THE WEAK SUFFER WHAT THEY MUST:
A Natural Experiment in Thought and Structure
E. Paul Durrenberger
Suzan Erem
Penn State University
SEIU Local 73
University Park, PA
Chicago, IL
American Anthropologist
1999
Vol 101 (4):783-793
Experiment - 2
THE WEAK SUFFER WHAT THEY MUST:
A Natural Experiment in Thought and Structure
Abstract
Because of a change at a hospital we are able to contrast two different structures of
leadership in a union worksite. Since we had tested a cognitive construct we call union
consciousness before the change, the difference in structure provides a natural experiment to
determine the consequences of structural change for cognition. We repeated the test after the
change and found a different cognitive structure. We conclude that cognitive structures are not
enduring configurations but that they change as structures change. This leads to the further
conclusion that external structures are powerful determinants of patterns of thought.
Key words: Experiment, cognition, structure, organized labor, unions, healthcare, culture,
theory
Experiment - 3
THE WEAK SUFFER WHAT THEY MUST:
A Natural Experiment in Thought and Structure
Introduction
For some the experiment is the defining feature of scientific research. An investigator
deduces from theoretical conjecture and empirical findings that an independent variable is
causally related to a dependent variable, determines procedures and practices by which to create a
situation that tests the assertion, does the test, and assesses the results. Then philosophers take
over and debate whether the finding confirms or merely fails to disconfirm the hypothesis while
scientists integrate the result into the empirical findings and theoretical speculations of the field
(Kuhn 1970; Kuznar 1997).
This is more or less the 19th century archetype of the practice of physics, which many
take to be the ideal for scientific inquiry. Other sciences, among them, anthropology, developed
techniques of observing and recording phenomena not readily amenable to experimental
manipulation. However once in a while a natural experiment presents itself while we are
observing and recording.
In the process of a study of a union local in Chicago (Durrenberger and Erem 1997a,b;
Erem and Durrenberger 1997), we had a chance to benefit from such a natural experiment.
Workers at a jobsite who are organized into a bargaining unit of a union local elect co-workers to
enforce the provisions of the contract, convey worker concerns to management, help bargain new
contracts, resolve worksite problems, and if they cannot be easily resolved by talking with
supervisors, to represent the worker at a second step grievance hearing with the supervisor. If
this fails to untangle the difficulty, the steward may call a union representative who the local
hires to represent members at a number of worksites. The union rep, as they are called, can
represent the member at a third step hearing with the department manager and the company's
vice-president of human resources. If the grievance is not resolved at the third step hearing, and
if both sides agree, it can be submitted to the judgment of an arbitrator whose decision is binding.
Experiment - 4
Thus law and practice have established a set of roles for dealing with workplace problems
through union mechanisms. Union members do not establish the roles of steward, rep,
supervisor, manager, co-worker, but conduct their work lives in terms of them and construct
various representations of these categories. Malinowski (1922) differentiated between internal
views of the people he was trying to understand as “ethnographic” in distinction to external
constructions which he called “sociological.” Marvin Harris’s (1999) distinction between the
emic and the etic captures another difference that Sandstrom and Sandstrom (1995) discuss at
some length. The people we are trying to understand build emic statements from discriminations
they make. Such statements are wrong if they contradict participants’ sense of similarity,
difference, significance, meaningfulness or appropriateness. Etic statements depend on
distinctions upon which a scientific community agree. They are wrong if empirical evidence fails
to support them (Harris 1999). In this example, the law and practice determine the external, or
“sociological” perspective on union-management relations and we can ascertain internal or emic
views as Malinowski did, by ethnography, though neither is in Harris’s terms etic.
Figure 1 represents the externally defined categories irrespective of union members
constructions, experiences, views, or opinions. Members, stewards, and reps are the “union
side” as versus supervisors and managers on the “company” side. Stewards are on the same level
of management as supervisors while reps are equal to managers and vice presidents. Because
union members develop their own conceptual schemes or folk models (Durrenberger 1996)
concerning these relationships, as part of our larger study of the local, I wanted to determine to
what extent members agreed with this external view, with each other and with members at other
worksites.
/Figure 1 here/
One important dimension of culture is the shared aspects of mental pictures people create
of related sets of words. People’s judgments of similarities among an organized set of words or a
semantic domain is an ethnographic means to construct individual mental pictures and measure
their similarities to others’ (Romney et al 1996). As Romney and Moore (1998: 315) put it, “the
Experiment - 5
meaning of each term is defined by its location relative to all the other terms.” This requires
some way to measure peoples’ ideas of similarity among the items of an organized set of words.
A triads test does this by asking informants to indicate which of three items is least like the other
two for all possible combinations of three items in the set of words. In selecting one item as least
similar, informants indicate that the remaining two are somehow similar.
