How the other half works: Immigration and the social organization of labor

How the Other Half Works: Immigration and the Social Organization of Labor

Volumn , Issue , 2003, Pages

  Waldinger, Roger ^a   Lichter, Michael I ^b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

^b UNIVERSITY AT BUFFALO   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 77951225269     PISSN: None     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book    
DOI: None     Document Type: Book

References (222)

1. As pointed out by Michael Walzer in What it means to be an American (New York: Marsilio, 1992), p. 24, building on an earlier observation by Horace Kallen, "The United States ... has a peculiar anonymity." (cited in Walzer, p. 23).
2. See Roger Waldinger and Mehdi Bozorgmehr, eds., Ethnic Los Angeles (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1996), especially chapters 11, 12, 15; and Barry Edmonston and James P. Smith, The new Americans: economic, demographic, and fiscal effects of immigration (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1997). The diversity of today's immigrant flows is a central theme sounded in Alejandro and Rubén G. Rumbaut Portes, Immigrant America, 2d ed. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996).
3. Immigrants make up 13 percent of all persons 25-64 years old, but over half of those possessing no more than an eighth-grade education, and 17 percent of those with some high school education (calculations from a merged sample of the 1994-97 Current Population Survey). For further background, see Roger Waldinger and Jennifer Lee, "New immigrants in urban America," in Strangers at the gates: new immigrants in urban America, ed. Roger Waldinger (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001).
4. One of the most systematic formulations of this approach can be found in George Borjas, "Economic theory and international migration," International Migration Review 23, no. 3 (1989): 457-85.
5. Scholars advanced two distinct, though related, "mismatch" hypotheses. One emphasized skills, underscoring the lack of fit between urban employers and the proficiencies, as measured by years of education, of minority urban residents. The second, focusing on geography, underscored the dislocation that occurred as low-skilled jobs, once located in inner cities, gravitated to suburbs, which inner-city residents could not easily travel to nor, given the more expensive housing, live in. For a recent exposition of this view, see William Julius Wilson, When work disappears: the world of the new urban poor (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996) and the references therein. For a reiteration of the "skills mismatch" view, based on data from a recent employer survey, see Harry J. Holzer, What employers want: job prospects for less-educated workers (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1996). The classic statement of the spatial mismatch hypothesis appeared in John Kain's seminal article "Housing segregation, Negro employment, and metropolitan decentralization," Quarterly Journal of Economics 82 (1968): 175-97. A critique of the skills mismatch hypothesis appears in Roger Waldinger, Still the promised city? African-Americans and new immigrants in postindustrial New York (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996).
6. See Roger Waldinger, "Up from poverty? 'race,' immigration, and the prospects of low-skilled workers," in Strangers at the gates, ed. Waldinger.
7. The theory of labor market segmentation was first developed in Peter B. Doeringer and Michael J. Piore's pathbreaking book, Internal labor markets and manpower analysis (Lexington, Mass.: Heath Lexington Books, 1971); for an up-to-date reformulation and defense of the approach, see Chris Tilly and Charles Tilly, Work under capitalism, new perspectives in sociology (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1998).
8. The queue theory of the labor market was developed by Lester Thurow in his books Income and opportunity (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1968) and Generating inequality: mechanisms of distribution in the U.S. economy (New York, Basic Books: 1975). In A piece of the pie: blacks and white immigrants since 1880 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980), Stanley Lieberson applied queue theory to examine the effect of compositional differences in black and immigrant employment, across a sample of U.S. cities in 1900. Although the concepts of queue order and shape and of "workers' rankings" were implicit in these earlier writings, they were first made explicit in the editors' chapters of Job queues, gender queues, ed. Barbara Reskin and Patricia Roos (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990). Our application of queue theory has its roots in the work of both Thurow and Lieberson and draws on the arguments developed in Waldinger, Still the promised city? chapters 1, 9, and passim.
9. Cf. Michael Piore, Birds of passage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), chapter 3.
10. See, for example, Paul Attewell, "Skill and occupational changes in U.S. manufacturing," in Technology and the future of work, ed. Paul Adler (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).
11. Saskia Sassen is a well-known proponent of this view. See, for example, The mobility of labor and capital (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
12. This view is maintained by Michael Piore in "An economic approach," in Dualism and discontinuity in industrial societies, ed. Suzanne Berger and Michael J. Piore (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), especially p. 18.
13. "The informal side of socialization," as Gary Alan Fine noted in a study that focused on some of the same occupations with which we are concerned, "is crucial in many occupations, but seems particularly salient in locales ... in which formal models of education are weak and where some assume that the job can be mastered by anyone with sufficient provision. If socialization is assumed routine and painless, little provision is made for acquiring knowledge ..." Gary Alan Fine, Kitchens: the culture of restaurant work (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), p. 51.
