- Reflections upon “The Effects of Industrial, Occupational and Sex Segregation on Blue-Collar Markets” – 35 Years Later
When my older sister was a graduate student in biology at the University of Rochester, the department head advised her to change her surname if she wanted to be hired locally as a teacher. So my father had the children’s surname changed from Formicola to Form, and she soon found work at a local high school. After I learned in introductory economics that rent, wages, prices and unemployment are solely a consequence of supply, demand and interpersonal competition, I rejected that discipline as a major. Economic theory simply did not describe the occupational world that I knew. There were no Italian surnames among the postal carriers, school teachers or high-wage workers in Kodak, Bausch and Lomb or the firm that became Xerox.
Somewhat later at the University of Maryland, my dissertation director C. Wright Mills was working with Hans Gerth at Wisconsin to translate some of Weber’s essays on social stratification. Gerth’s written English was awkward. As Mills’s knowledge of German was modest, he asked me about some passages they were struggling with. Thus, I learned about class, status and power. Weber’s notions about labor markets resonated with my own experience. My dissertation was built around these concepts in a study of a federally established suburb, Greenbelt, Maryland. The research focused on the social stratification that emerges in a one-class community that has developed no traditions. Residents had little power. They could make no decisions on rental rates, community growth, transportation, schools, movie prices or health services because federal officials supervised the town. Status stratification emerged as a consequence of an individual’s having achieved leadership in working with voluntary organizations. The findings (Form 1945) marked a research program that lasted until 1995.
In subsequent lectures and publications, first at Kent State in Ohio and then at Michigan State, I described differences in the level of control over work for workers in five categories: managers, independent professionals, civil servants, the unionized and lone workers of low skill (see Miller and Form 1951:394–403; [End Page 13] Form and Miller 1960:401–5; Miller and Form 1964:760–2). Managers control their own activities. Professionals (e.g., physicians and lawyers) control entry into their own arenas. The civil service is controlled bureaucratically. Union-management bargaining represents contested control, and individuals bargain as best they can in the free labor market (Form and Huber 1977).
At about that time, economists like Robert Averitt, Gary Becker, Barry Bluestone, Ester Boserup and John Dunlop were broadening their discipline to include the societal setting of firms. In 1971, I benefited from a joint appointment between the Department of Sociology and the Institute of Labor and Industrial Relations at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. In daily contact with labor economists like Lawrence Kahn, Francine Blau, Koji Taira, Melvin Rothbaum and Milton Derber, I found that much could be gained by interdisciplinary dialogue. Sociologists could contribute knowledge about societal factors that influence economic organizations such as the intergenerational accumulation of educational advantage, the strength of weak ties in the labor market, ancestral linkages of elites and occupational ethnic and religious homology. These advantages were conceptualized as social capital, a supplement of human capital.
When Robert Bibb, a Ph. D. candidate at Illinois, took an interest in the study of blue-collar women workers, he was exposed to my typology of labor markets. Although the categories had been derived from observations of specific firms, in our work together Bibb and I analyzed labor markets at the societal level. To be sure, some criteria were the same: level of education, amount of work experience, presence of a labor union and specific occupation. However, labor economists such as Becker (1971) had introduced other factors such as employment sector (core or periphery) in which the firm is embedded, number of employees and size of community in which the firm is located.
Thus, Bibb and Form (1977) launched a research program that produced 12 articles that were incorporated along with other materials into two monographs on the stratification of working-class markets (Form 1985...