I arranged the terms “steward,” “rep,” “manager,” “supervisor,” “worker in the same
department (or line),” and “worker in a different department (or line)” in all possible
combinations of three on a page and asked each respondent to indicate the item in each line that
was most different from the other two. Weller and Romney (1988) and Bernard (1988) discuss
this procedure and its history in anthropology. For more recent discussions of the triads
multidimensional scaling representations, and further citations to the methodological and
substantive literature on the topics see Romney et al 1996; Romney, Moore, and Rush 1996; and
Romney and Moore 1998.
If union members consistently used only single criteria to judge similarity, there would be
three “pure” models or different mental pictures based on three different criteria. As an
example, consider the triad: "supervisor, co-worker, union rep.” If a person selected “supervisor”
as the most different, indicating similarity between workers and reps, it would imply a "union
model." They are distinguishing in terms of union versus non-union affiliation. The choice of
"coworker" would indicate a conceptual scheme based on hierarchy as "co-workers" are less
powerful than supervisors and reps. Picking "rep" would indicate a workplace proximity
scheme as that is the feature that supervisors and co-workers share.
Tabulation of responses in a matrix of all possible relationships among items determines
the similarity, “closeness,” or proximity of any two items. Every time a respondent does not
select two items in single row of 3, every time a respondent selects the other item, the cell for the
unselected pair in the matrix increases one point for similarity. Each row of each respondent’s
responses thus adds one point to some pair. In this design, since all pairs occur 4 times, the
maximum score for any pair is 4, indicating the greatest degree of similarity between the two
Experiment - 6
items. The summation of individual matrices into an aggregate matrix shows the strength of
similarity for the population. Then the counts are converted into percentages to develop a
measure of proximity from 0 to 1.
It is not meaningful simply to sum responses unless there is some reason to suppose that
the picture is somehow cultural, a representation that people of the group share (Romney 1999).
As an example, consider the external legal model. If there were perfect consensus, all
respondents would agree and always select the item that indicates that they are thinking in terms
of union relationships. They would select “manager” or “supervisor” as most different whenever
they occur in triads with “steward,” “rep” and/or “co-worker.” Thus, manager-supervisor would
score 100% and supervisor-steward, supervisor-rep, supervisor-same or different line worker
would score 0. Likewise for Manager in all of these pairs. Steward-rep would be 100% and
different line worker-same line worker would be 100%. Worker-steward and worker-rep cells
would be 50% or .5 because in those 2 (of 4) triads where workers, stewards, and reps all occur,
union membership does not distinguish among the items, but either workplace proximity or
hierarchy does. Thus the highest score could be .5 in the steward-worker cells and the repworker cells. Table 1 shows this similarity matrix.
/Table 1 here/
I used Anthropac (Borgatti 1996a) to make and score the triads tests. I then used
Anthropac to test the individual proximity matrices for consensus. The aggregate matrices for
each worksite indicate the strength of similarity between each pair of items. I used these
aggregate proximity matrices in two further ways. First, I correlated them to one another to
determine the similarity between any two groups (see table 2). For this, I eliminated the
relationships which were universally deemed to be similar--manager-supervisor, worker-worker,
and steward-rep--roughly, management with itself; members with themselves, and union officers
with themselves. Eliminating these reduces the correlations from the full matrix of relationships
and highlights differences rather than similarities that are artifacts of the instrument. Groups
with highly correlated matrices share ideas about the similarity of roles while those that are not
Experiment - 7
correlated do not. Some of the correlations are negative. I can offer no interpretation for these
except that they indicate difference. Second, I used Anthropac’s multi dimensional scaling
program to develop a visual representation of the “distances” among the items. Those items that
are similar cluster together; those that are not are dispersed in the diagram thus allowing a visual
representation of similarities and differences that the aggregate proximity matrices measure.
Table 2 shows the correlations among the “perfect model” and the union local’s staff (n=18), a
public hospital (n=9), a group of industrial workers (n=11), and Rehabilitation Hospital members
in 1996 (n=6) and 1998 (n=25). To further test the reliability of this method, I administered the
triads test to the staff of a different local in the same international union in Chicago (n=25) and
Table 2 shows that their similarity matrix is highly correlated to the one for the staff of the local
in question as well as the “perfect” model. Because this shows a high degree of awareness of
union-non union distinctions as opposed to alternative ways of organizing the same relationships
(hierarchy or workplace) I suggested that this model indicates “union consciousness,” the emic
use of union-non-union distinctions for ordering terms for the relevant workplace relationships.
/Table 2 here/
Having a way of characterizing the mental picture, internal scheme, or folk model of
union-management relations at different worksites not only allowed me to compare these
constructs at different places, but also allowed me to develop hypotheses about how the internal
models are related to other variables such level of activism in the union. I expected that more
activist stewards would have a model of social relations more similar to the staff or the “outside”
or “prefect” union model—to be more conscious of the union as an organizing principle and
show it in their triads tests. A similar triads test administered to the stewards of the local
gathered at their annual convention in 1996 indicated that there was no relationship between
union activism and union consciousness--whether or not stewards thought in terms of the
“perfect model,” one of the alternatives (hierarchy or workplace) or some mixture of the three
(Durrenberger 1997).
