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  • Response:Organizing, Movements, and Social Capital
  • Dan Clawson (bio)

Even though I am unequivocally a supporter of an organizing model and social movement unionism, I find a great deal to like in Paul Jarley's social capital approach. The labor movement desperately needs fresh ideas; rather than providing a variation on the fifteen-year-old servicing-organizing debate, Jarley introduces a new dimension, social capital. It's a different way of thinking about the problem. No union member should get stuck in a single perspective; we all need a toolkit of different approaches, each to be used in certain circumstances. Jarley's social-capital approach should be part of the toolkit for every union activist.

Although Jarley gives it a particular twist, I predict that others will attempt to appropriate and transform his insights, incorporating them into their own perspectives. In fact, that's exactly what I intend to do in my comments here. Sometimes it seems that Jarley loses sight of what is specifically union and labor about the general approach. His version of social-capital unionism tends to presume a world of employer-union cooperation, and contains no analysis of conflict, but that's not inherent in the approach.

As Ecclesiastes tells us, there is nothing new under the sun, and a reasonable argument can be made that the labor movement has long been aware of the importance of social capital, even if we haven't used that name. Marx, after all, argued that workers would make the revolution because capitalism brought large groups of workers together in factories; peasants might be as oppressed, but were isolated from one another and did not cooperate with each other in the process of production and hence could not mount an effective struggle.

But naming something and theorizing it, and perhaps above all connecting it to a well developed literature that tries to develop the implications of an approach, is a major contribution. It makes it possible for a union leader or staff member to self-consciously think through a problem [End Page 37] from this perspective, rather than have a vague sense but not know how to act on it. As a sociologist, and one whose past work involved an analysis of social networks, I'd note that in essence Jarley has taken an important literature in academic sociology, that of social networks and social capital, and shown its implications for the labor movement. Since many smart people, over thirty some years, have developed non-obvious implications of this approach, there are many ideas to draw on.

In some sense a social-capital approach re-states the labor movement's bedrock principle: solidarity. Workers gain their power only through unity. As labor's anthem notes, "what force on earth is weaker than the feeble strength of one, but our union makes us strong." Union—the very term - implies connection, that is a network, that is social capital. Therefore, if we seek to build labor's power, we need to build connections. As Jarley notes, we don't want to have just one-way links (from the union rep/leader to the member), not even just two-way links (rep/leader to member and back), but rather dense networks (members connected to each other in all sorts of ways). Those dense networks, the development of social capital, give our union, our solidarity, a power that can't be attacked at any one point. There are redundant and multiple connections, such that both information and mobilization can (and do) flow through multiple channels. Even if the steward or staff member is removed from contact, the network has many other ways to accomplish its goals.

Although they didn't use the term "social capital," and didn't draw on the range of systematic analysis presented in Jarley's piece, both employers and labor activists have long been concerned about social capital. That's why employers prohibit union organizers from coming onto company property. It's why employers sometimes try to control the spaces where people take breaks, limiting them to locations that can be monitored by supervisors (Diamond 1992). When employers take effective union activists, and re-assign them to different shifts, or...

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