14. The references are to Oscar Handlin's classic immigration history, The uprooted (Boston: Little Brown, 1952); and John Bodnar's revisionist work, The transplanted (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985).
15. These two paragraphs do no more than present a stylized summary of a vast literature; for a lucid discussion of network theory, with ample references, see Douglas Massey et al., "Theories of international migration: a review and appraisal," Population and Development Review 19, no. 3 (1993): 431-66; "Continuities in transnational migration: an analysis of 19 Mexican communities," American Journal of Sociology (May 1994): 1492-533.
16. For a review of the concept of social capital, with numerous references to the immigration literature, see Alejandro Portes, "Social capital: its origins and applications in modern sociology," Annual Review of Sociology 24 (1998): 1-24.
17. Thomas Bailey and Roger Waldinger, "Primary, secondary, and enclave labor markets: a training systems approach," American Sociological Review (August 1991): 432-45.
18. Alejandro Portes and Julia Sensenbrenner, "Embeddedness and immigration: notes on the social determinants of economic action," American Journal of Sociology 98 (1993): 1320-50.
19. On the ethnic economy, see Ivan Light and Stavros Karageorgis, "The ethnic economy" in Neil Smelser and Richard Swedberg, eds., The handbook of economic sociology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, and New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1994); on the ethnic enclave, see Alejandro Portes and Robert Bach, Latin journey (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985); on the ethnic niche, see Waldinger, Still the promised city?
20. As argued by Douglas Massey and his collaborators (Rafael Alarcón, Jorge Durand, and Humberto González) in Return to Aztlan (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987).
21. On the role of networks in matching workers with jobs, Mark Gra-novetter's Getting a job, 2d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995) is a basic source. Other useful sources include Mark Granovetter and Charles Tilly, "Inequality and labor processes," in Handbook of sociology, ed. Neil J. Smelser (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991), 175-221; David Stevens, "A reexamination of what is known about jobseeking behavior in the United States," in Labor market intermediaries, Report no. 22 (Washington, D.C.: National Commission for Manpower Policy, 1978), 55-104; Margaret Grieco, Keeping it in the family: social networks and employment chance (London and New York: Tavistock Publications, 1987); Walter W. Powell and Laurel Smith-Doerr, "Networks and economic life," in Handbook of economic sociology, pp. 368-402.
22. See Waldinger, Still the promised city? especially chapters 7 and 8; and "The 'other side' of embeddedness: a case-study of the interplay of economy and ethnicity," Ethnic and Racial Studies 18, no. 3 (1995): 555-80.
23. As noted by Peter Capelli, a broad array of sources indicate that "employers see the most important consideration in hiring and the biggest deficit among new workforce entrants as being the attitudes that they bring with them to their jobs." Personality-"one's basic dispositions toward the outside world"-ranks as the work-attitude axis most frequently emphasized by employers. Peter Capelli, "Is the 'skills gap' really about attitudes?" California Management Review 37, no. 4 (summer 1995): 110, 112. Similarly, Philip Moss and Chris Tilly's study of low-skilled employers found that "majorities of respondents ... pointed to soft skills" (the authors' term for motivation and interaction) "as the most important qualities they sought." Drawing from the evidence for their study, as well as material from the broader literature, they conclude that "the United States has seen a rising tide of skill requirements, but nothing like a tidal wave." See Philip Moss and Chris Tilly, Stories employers tell: race, skill, and hiring in America (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2001), p. 83.
24. For a review of this literature, see John Duckitt, The social psychology of prejudice (New York: Prager, 1992).
25. The preference is not a direct result of the distaste, however. Let us say that a particular employer highly values ambition in others; if, however, he is hiring for a dead-end job and wants a stable workforce, he will probably hire from a group he considers unambitious.
26. On the experiences of the earlier groups, the now exploding literature on "whiteness" and "whitening" is instructive. See Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish became white (New York: Routledge, 1995), for a particularly insightful example.
27. For a review, see Nelson Lim, " 'On the back of blacks'? immigrants and the fortunes of African-Americans," in Waldinger, ed., Strangers at the gates.
28. George Borjas, "The economics of immigration," Journal of Economic Literature (1994): 1667-717.
29. For evidence of this sort, see Joleen Kirschenman and Kathryn Necker-man, "We'd love to hire them, but...: the meaning of race for employers," in The urban underclass, ed. Christopher Jencks and Paul E. Peterson (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1991), pp. 203-32; Katherine Newman, No shame in my game: the working poor in the inner city (New York: Knopf, 1999), chapter 8.