Experiment - 8
There was a relationship between union consciousness and the place of the union in the
organization of worksites—a dimension of structure rather than thought or cognition. The
aggregate similarity matrix for the triads tests of the union local’s staff was very close to the
external model. I therefore used this as the measure of union consciousness. To the extent that a
group of members showed a similar cognitive pattern, I concluded that they exhibited union
consciousness. Members at only two worksites exhibit union consciousness. One was a public
hospital (Pearsons r=.89) where for various reasons the union is very strong and significant
(Durrenberger 1997). The other was Rehabilitation Hospital (r=.64). I concluded that this was
because of the small size of the membership and the strength of the chief steward who had been
in office for several decades and cultivated a vast network of relationships of mutual obligation
not only among members but with management. Furthermore, just before I administered the first
triads tests, there had been a union victory which all of the members had celebrated. I argued
that without time depth it was not possible to know whether such cognitive configurations were
stable through time or whether they respond to such episodes as a victory or a defeat for the
union at a site (Durrenberger 1997). As the multi-dimension scaling diagram in Figures 2 and 3
show, the one difference between Rehabilitation Hospital (Figure 2) and the public hospital
(Figure 3) was that the members at Rehabilitation Hospital departed from the “union model” to
place their steward hierarchically above rather than below the rep so their steward was on a par
with the manager and the rep with the supervisor. Another, which represents the relative power
of the union in the two work places is the placement of the public hospital’s stewards and rep at a
higher level in the hierarchy than supervisors or managers (Durrenberger 1997). The reversal of
the steward/rep relationship at Rehabilitation Hospital was an accurate reflection of the chief
steward's long association and developed networks with the management of the hospital. At the
worksite, she in fact had more power than the rep, though the rep could reinforce it by putting the
authority of the local behind her.
/Figures 2 & 3 here/
Experiment - 9
Other hospitals had neither the extensive union structure of the public one nor the history
of recent victories or intricate networks of relations that connected the leadership of the unit of
Rehabilitation Hospital. I concluded (Durrenberger 1997) that union consciousness seemed to be
related to features of structure—realities of power and organization--and perhaps history or
recent events.
That's usually where the story stops. We observe and deduce patterns. If we are
quantitative in our tastes, if we want to show the patterns and make them accessible to others to
observe and test, we translate some of these into measures. If we are empirically oriented, we
test hypotheses about the relationships among variables we can measure and base other
speculations on theoretical assertions and empirical findings of the past. The association of the
cognitive pattern with the structure seems plausible for want of any convincing measure of
structure that would be more than a poor proxy. But we could argue, I suppose, that the cultures
of worksites are sufficiently different to cause different structures. Just because it doesn't seem
plausible to me doesn't mean that it mightn't to someone else.
However, when the chief steward at Rehabilitation Hospital retired just before the unit
negotiated a new contract, Suzan and I were presented with the possibility of at least a quasiexperimental design. We had the triads tests from 1996, and now in 1998 we could administer
them again, after a significant structural change, to detect whether the patterns of thought had
changed with the change of structure. While this was a change of personnel within the existing
collective bargaining arrangements, though the union structure remained in tact with stewards
and reps and law, there were changes of relations of power in the changing networks of the
workplace. As this steward withdrew from the workplace, her well developed relationships of
mutual obligation with management and workers alike disappeared. This shift brought together
what Alford (1998) calls multivariate, historical, and ethnographic approaches to bear on a single
theoretical question which is at the same time a practical issue—the relationship between
consciousness or patterns of thought and changing realities of power and organization—
structure--at a single worksite.
Experiment - 10
Theoretical backgrounds
From advertising to education there are modern institutional structures dedicated to the
proposition that the way to change people's actions is to change their minds, a proposal that rests
on the assumption that thought determines action. When Jean Lave (1988), attempting to
understand how people learn and use that most cerebral of cognitive skills--mathematics-challenged transference theory, the notion that we can isolate abstract properties of systems and
communicate them to others via symbols, she advocated expanding our understanding of
cognition from something that happens in the mind to a process that stretches over the
environment as well as time into past experiences and future expectations. In doing so she
offered a new definition to a movement Ortner (1984) detected in the attempts to synthesize and
sort out anthropological theorizing since the 1960's, a trend she tentatively called practice theory.
Some who called themselves cognitive anthropologists, before boring themselves to
death, as Keesing (1972) quipped in a pre-mature death knell (Durrenberger 1982), described
well structured patterns of thought they understood by talking to people. In a precursor of the
now fashionable "linguistic turn" (Pálsson 1995) some (Black 1969) even argued that because
cultures were things of the mind embodied in language anthropologists had only to talk to people
to understand their cultures.
