Bringing in managers and union leaders

Sociologists are supposedly fascinated by class conflict. That said, there is remarkably little work done by sociologists on American unionism, and even less on the unions of the present day. Some of this comes from the traditional Marxist dismissal of the labor movement as bourgeois reformism. Burawoy's (1979) characterization of unionism as a ritual game serving to defuse serious critiques of capitalism is harsh; nevertheless, it has received almost no protest from the ranks of sociologists. Disinterest has led to a certain amount of superficiality in our models of industrial conflict. Our propositions are reasonable, but they are simple-overly so. Our first commonly invoked theory is resource mobilization theory. Workers will unionize and strike when they are strong. Formal organizations, such as unions, make workers stronger and thus encourage more striking (Obserschall, 1973; Tilly, 1978). Our second proposition is that unions once formed tend to become bureaucratized and centralized.