30. As this book returns to the concerns of Waldinger's Still the promised city? a few words on the relationship between the two works seem in order. Still the promised city? told a story of historical change, focusing on the interplay of ethnicity and economy in New York during the twentieth century, with an emphasis on that century's second fifty years. It argued that the opportunities and obstacles confronted by immigrants and African Americans resulted from America's serial incorporation of outsider groups and from those groups' attempts to create protective economic shelters. The history of continuous recourse to migration made ethnicity the crucial and enduring mechanism whereby categorically distinctive workers were sorted into an identifiably distinct set of jobs. The path up from the bottom involved finding a good niche and dominating it, which meant that an earlier group's search for labor-market shelters eventuated in barriers confronting the next round of arrivals. Under certain conditions, established groups moved up the queue, creating opportunities for newcomers. Under other circumstances-as when the preferences of low-ranked groups changed quickly while older groups remained attached to their customary niches-ethnic competition, as opposed to ethnic succession, ensued, with newcomers seeking to alter hiring and promotion rules, and incumbents trying to maintain the structures protecting their group's jobs. Still the promised city? sought to elaborate this argument using a range of methodologies, including analysis of census data and historical as well as contemporary case studies. For the most part, however, the book emphasized the importance of exclusionary efforts, whether informal or concerted, directed by one group of ethnic workers against some distinctive other. How the other half works lacks the historical dimension of the earlier volume. But it sheds light, we believe, on a set of dynamics largely unexplored there. In part, the dividends stem from a difference in methodology, as we use a richer set of indepth interviews, allowing more careful investigation of the interplay between the "structures" of organization and technology, on the one hand, and the active efforts by workers and managers to shape their environment, on the other. We develop the concept of "exclusionary" and "usurpationary" closure to show how immigrant networks expand beyond the economic functions emphasized in earlier work; at the same time, we show how organizational features constrain the reach of immigrant networks (a theme not at all anticipated in Still the promised city?). Similarly, the chapters on employer preferences present a framework entirely different from the approach offered in the earlier book, which had relatively little to say either about the nature of employer preferences or the ways those preferences might be implemented and why.
31. For overviews of the contemporary demographic and economic transformation of Los Angeles, see Waldinger and Bozorgmehr, Ethnic Los Angeles, chapters 1-3; for an update of immigration trends based on data from the mid-1990s, see Roger Waldinger, "Not the promised city? Los Angeles and its immigrants," Pacific Historical Review (May 1999).
32. For an elaboration of this argument, with application to a very different type of immigrant place, see Waldinger, Still the promised city?
33. All employers are single-counted, even if owners or managers of multiunit operations. Three of the hospital interviews involved persons not directly employed by hospitals; these were with the vice-president of a company supplying contract housekeeping services to hospitals, an official in a large public sector hospital workers' union, and two personnel officials in a local government department responsible for general health-care services.
34. The interviews with restaurants, and, to a much more limited extent, with hotels, served as our pilot interviews; we completed these first, using a version of the survey instrument that underwent subsequent modifications, almost entirely without the aid of a tape recorder. In most cases, subsequent interviews were recorded and later transcribed; otherwise, detailed notes were made of interviewees' responses. We did the least interviewing in the department store sector, as most stores were part of larger chains with centralized personnel departments; finding the person in charge of hiring for a specific store was difficult, and the companies were generally quite shy about giving interviews. Overall, however, we came close to our goal of forty firms per industry.
35. Frank Levy and Richard Murnane, "U.S. earnings levels and earnings inequality: a review of recent trends and proposed explanations," Journal of Economic Literature 30 (1992): 1333-81; Richard Murnane and Frank Levy, Teaching the new basic skills: principles for educating children to thrive in a changing economy (New York: Free Press, 1996).
36. Roger Waldinger, "Up from poverty? 'Race,' immigration, and the prospects of low-skilled workers," in Roger Waldinger, ed., Strangers at the gates: new immigrants in urban America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001).
37. Clark Kerr et al., Industrialism and industrial man: the problems of jobs and management in economic growth (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960).
38. Robert Blauner, Alienation and freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964). Thus, Blauner emphasized the uncertain effect of automation. While continuous-process work substituted mechanical for human labor, the process was highly subject to instability; since automated systems inevitably crashed, workers had the opportunity to act together creatively to bring the process back on line.