Other cognitive anthropologists questioned the salience of such language centered
patterns. Van Esterik (1978) showed that there were no static taxonomies of spirit-ghosts in
Thailand and concludes that, “the process of creating guardian spirits is continuous . . . . ” (Van
Esterik 1978:405). Durrenberger and Morrison (1978) expanded on that finding. Challenging
language-centered analyses, Gatewood (1985) discussed the complex patterns of cultures that are
not encoded linguistically, not available for labeling, and not accessible to language or languagecentered investigative techniques. People learn some things not by hearing about them but by
doing them. Actions, he said in his title, speak louder than words. A decade later Pálsson
(1994), reflecting on similarly nautical experiences, reached a similar conclusion.
Experiment - 11
Few today would argue that any structures--cognitive, political, economic--endure. We
have seen too much change in patterns of economic, political, and cultural relations for the
premise of systems in equilibrium, even dynamic to be persuasive (Wang 1997). The riddle
repeats an earlier one--what are the directions of causality? From thought to action as
structuralists and cognitivists would have it? Or from structures of power and other relationships
to thought as materialists would have it?
One solution is the extreme postmodernist one, which argues that structures of meaning
are not anchored in the outside world (Layton 1997:186). Another might be to affirm that
everything affects everything else and we cannot sort it all out because it's too complex. At best
we can provide an appreciation for the complexity by some attempt to recapitulate it in another
mode. Replication of reality needs no mediation--only experience, not reflection, analysis, or
depiction. This is counter to the principles of both art and science which highlight some
dimensions and underplay others to organize and filter reality rather than replicate it. While it
may be true that everything is related, we do not see hurricane forecasters watching butterflies to
detect how the beat of their individual wings will impact el nino.
Here we return to a practical issue and the work of Jean Lave. If patterns of thought are
situational, determined by changing social structures, then it is not effective to try to change
social patterns by changing minds. Education, in the sense of transference of patterns, is not the
answer. The only contradiction here is that we are trying to change your mind by just that means!
On the other hand, we are content with the understanding that while we will change no one's
mind, we may add to the empirical findings of anthropology an example that will be of use to
others of similar empirical bent.
For some, these questions are of more than theoretical or academic interest. Suzan Erem
is the union representative assigned to Rehabilitation Hospital. Here, she takes up the story to
tell what happened. We see her formulating and testing various hypotheses and attending to the
outcomes because it was those outcomes that were important in trying to bring about the changes
she desired.
Experiment - 12
The story
When Della retired from Rehabilitation Hospital Rehab after 30 years as chief steward I
knew the union would never be the same. She warned me she was retiring, but it took a year or
more for her to finally leave, so after awhile her complaints of the pain in her wrists from dishing
out food for 3 decades didn’t register with me as poignantly and I thought she’d stay at least as
long as I would.
But finally Della announced the date she would leave. She assured me that the gangly
young jokester who’d just “become union” a year before would make a good steward. Bernard
adored Della, that was clear, but so did everyone else. She was the center of the hospital, like a
grandmother is the center of a huge family, so it was hard to believe this tall, thin, fun-loving but
inattentive character could ever fill her shoes. I knew Della’s judgment was sound, so I trusted
she’d teach him everything he needed to know.
A year earlier, the other veteran steward, Marie, from housekeeping, retired. Her
retirement wasn’t as noticeable because Della was the true matron, but it left an entire
department without a steward. Between Marie’s retirement and Della’s was Monica’s promotion.
Monica was the young, articulate and fastidious steward from the nursing department. About 3
months after running a successful union protest against the hospital she was promoted out of the
union into a management position as a scheduler—a position that, because it is considered
management, is by law not in the bargaining unit. Within a year she had a baby. When she tried
to return to work Rehabilitation Hospital “couldn’t find” a position for her. Around the hospital
the workers would say they knew Rehabilitation Hospital did her wrong after the way she helped
run that boycott last year, but it was her fault for getting out of the union.
So Della was the last and most effective steward to leave the shop, and that left me with a
vacuum. Bernard took over the kitchen, and at a membership meeting a quiet man named Greg
volunteered to take on housekeeping. No stewards came forward from nursing. Greg and Bernard
spent a Saturday morning to come to a stewards’ training I held at the union office for healthcare
Experiment - 13
workers. They gave up a another Saturday to attended the 1997 annual stewards' conference as
well. (Well, Bernard tried to attend, but after he picked up Della in a snowstorm his car broke
down on the expressway. They were both stranded for hours.) Greg called at least once a week to
update me on problems, but often indicated he “had it under control.” Bernard, younger and
cockier, and that much less secure, never called. When I’d hear problems from other members,
I’d ask him about them, but he always assured me “he had taken care of it.”
More than a year passed before I realized something serious was going wrong at the
hospital. Just before Della left, the hospital approached the union to eliminate two jobs from the
bargaining unit. The hospital was eliminating 31 positions, and was careful not to target the
union. Instead of taking the layoff, the members voted--with Della’s leadership--to take a cut to 7
hours of work per day. We signed an agreement to that effect, which also indicated that when the
patient count reached an average of 77 for 90 days, everyone would go back up to the full 8
hours. We were confident the count would go up soon with the opening of the new addition to
the hospital scheduled for the spring of 1998.
