lower income return to authority than do whites, with the discrepancy in income return being especially pronounced at higher occupational status levels; and (4) the exclusion from authority is costly; on the average across occupations it accounts for approximately one-third of the total black-white income gap.
Employers play a crucial role in the process of social stratification in the U.S.: the jobs they provide are the primary mechanism by which individuals are distributed among occupations and by which earnings are distributed among persons. But the vast majority of sociological work on socioeconomic achievement ignores employers completely, and nearly all related work by economists either ignores employers or else ignores characteristics of workers, substituting one omission for another. In the theoretical section of this paper, we review and combine sociological work on organizational structure, sociological studies of social stratification, and economic research on labor markets, industrial wage differentials and human capital. In this review, we hypothesize that the size of an employer organization works indirectly through other dimensions of organizational structure to alter the effect of workers' schooling on their wages and occupational attainment. In particular, we hypothesize that the effect of workers' schooling on earnings and the effect of workers' schooling on occupational SES increase as logarithmic functions of the size of the organization which employs them. Since the relationship between schooling and occupational attainment is a central part of social stratification research, and because the effect of schooling on earnings is a fundamental feature of sociological and human capital research on earnings, this hypothesis links organizational structure to the very heart of current issues in social stratification and human capital studies. In the empirical section of the paper, we divide a national probability sample of workers into five groups, depending on the size of the establishment in which they work. Fitting models of earnings and occupational attainment in each of these groups and then relating schooling effects to the size of the establishment which defines the groups, we find that the effect of workers' schooling on earnings and SES increases approximately as a logarithmic function of the size of the establishment for which they work. Indeed, we find zero-order correlations between schooling effects and log establishment size to be between +.88 and +.95, and statistically significant at the .025 level or better. Implications of our research are discussed.
The class theories of Karl Marx and Ralf Dahrendorf, although subject to much theoretical analysis, largely have been ignored in the dominant lines of quantitative research on status attainment and the political consequences of social stratification. This paper attempts to bridge this gap by drawing out some of the implications of Marx's ownership of the means of production and Dahrendorf's authority for both income inequality and politics, by evaluating these implications empirically and by showing how these conceptions of class can be incorporated into the dominant Blau-Duncan model of status attainment. Using survey data from large national samples in the United States and Great Britain, we show that both Marx's and Dahrendorf's class models have important implications for men's income, increasing by almost half the variance explained by the conventional Blau-Duncan model. The income of American women, in contrast, is little influenced by class and this explains a substantial part of the male-female income gap. As Marx, Dahrendorf, and others predicted, class position has a stronger impact on class identification and politics in Great Britain than in the United States. An analysis of the transfer of class position from one generation to the next in Britain suggests the existence of two overlapping but distinct stratification systems, one a class system rooted in ownership of the means of production and authority, and the other a status system based on education and occupational status.
The research presented here investigates the relative utility of a power theory versus a functional theory of organizational stratification as they pertain to managerial compensation in the large corporation. Concretely, it examines the effects of different types and levels of corporate control, adjusted for the effects of corporate size and performance, on three dimensions of compensation among 218 industrial corporations during 1975 and 1976. In order to assess the power of the chief executive officer in relation to other directors, the analysis employs a hierarchy of control configurations based on the distribution of stock ownerwhip among the members of the board of directors. In general, the results confirm the hypothesis that the remuneration received by a chief executive officer is directly related to his power within the corporation. A major exception to this pattern involves chief executive officers who are also principal stockholders in their corporations and receive dividend income from their s...
- BERLE, A.