39. Daniel Bell, The coming of post-industrial society (New York: Basic Books, 1974).
40. Tolnay says that "Originally, 'The Great Migration' was a term used to describe the sharp increase in the northward migration of southern blacks during and after World War I. In its more general application, it also includes the subsequent surge in South-to-North migration that occurred during and after World War II." We use the second, broader sense. Stewart E. Tolnay, "The great migration and changes in the northern black family, 1940 to 1990," Social Forces 75 (1997): 1213-38.
41. Harry Braverman, Labor and monopoly capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974).
42. Michael Spence, Job market signaling (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974).
43. Footnote to Randall Collins, The credential society: an historical sociology of education and stratification (New York: Academic Press, 1979).
44. Case studies on the labor process, ed. Andrew Zimbalist (New York: Monthly Review, 1978), provided an early celebration. Reassessments of a more critical sort were soon forthcoming, although Braverman's influence lingered. For a selection of reconsiderations, see Paul Attewell, "The deskilling controversy," Work and Occupations 14, no. 3, (1987): 323-34,and Vicki Smith, "Braverman's legacy: the labor process turns 20," Work and Occupations 21, no. 4 (1994): 403-21.
45. David Howell and Edward N. Wolff, "Trends in the growth and distribution of skills in the U.S. workplace, 1960-1985," Industrial and Labor Relations Review, 44, no. 3 (1991); Sue E. Berryman and Thomas Bailey, The double helix of education and the economy (New York: Institute on Education and the Economy, Teachers College, Columbia University, 1992).
46. Paul Adler, "Introduction," in Adler, ed., Technology and the future of work (New York: Oxford, 1992).
47. Beverly Burris, "Computerization of the workplace," Annual Review of Sociology 24 (1998): 141-57.
48. John Heritage, Garfinkel and ethnomethodology (Cambridge, England: Policy, 1986).
49. As shown in the classic studies of Christy Mathewson, Restriction of output among unorganized workers (New York: Viking, 1931), and the famous articles by Donald Roy, e.g., "Efficiency and 'the fix': informal group relations in a piece work machine shop," American Journal of Sociology 60 (1955): 255-66.
50. Ken Kusterer, Know-how on the job: the important working knowledge of 'unskilled' workers (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1978).
51. Michael Burawoy, Manufacturing consent (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979).
52. For the variety of segmentationist views, see Peter Doeringer and Michael Piore, Internal labor markets and manpower analysis (Lexington, Mass.: Heath, 1971); Richard Edwards et al., ed., Labor market segmentation (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1975); David Gordon et al., Segmented work, divided workers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
53. As implied by Michael Piore and Charles Sabel in The second industrial divide (New York: Basic Books, 1984).
54. Tilly and Tilly, Work under capitalism (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1997); Christopher Jencks, Lauri Perman, and Lee Rainwater, "What is a good job? a new measure of labor-market success," American Journal of Sociology 93 (1988): 1322-57; Neal Rosenthal, "More than wages at issue in job quality debate," Monthly Labor Review (December 1988): 4-8.
55. As hypothesized by Doeringer and Piore in Internal labor markets, workers attached to a particular labor market segment tend to adopt (or already exhibit) segment-appropriate behavior. Behaviors that mirror the instability of the secondary sector (or segment) are unlikely to win approval in the primary sector. This is another possible barrier to mobility from the secondary to the primary sector.
56. As argued by Michael Piore, Birds of passage (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979).
57. The phrase is Arthur Stinchcombe's, although invoked in a discussion of a different occupational setting; see Stinchcombe, "Work institutions and the sociology of everyday life," in Kai Erikson and Steven Peter Vallas, eds., The nature of work: sociological perspectives (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).
58. Studies of the archetypically deskilled job, fast-food work, illustrate this point in great detail. See Katherine Newman, No shame for my game: the work-ingpoor in the inner city (New York: Knopf, 1999), chapters 4 and 5; and Robin Leidner, Fast food, fast talk: service work and the routinization of everyday life (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), chapter 3. Leidner first notes (p. 72), in her ethnography of a McDonald's, that "McDonald's had routinized the work of its crews so thoroughly that decision making had practically been eliminated from the jobs." But she later (p. 77) points out that "McDonald's work may be considered unskilled, but it was by no means easy to do well. Window workers had to be able to keep many things in mind at once, to keep calm under fire, and to exhibit considerable physical and emotional stamina." Reminiscing on his own experience as a young McDonald's worker, historian Robin Kelley provides another view of "employees at the central Pasadena McDonald's... constantly inventing new ways to rebel," which implies some considerable scope for freedom from management's imposition of routines. See Robin Kelley, Race rebels (New York: Free Press, 1994), pp. 1-3.