Della retired, and 6 months later Rehabilitation Hospital opened its new wing, doubling
the size of the hospital. Everyone expected their hours to go up, but instead, the hospital hired
more workers, and kept their hours at 7 as well! The members were enraged, and so was I. I
made furious phone calls to management, asking what right they had to do such a thing, but they
said they’d told us they were going to do it. I had no memory of such discussion, and neither did
Della, whom I called at home. It made no sense for me to ever agree to such a thing, since taking
the layoff would have resulted in our people coming back to work if we’d thought they were
going to hire new staff any time soon.
Meanwhile we had just wrapped up 6 months of bargaining for a new contract before the
regular expiration of the previous one. These two stewards and some observing members sat
through it all, no matter how late it ran, whether or not it was scheduled for an off day. I knew I
couldn’t afford any internal problems during bargaining, so no matter what I suspected, I kept
those two stewards until we were done and the contract was signed.
Experiment - 14
But every time I went to the hospital, members approached me with the same question:
“when are we gonna get our hours back?” I’d update them on the latest phone call but it did no
good. I thought they were angry with management for what it had done, but within a few months
I began to get a sense it wasn’t management who was getting the brunt of it.
To test my theory, I told the stewards we needed to run a petition against management on
its decision to hire more workers instead of increasing the hours for the people already working
there to back to eight. I even typed up a petition and gave them copies. Then I gave them a week
to get everyone to sign it. A week later, the petition was no where to be found. I asked the
stewards, and they said they passed it to so-and-so who never got it back to them. I asked
members, and they said they heard about it but never saw it.
Now I knew we were in trouble, but the stewards needed to know that I knew before I
could approach them with the problem. I gave them another assignment: take a group of
employees with you and meet with the human resources department over the issue. As I
expected, the stewards couldn’t get a single person to go with them. This was the hottest topic of
the year, and not a single person was willing to follow the union steward on it. Finally I started
asking the most honest questions, and getting some answers. “They say the union is weak,” said
one person. “The union gave our hours away and can’t get them back.”
I realized I had a serious leadership crisis. More often than not, members started coming
up to me with their grievances about a nasty boss, or denied vacation. I received phone calls from
members I’d never heard from asking if management had the right to do this or that. I’d refer
them to the stewards, but they’d say the steward didn’t know. Worse, they’d go away without
talking to the steward, and without telling me, unsatisfied and believing the union was weak and
ineffective to help with their workplace problems.
In February, 1998 after negotiating a new contract, we held the contract ratification
meeting where I described what we’d negotiated, and distributed the same triads test Paul had
done more than a year before, when Della was still there. Members voted, then filled out the
Experiment - 15
triads tests, and then received their contracts. The contract was ratified. With bargaining behind
me, I could focus on the internal problems more carefully.
I sat down with the two stewards. I said, “this isn’t fair to you and it’s bad for the union.
These folks won’t follow you and you’re beating your heads against the wall.” Both men nodded
enthusiastically at that assessment. I agreed to hold steward elections, define the job of steward
and reinforce that once members vote for a steward they have to trust and follow that person.
The word went out through the kitchen that Bernard was up for election, and the older
workers looked concerned. “Why?” they asked me. “Because you’re not following him, and the
union can’t afford that. If you’re going to follow him, then re-elect him, if not, then vote for
somebody else. But we’ve got fights to fight, and we can’t be screwing around.” By the end of
that week, Bernard called me and announced that he’d taken 6 workers from the kitchen with him
to the human resources department and demanded to meet with the director. They’d met for
almost a half hour. I congratulated him loudly. Later that day I received a phone call from
management requesting that only one person meet with them. I knew we’d made a point. The
next week, the members re-elected him steward.
Housekeeping didn’t turn out the same way. I asked members what they thought good
qualities in a steward were. They listed them: “they ought to speak up for people. They ought to
study up on the laws and the contract. They ought to never be cutting their own deals, but looking
out for everybody.” So I re-listed them - “so they should defend their co-workers, go to trainings,
and lead.” They agreed. Then I reminded the members that if the steward holds up his end of the
deal, they have to hold up theirs and follow. They agreed. Then they voted in a new steward, and
I had to start over again with training.
Members in the nursing department also held a spirited meeting and steward election and
voted in two stewards. Finally, the union was back on the upswing, but months of deterioration
were going to weigh heavily on morale. The key was to win back the full-time hours. That would
be the first real test.
Experiment - 16
Triads revisited
The same triads test administered just after the ratification of the new contract shows a
cognitive pattern quite different from the first one more than a year before (r=-.41) (see Table 1).
Whereas the first pattern was similar to the staff pattern (r=.64), the second is not (r=-.47).
