Sourcebook of Labor Markets: Evolving Structures and Processes (review)

Voices from the sociological tradition are easily lost in wider discussions of labor markets and other economic fields of study. One of the most striking features of this book, therefore, is its concentration in one place of work on labor market questions by sociologists, rather than economists (a few welcome exceptions notwithstanding). And concentrated it is: the book is more than 700 pages, with 27 chapters written under names familiar to most sociologists in this area.

The breadth of the book is impressive, covering topics as diverse as economic inequality (Nielsen and Alderson), the future of the labor movement (Cornfield and Fletcher), the decline of internal labor markets (Cappelli), sex segregation (Jacobs) and the gender pay gap (England et al.), race segregation (Kaufman), social networks (Marsden and Gorman) and immigration (Bean et al.). On the whole, the chapters attempt to summarize theoretical perspectives and present empirical trends and to describe the state of the methodological art in the areas they cover; some present original analyses of their own. Most of these chapters are not ground-breaking but rather ground-covering. The result is a book that will be useful in many ways to many people, but is not likely to be read beginning to end.

The editors, acknowledging their "commitments to our contributors' rights" report refraining from aggressively shaping the pieces they assembled. They save their own views for the introductory pieces and an afterword, in which they argue that "the transition to price competition has been the most fateful factor for labor markets of all those changes noted [in the introduction], and those noted by our contributors, whether or not they have acknowledged the fact." (10) After a post-World War II era dominated by oligopolistic industrial giants that were free to strike friendly deals with labor even as huge profits rolled in, the post-OPEC period has witnessed the violent return of large-scale competition and subsequent decline of manufacturing, with devastating effects on those least able to protect themselves from "instability," "flexibility," "accountability" and other euphemisms for a winner-take-all economic order.

However, far from being the inevitable result of anonymous "market forces" (a term toward which the editors show no deference), the new order results from the active decisions taken by a generation of managers whose response to the new demands reflected not only their business myopia but also the reality of what they could get away with. The labor movement was weak for the same reasons the industrial CEOs had become lazy bureaucrats, and when the CEOs directed their "adjustments" downward toward their employees, they met little successful resistance. Rather, they found among workers an "apparently amiable equanimity … very likely reflecting consumption opportunities at retailers' import counters" – as well as stock-owning rates more than 50 percent. In short, the victims of corporate restructuring had "little to gain and much to lose" by participating in organized opposition, leaving open an obvious path of least resistance for corporate actors (22-3).

The return of price competition may be the "most fateful factor" affecting labor markets and inequality, but it is not clear how this can explain other important developments, such as the decline of occupational sex segregation and the gender pay gap over the same period (the 1970s and 1980s) – or why that gender progress slowed in the 1980s and stalled in the 1990s, as reported in the chapters by Jacobs and England et al. An explanation for the improvements might link the trend toward competitive markets with the growth of the service sector, which positively affects women's relative labor market position. Less clear is why this progress would stall in the 1990s, or why England et al. find the penalty for working in a female-dominated job (or the reward for working in a male-dominated job) seems to have increased over the 1980s. The "gender revolution" thus joined the labor movement in the doldrums, and will either "stall out" or "be reenergized by new initiatives and...