59. Supporting evidence for this view comes from two books, both written from a standpoint of considerable sympathy, if not alignment, with a segmentationist perspective: Roger Waldinger, Through the eye of the needle: immigrants and enterprise in New York's garment trades (New York: New York University Press, 1986); Thomas R. Bailey, Immigrant and native workers: contrasts and competition (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1987).
60. Michael Piore, Birds of passage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979b p.55.
61. Arlie Hochschild, The managed heart (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983). Hochschild's work was anticipated by many years in C. Wright Mills's discussion of the "personality market." See C. Wright Mills, White collar: the American middle classes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1951).
62. See also: Leidner, Fast food, fast talk; Ester Reiter, Making fast food: from the frying pan into the fryer (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1991), especially pp. 85-91.
63. Greta Foff Paules, Dishing it out: power and resistance among waitresses in a New Jersey restaurant (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991).
64. Stanley Hollander, "A historical perspective on the service encounter," in The service encounter: managing employee/customer interaction in service businesses, J. Czepiel et al., eds. (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1985).
65. Erving Goffman, Interaction ritual (New York: Pantheon, 1967), especially pp. 81-85 and pp. 90-95; Erving Goffman, The presentation of self in everyday life (New York: Doubleday, 1959), pp. 151-152.
66. Gender interacts with nativity so that, as Betsy Aron noted in a study of labor conflict in Boston's hotel industry, women "who come from societies without a tradition of egalitarian underpinnings to the class structure are even more attractive to employers, who value their apparent willingness to display docile and subservient behavior." See her Defeat from the jaws of victory: the rise and fall of Local 26, Hotel Employees, and Restaurant Employees (HERE) in Boston (unpublished manuscript, 1999), p. 19.
67. As suggested by various studies of domestic workers. For the second generation Japanese-American women studied by Evelyn Nakano Glenn, U.S. conditions furnished the principal frame of reference, the main reason why the U.S.-born Nisei experienced greater "status degradation" than did their foreign-born, or Issei, counterparts. See her Issei, Nisei, war bride (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986), pp. 177-82. The women interviewed by Judith Rollins in her study of domestics in Boston came from a variety of ethnic and national backgrounds, but most were either from small towns, the countryside, or foreign countries. "Now urban themselves," Rollins notes in describing her respondents, "none of them would want their daughters to become domestics." See Between women: domestics and their employers (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1985), p.113.
68. As defined by Philip Moss and Chris Tilly, Stories employers tell: race, skill, and hiring in America (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2001), p. 44. Moss and Tilly distinguish two clusters of "soft skills," one entailing interaction, the second motivation. Even as they advance the concept of "soft skills," the authors note that the concept "is a misnomer," precisely because the bundle of attributes referred to as "soft skills" is culturally defined, confounded by employer/worker differences in cultural norms, and viewed by employers as immutable. They found, as did we, that "employers genuinely view interaction and motivation as skills"; thus they use the concept in their analysis. In utilizing "soft skills" as an analytic category, however, they seem to lend it face validity. But as we argue in this chapter, what employers say and what they mean are two different things. In the employers' discourse, the qualities denoted by "motivation" or "attitude" refer to the traits relevant to relationships with co-workers, customers, or bosses. Insofar as these relationships involve authority relations they take a political form-which is precisely what the everyday talk about "soft skills" is designed to obscure.
69. As argued by George Sternlieb and James Hughes, "The uncertain future of the central city," Urban Affairs Quarterly 18, no. 4 (1983): 455-72, or any of the other proponents of the skills mismatch hypotheses, a literature review in Waldinger, Still the promised city? African Americans and new immigrants in postindustrial New York (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), chapter 1.
70. The literature on the two manufacturing industries that we studied remains scant. When they could still be classified as highly skilled members of the blue-collar élite, workers in the printing trades received a good deal of scholarly attention; although this interest persisted as long as the impact of computerization was still uncertain, academic attention disappeared once it became clear that the new technology would sweep aside the old craft skills. Bob Blauner's book Alienation and freedom: the factory worker and his industry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), with a chapter on printers and the printing trade, remains a classic reference. A more recent overview of technological trends, with an assessment of their implications for training, can be found in Thomas Bailey, Ross Koppel, Roger Waldinger, Education for all aspects of the industry: overcoming barriers to broad-based training (Berkeley: National Center for Research in Vocational Education, Graduate School of Education, University of California, Berkeley; Washington, D.C.: U.S. Dept. of Education, Office of Educational Research and Improvement, Educational Resources Information Center, 1994). Further information can be found in Karen Chapple, "The transformation of traditional industries in San Francisco: the cases of printing and apparel manufacturing," Working Paper 701 (Berkeley: University of California, Institute of Urban and Regional Development, 1998). Scholarly studies of the furniture industry are rarer still. Mark Drayse, "The development and structure of labor markets in the Los Angeles furniture industry" (Ph.D. dissertation, UCLA, 1997), provides an overview of trends in the industry, with conclusions, regarding the role of immigrant labor, quite similar to those that we report in this book.