This could be because different people responded to the two tests, but the proportions of
people in different departments are about the same, and at least some of the same individuals
responded to both. In this unit, unlike some others, there are no factions, so differential
representation of factional views could not be a factor.
The multi-dimensional scaling representations of the two schema in Figures 2 and 4
shows there is a shift away from a model based on union membership and hierarchy to one based
on workplace proximity and hierarchy. In the first, 1996, model (Figure 2), reps and stewards are
higher than supervisors and managers; the second , 1998 (Figure 4), reverses this hierarchy; the
superiority of the steward to the rep in the first model is reversed in the second. This suggests
that members at Rehabilitation Hospital were no longer seeing themselves primarily as union
members, but as workers for the management of Rehabilitation Hospital. They no longer held
union officers to be more powerful than management but management more powerful than union
officers.
/Figure 4 here/
The triads test was administered at the same time as an overwhelmingly positive vote to
ratify the contract, tantamount to a survey of satisfaction with the new contract. The ratification
vote was strong, so the shift in the triads cannot indicate alienation because of the new contract.
The shift must be related to what appeared to Suzan to be a leadership crisis, the change in the
structure of the unit occasioned by the withdrawal of all of the experienced stewards and the
chief steward and the disappearance of those networks of relationships from the unit. The
cognitive models reflected the changing realities of power and organization—structure--in the
worksite. The fact that the cognitive model changes to mark reorganization of the structure leads
to the conclusion that structure causes cognition, not the other way around.
Experiment - 17
Details
Here we report in more depth the statistics of this exercise. Those who find such material
boring will perhaps forgive the exercise and skip to the next more qualitative section on
structure, agency, and class so that our colleagues with a more developed senses of
methodological aesthetics will not be neglected.
A comparison of the proximity matrices of different worksites shows just how they differ.
Table 3 shows the proximity matrix for a group of industrial workers. Table 4 shows the
proximity matrix for the public hospital which was considered a model of strong organization.
Table 5 shows the proximity matrix for the staff. The “perfect” model and staff model show a 0
or near 0 similarity between union reps and stewards on the one hand and supervisors and
managers on the other while the industrial model shows a stronger similarity. The “perfect” and
staff model show a near 0 similarity of members with supervisors and managers but the industrial
model shows significantly stronger relations. The “perfect” and staff models show a similarity of
about .5 for stewards and reps on the one hand and members on the other. The industrial model
shows a much weaker similarity. All together these 12 relationships indicate that industrial
members see themselves as closer to management and farther from union officers than the “union
model” would. The multi dimensional representation of these relationships shows the contrast
among industrial members and staff as figures 5 and 6 indicate. These representations suggest
that while staff see a clear demarcation between union and management and a hierarchy much
like the outside model, the industrial members see management and union officers as being
equally different from and more powerful than members.
/Tables 3, 4, and 5 here/
/Figures 5 and 6 here/
The contrast between Rehabilitation Hospital in 1996 (Figure 2) and 1998 (Figure 4)
shows the structural change that Suzan’s story illustrates. In the corresponding 1996 and 1998
proximity matrices illustrated in tables 6 and 7 show the contrast as members see stewards and
reps as closer to managers and supervisors in 1998 than in 1996, see themselves as closer to
Experiment - 18
managers but a somewhat less close to supervisors, and see themselves as less similar to reps and
stewards. In these respects, the 1998 proximity matrix for Rehabilitation Hospital resembles the
industrial one.
/Tables 6 and 7 here/
To what extent do these figures and tables represent shared patterns of thought? This has
been an issue since Wallace raised it (1961). Romney, Weller, and Batchelder (1988) outline the
theory and mathematics for computing respondents’ consensus on cultural domains, and Borgatti
(1996a,b) includes it in Anthropac. Here, the purpose of using consensus analysis is only to
assess the agreement among respondents. The procedure computes a factor analysis of the
chance-adjusted measures of agreement among respondents. If the first factor is less than three
times as great as the second, there is no consensus. Table 8 shows the ratio of the first to the
second factor for each group and the number of respondents. It is clear that there is sufficient
consensus at each site to consider the proximity matrices cultural constructs.
/Table 8 here/
Given that there is consensus among respondents, to what extent are the samples of
respondents representative of the whole group? My sampling techniques were neither very
consistent nor very pure. The exigencies of shifts, transportation across a wide area, dubious
quality of membership lists—the only available sampling frame--and other factors made the
random sampling that I desired and attempted hopelessly quixotic. To do the work, I had to rely
on other techniques, chiefly opportunistic sampling. Some of the samples represent almost the
entire population, and for those sampling is not problematic. Virtually the entire staff of the local
responded, so that is not an issue. Almost all of the non-support staff of the second local
responded, and that included virtually all of the reps. Rehabilitation Hospital has about 60
members (64 in 1996, but the number varies as Suzan’s narrative in this paper indicates); the first
sample of 6 is thus about 10%; the second is nearly half, 42% and represents all departments as
does the first sample. While these are neither random nor stratified samples, they are fairly
representative of the membership. The industrial sample is from a random sample list of four
Experiment - 19
industrial sites I drew from the membership list. This represents about 1% of the total industrial
membership of the local. The public hospital sample partially from a random sample list I drew
from the membership list and partially an opportunistic sample of its 674 service employees and
79 technicians (753 total), about a 1% sample. I think the samples of the staffs and
Rehabilitation Hospital members are representative; there may be some doubt about the
industrial and public hospital samples, but here the sampling was more purely random.