71. Peter B. Doeringer and Michael J. Piore, Internal labor markets and manpower analysis (Lexington, Mass.: Heath Lexington Books, 1971).
72. Thomas Bailey's study of immigrants in the restaurant industry, Immigrant and native workers: contrasts and competition (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1987) provides background on the structure of the industry and its occupational demands; for a similar discussion of the hotel industry, see Waldinger, Still the promised city? chapter 5, and Dorothy Sue Cobble and Michael Merrill, "Collective bargaining in the hospitality industry," in Collective bargaining in the private sector, ed. Paula Voos (Madison, Wisc.: Industrial Relations Research Association, 1999).
73. William Whyte's classic article, "The social structure of the restaurant," American Journal of Sociology 54, no. 4 (1949), first underscored the interdependencies and uncertainties of restaurant work and the complexities that ensued, a point that subsequent research has confirmed. Nonetheless, the long-term trend is one toward deskilling, propelled largely, but not exclusively, by the explosion of fast food restaurants. While job demands increase with prices printed on the menu, the decline of occupational unionism in the restaurant has certainly diminished servers' ability to exercise craftlike control over the way in which the work gets done. See Dorothy Sue Cobble, "Organizing the postindustrial workforce: lessons from the history of waitress unionism," Industrial and Labor Relations Review 44, no. 3 (1991): 419-36.
74. Gary Alan Fine's recent study, Kitchens: The culture of restaurant work (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), repeatedly underscores the complexity of the impression-management techniques used by servers as they respond to the unpredictable flow of food and traffic in a constant effort to "manipulate customers" (pp. 98-110).
75. Moss and Tilly similarly report that "as clichéd as it may seem, numerous managers in retail and service establishments boiled down the requisite interaction skills to 'a smile.' " Moss and Tilly, Stories, p. 59.
76. Mandating impression-management policies seems a widespread practice. For example, Burger King's training manual includes the following instruction: "Smile with a greeting and make a positive first impression. Show them you are GLAD TO SEE THEM. Include eye contact with the cheerful greeting." Cited by Sarah Reiter, Making fast food: from the frying pan into the fire (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1991), p. 85; (capitals in the original).
77. The fast-fooders studied by Katherine Newman similarly expected workers to "servic[e] customers with a smile." Although hardly a skill, smiling involved an impression-management requirement of a non-trivial nature, since, as Newman wrote, "Customers can be unreasonably rude, even insulting, and workers must count backwards from a hundred in order to stifle their outrage." In No shame in my game: The working poor in the inner city (New York: Knopf, 1999), p. 89.
78. In recent years, the literature on clerical work has been dominated by accounts that are largely consistent with Braverman's emphasis on deskilling: Rosemary Crompton and Gareth Jones, White collar proletariat: deskilling and gender in clerical work (London: Macmillan, 1984); Evelyn Nakano Glenn and Roslyn Feldberg, "Proletarianizing clerical work: technology and organizational control in the office," in Andrew Zimbalist, Case studies on the labor process (New York: Monthly Review, 1978).
79. The offset press is a very commonly used printing technology.
80. In underscoring the contingent, contested nature of managerial authority, we build on the fundamental Marxist insight, exemplified by Harry Braverman and his radical critics. As James Rebitzer argues, the social relationships within a firm can be understood as political, insofar as "they involve conflicts of interests between parties that are resolved by the exercise of power." "Radical political economy and labor markets," Journal of Economic Literature 31 (1993): 1396.
81. The sentence is paraphrased from Douglas Massey, Rafael Alarcón, Jorge Durand, and Humberto González, Return to Aztlan: the social process of migration from western Mexico (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), where the authors write that "landless Mexican campesinos may be poor in financial resources, but they are wealthy in social capital, which they can readily convert into jobs and earnings in the United States"; (italics added).
82. William Form, "On the degradation of skills," Annual Review of Sociology 13 (1987): 30.
83. Stephen R. Barley, "Technology, power, and the social organization of work: towards a pragmatic theory of skilling and deskilling," Research in the Sociology of Work 6 (1988): 33-80.