Structure, agency, and class
Alford (1998) points out the problems of the multivariate approach in understanding
historical phenomena--dependent variables may become independent variables as systems of
relationships change over time. In highly stratified social orders defined by differential access to
productive resources (Fried 1967), agency and structure may have different positions in different
classes because access to resources, hence class position, rests on differential power, a structural
dimension given by position in the social order. Among the working class in the United States
there seems to be dual awareness of both structure and agency whereas middle class persons
think more in terms of agency than structure. This suggests that the concern anthropologists have
with the topic of agency may be a projection of our own class-based folk models onto the rest of
the world (Durrenberger and Erem 1997b). Working class awareness of structures is less a
cultural convention than a recognition of the reality of powerlessness (Newman 1988, 1993;
Hunt 1996; Hackenberg 1995; Griffith 1995; Rubin 1992).
The relationship has never been stated more clearly than in the words Thucydides put into
the mouths of the Athenian delegation to Melos in the sixteenth year of the Peloponnesian War:
“. . . you know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals
in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must” (Crawley nd:
359). They went on to make the nomothetic observation, “Of the gods we believe, and of men
we know, that by a necessary law of their nature they rule wherever they can,” elaborating that
the did not make this law, but found it “and shall leave it to exist for ever after us. . . .” (Crawley
Experiment - 20
nd: 361-362). The democratic Anthenians then besieged the place and finally, after the Melians
surrendered, killed all of the men and sold the women and children into slavery (Crawley
nd:365). The Athenians’ observations are as valid for modern social orders as for ancient ones.
The chief goal of the union movement in industrial social orders is to redress the
structural imbalance and give some sense of agency to those who provide labor but do not
necessarily control the conditions for its use. It does this by attempting to develop collective
power based on other structural principals than wealth. The intentions of the powerful are more
consequential than those of the un-powerful. Thus by the actions of the powerful do their
intentions become structures that shape the cognition of the powerless. Cognition and agency
may determine structure for some classes while for others structure may determine cognition; the
causal arrows may be functions of class position or power rather than being constant across the
whole social order. Thus even the question of causal relations between structure and cognition is
not a constant but varies by class. This is one theoretically important reason that anthropologists
should not perpetuate the American folk model of the classless society but explore the structural,
cultural, and practical dimensions and consequences of stratification in our own society (see the
works in Forman 1995) and other social orders ancient and modern.
Conclusion
We have offered an analysis of some triads tests and a story. The story explains the results of the
tests—it explains the ethnographic data. When people saw union stewards as powerful and effective,
they stressed union membership and the power of union officers compared with management personnel—
they were conscious of their union as efficacious. A little over a year later, following the loss of all the
seasoned stewards and their networks of mutual obligation with management, a source of power and
influence, after a series of ineffective interventions to meet management imprecations, the same triads
test shows that workers see themselves closer to a more powerful management. The triads tests provide
the ethnographic data upon which we can base statements about the relationships between patterns of
thought and relationships of power and organization—what we call structure. While culture is more than
Experiment - 21
the dimensions of contrast among sets of words as critiques of language-centered approaches have
shown, such semantic domains are important dimensions of culture. Furthermore, they are quantifiable
aspects of culture that are amenable to empirical ethnography so we can ask just how similar two
cognitive schemes are or how similar two items are within a single scheme. We hope that this exercise
can contribute to the accumulation of “the will, the skill, and the modesty required to bring our ideas into
the ‘empirical arena’” where assertions can be tested (Romney, 1999:113).
We hope we have suggested that the world is more complex than the unqualified conclusion that
structure causes cognition would indicate. Not only is the causality between ideas and action complex
and two-way, dialectic as Lave put it, but the class structures of complex social orders mean that the
cognition and action of members of different classes are differently related and differentially efficacous.
We hope that this story and this analysis will contribute to an increased effort to understand the
complexities of hierarchy and class.
Epilogue
Here Suzan takes up the story again.
By the middle of the summer of 1998 we had everyone back up to 8 hours at
Rehabilitation Hospital and I had held meetings to train managers and supervisors to work with
the stewards as they are required to by law. I'd trained stewards on how to be treated as equals by
management) when they were used to being treated as subordinates--mutually agreed upon
meetings (rather than just meeting when management demanded a meeting at a time and place
management dictated), how to command meetings (rather than be a passive audience), how to
show solidarity when they needed to (rather than each person only looking out for him or
herself). With high turnover among management, new stewards and the law behind me, I have
some power to create new structures. If management elects not to participate, they know I can file
Experiment - 22
charges against them with the Labor Board and cause them more trouble than they want. More
importantly, the members are regaining a sense of ownership in the union and of their own ability
to affect what happens at their job as they become more organized and see the consequences of
their concerted activity.