84. See Everett C. Hughes, "The linguistic division of labor in industrial and urban societies," in Advances in the sociology of language, vol. 2., ed. Joshua Fishman (The Hague: Mouton, 1972), p. 309. And see Joshua Fishman, The sociology of language (Rowley, Mass.: Newbury House, 1972); Calvin Veltman, Language shift in the United States (Berlin: Mouton, 1983); David Lopez, "Social and linguistic aspects of assimilation today," in The handbook of international migration, ed. Charles Hirschman, Philip Kasinitz, and Josh Dewind (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1999).
85. As noted in Ralph Fasold, The sociolinguistics of society (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984).
86. Joshua Fishman, Sociology of language, p. 45.
87. Joshua Fishman, The rise and fall of the ethnic revival (The Hague: Mouton, 1985), p. 61.
88. Alejandro Portes and Ruben Rumbaut, Immigrant America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990) p. 217.
89. One can identify still a third alternative, made possible when immigrant entrepreneurs from one group employ immigrant workers from another. In this case, the workers adapt to the linguistic practices of the entrepreneurs, as the literature suggests, which means learning not English but a second "foreign" tongue. For an example, see Stuart Silverstein, "Crossing language barriers," Los Angeles Times, Wednesday, 8 December 1999, p. A-I.
90. We refer, for example, to contact that Ralph Grillo has described as "ethnic enclavement," a notion apparently invoked by him without reference to or awareness of the U.S. literature on "ethnic enclaves." As Grillo concedes, "enclavement" is the exception, not the rule, in immigrant situations. See R. D. Grillo, Dominant languages: language and hierarchy in Britain and France (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
91. Howard Giles, R. Y. Bourhis, D. M. Taylor, "Towards a theory of language in ethnic group relations," Language, ethnicity, and intergroup relations, ed. Howard Giles (London and New York: Academic Press, 1977).
92. Everett C. Hughes, "The linguistic division of labor in industrial and urban societies," pp. 296-305 in Joshua Fishman, ed., Advances in the sociology of language, vol. 2 (The Hague: Mouton, 1972).
93. Raymond Breton, Gail Grant, and the Institute for Research on Public Policy, La langue de travail au Québec: synthèse de la recherche sur la rencontre de deux langues (Montréal: Institut de recherches politiques, 1981), p. 42.
94. This borrows from Stanley Lieberson, who argues that the demand for bilingualism in the workplace varies based on the "(1) linguistic composition of co-workers; (2) importance of communication with co-workers; (3) linguistic composition of customers and relevant outsiders; and (4) importance of communication with customers and outsiders." Stanley Lieberson, Language diversity and language contact (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1981), p. 174.
95. Richard V. Teschner, "Beachheads, islands, and conduits: Spanish mono-lingualism and bilingualism in El Paso, Texas," The International Journal of Sociological Language, no. 114 (1995): 97.
96. June A. Jaramillo, "The passive legitimization of Spanish. A macrosoci-olinguistic study of a quasi-border: Tucson, Arizona," The International Journal of Sociological Language, no. 114 (1995): 82.
97. Roger Waldinger, Still the promised city? African Americans and new immigrants in postindustrial New York (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996).
98. Joshua Fishman, "Language maintenance," in Harvard encyclopedia of American ethnic groups, ed. Stephan Thernstrom (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1980), pp. 629-38.
99. Similarly, other researchers have found that Korean immigrant owners learn Spanish phrases in order to give direction to the Latino workers whom they mainly employ. (Personal communication from Jennifer Lee.)
100. Baldwin Hills is an area at the boundary between the largely Anglo west side and beach communities, and the middle-class, African-American enclave of the larger south central area.
101. The manager in question noted that this consideration went both ways- English-speaking patients interacting with non-English-speaking staff, and vice versa.
102. The story that we have told reports both on language change at the workplace and on employers' views of this process. Only the former issue connects directly with the analytic question-how organizational characteristics, internal and external, affect language choices at work. The information on employers' attitudes needs to be treated with care, as the forces affecting these attitudes derive from factors exogenous, not endogenous, to the workplace. But employers' attitudes are nonetheless illuminating, as they highlight the deep embedding of Spanish and other foreign languages within the workplace, notwithstanding employers' wishes to the contrary.
103. The respondent is referring to La Opinión, Los Angeles's largest and oldest Spanish-language daily.
104. This is no more than a stylized, partial summary of a vast literature; for a lucid discussion of network theory, with ample references, see Douglas Massey et al., "Theories of international migration: a review and appraisal," Population and Development Review 19 (1993): 3, 431-66.
105. See J. Edward Taylor, "Differential migration, networks, information, and risk," in Research in human capital and development, vol. 4: Migration, human capital, and development, ed. Oded Stark (Greenwich, Conn.: JAI Press, 1986), pp.147-71.