Experiment - 23
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Experiment - 25
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Experiment - 26
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Experiment - 29
SUPERVISOR MANAGER STEWARD
UNION REP DIF. LINE
MANAGER
1.0
STEWARD
0.0
0.0
UNION REP
0.0
0.0
DIF. LINE
0.0
0.0
0.5
0.5
SAME LINE
0.0
0.0
0.5
0.5
1.0
TABLE 1
PERFECT UNION MODEL
1.0
Experiment - 30
SCH98
SCH96
STAFF
INDUST
PUBLIC
STAFF2
SCH96
-.41
STAFF
-.47
.64
INDUST
-.18
-.16
.29
PUBLIC
-.32
.68
.89
.14
STAFF2
-.39
.64
.98
.17
.88
TABLE 2
CORRELATIONS AMONG PROXIMITY MATRICES
PURE
-.39
.67
.96
.21
.88
.96
Experiment - 31
SUPERVISOR MANAGER STEWARD
UNION REP DIF. LINE
MANAGER
.73
STEWARD
.23
.18
UNION REP
.09
.25
.89
DIF. LINE
.16
.25
.18
.27
SAME LINE
.25
.20
.27
.18
TABLE 3
INDUSTRIAL MEMBERS
.82
Experiment - 32
SUPERVISOR MANAGER STEWARD
UNION REP DIF. LINE
MANAGER
.93
STEWARD
.10
.08
UNION REP
.18
.25
.88
DIF. LINE
.10
.08
.35
.28
SAME LINE
.05
.08
.48
.30
TABLE 4
PUBLIC HOSPITAL MEMBERS
.90
Experiment - 33
SUPERVISOR MANAGER STEWARD
UNION REP DIF. LINE
MANAGER
.83
STEWARD
.04
.06
UNION REP
.00
.07
.68
DIF. LINE
.04
.06
.64
.49
SAME LINE
.08
.03
.73
.44
TABLE 5
STAFF
.94
Experiment - 34
SUPERVISOR MANAGER STEWARD
UNION REP DIF. LINE
MANAGER
.81
STEWARD
.13
.06
UNION REP
.10
.07
.60
DIF. LINE
.28
.22
.31
.17
SAME LINE
.31
.26
.26
.26
TABLE 6
REHABILITATION HOSPITAL 1996
.88
Experiment - 35
SUPERVISOR MANAGER STEWARD
UNION REP DIF. LINE
MANAGER
.86
STEWARD
.32
.22
UNION REP
.28
.23
.70
DIF. LINE
.17
.19
.19
.22
SAME LINE
.21
.28
.18
.22
TABLE 7
REHABILITATION HOSPITAL 1998
.84
Experiment - 36
SITE
N
RATIO
REHAB96
6
4.5
REHAB98
25
4.0
STAFF
18
5.8
STAFF2
25
5.2
PUBLIC
9
10.6
11
11.2
IUDUSTRIAL
TABLE 8
SITES, NUMBERS OF RESPONDANTS, AND RATIO OF FIRST AND
SECOND FACTORS IN CONSENSUS ANALYSIS
Experiment - 37
WORKER
STEWARD
SUPERVISOR
MANAGER
REP
HUMAN RELATIONS DIRECTOR
VP FOR HUMAN RELATIONS
FIGURE 1
OUTSIDE SCHEME
Experiment - 38
DLWORKER
SLWORKER
SUPERVISOR
MANAGER
REP
STEWARD
FIGURE 2
REHABILITATION HOSPITAL 1996
Experiment - 39
DL WORKER
SUPERVISOR
MANAGER
SL WORK
STEWARD
UNION REP
FIGURE 3
PUBLIC HOSPITAL
Experiment - 40
DLWORKER
SLWORKER
STEWARD
REP
MANAGER
SUPERVISOR
FIGURE 4
REHABILITATION HOSPITAL 1998
Experiment - 41
REP/STEWARDS
MAN/SUPER
WORKERS
FIGURE 5
INDUSTRIAL MEMBERS
Experiment - 42
WORKERS
SUPERVISOR
STEWARD
MANAGER
REP
FIGURE 6
STAFF
Experiment - 43
. We thank Tom Balanoff, President of Service Employees International Union Local 73 and
Doug Hart, President of SEIU Local 1, both of Chicago, for their support during various phases
of this project. We also thank the staff, officers, and members of these two locals for their
assistance. We thank Robert W. Sussman, editor of the American Anthropologist for his
editorial suggestions and the four anonymous readers whose reviews helped us improve the
paper.