106. On page 169 in Douglas Massey, Rafael Alarcón, Jorge Durand, and Humberto González, Return to Aztlan: the social process of migration from western Mexico (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987).
107. On pages 1501 and 1528 in Douglas Massey et al., "Continuities in transnational migration: an analysis of 19 Mexican communities," American Journal of Sociology (May 1994): 1492-1533.
108. See for instance, Massey et al., Return to Aztlan, p. 171.
109. See page 17 in Leslie Moch Page, Moving Europeans: migration in western Europe since 1650 (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1992).
110. See also page 84 in Charles Tilly, "Transplanted networks," in Virginia Yans McLaughlin, Immigration reconsidered (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).
111. See Mark Granovetter, "The strength of weak ties: a network theory revisited," Sociological Theory 1 (1983), especially pp. 209-13.
112. See page 12 in Alejandro Portes, "Introduction," in Alejandro Portes, ed., The economic sociology of immigration (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1995
113. Mark Granovetter, "The strength of weak ties," American Journal of Sociology 78 (May 1973): 1360-80.
114. Ronald S. Burt, Structural holes: the social structure of competition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992).
115. See Walter Powell and Laurel Smith-Doerr, "Networks and economic life," in Neil Smelser and Richard Swedberg, eds., The handbook of economic sociology (Princeton: Princeton University Press; New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1994).
116. Emphasis added, page 14 in Alejandro Portes, "Economic sociology and the sociology of immigration: a conceptual overview." in The economic sociology of immigration: essays on networks, ethnicity, and entrepreneurship, ed. Alejandro Portes (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1994).
117. Max Weber, Economy and society, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978), p. 343.
118. Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship and nationhood in France and Germany (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 23.
119. Frank Parkin, Marxism: a bourgeois critique (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979).
120. Chris Tilly and Charles Tilly, "Capitalist work and labor markets," in Smelser and Swedberg, eds., Handbook of economic sociology.
121. We would say the same if we were talking about the actions of a labor union. A labor union can only be effective when it exercises social closure, and when it does exercise social closure, it can potentially usurp the prerogatives of management.
122. See Rosabeth Kanter, Men and women of the corporation (New York: Basic Books, 1976).
123. Harry Holzer, "Why do small establishments hire fewer blacks than large ones?" PSC Research Report Series 96-374 (Ann Arbor: Population Studies Center, University of Michigan, 1996).
124. Holzer might be unconvinced, however. In a study of job searching among young white and African-American males, he found that African Americans received fewer job offers from employers regardless of what method of search was used. See Harry Holzer, "Informal job search and black youth employment," American Economic Review 77 (1987): 446-52.
125. "Newspaper ads and informed referrals are the most frequent means of recruitment. Exclusive network hiring is used mainly by small, less formal establishments," notes Peter V. Marsden in "The hiring process: recruitment methods," American Behavioral Scientist 37 (1994): 979-91.
126. We say "non-network," because it appears that in many cases walk-ins are what we might call "weakly sponsored" or "non-sponsored" referrals. The applicant has knowledge of the workplace and the job opening through an incumbent or former worker, but the applicant's sponsor is not taking an active role in the hiring process.
127. See Richard D. Arvey and James E. Campion,"The employment interview: a summary and review of recent research," Personnel Psychology 35 (1982): 314. There is little evidence that this message has gotten through to managers who hire. In a survey of human resources professionals in the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area, 90 percent said that the interview was the first or second most important selection tool they used, and 87 percent rated it as no less reliable than alternative methods. See Renee Ruhnow, Robert M. Noe, Randall Odom, and Stanley Adamson, "Interviews: a look at their value and reliability," HR Focus 69 (1992): 13.
128. "'Is this test valid?': a guide for determining the validity of a preemployment test," Personnel Journal 71 (1992): A05.
129. Elaine D. Pulakos and Neal Schmitt,"Experience-based and situational interview questions: studies of validity," Personnel Psychology 48 (1995): 289-308.
130. Harry Holzer's large-scale employer survey found that 90 percent of the organizations that he contacted interview applicants; from this finding, he concluded that "most employers want an opportunity to judge their applicants personally in a format in which they can go beyond the information obtained from more objective measures." Harry Holzer, What employers want: job prospects for less-educated workers (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1996) p.57.
131. John F. Kain, "Housing segregation, Negro employment and metropolitan decentralization," Quarterly Journal of Economics 82 (1968): 175-97; Harry Holzer and Keith R. Ihlanfeldt, "Customer discrimination and employment outcomes for minority workers," Quarterly Journal of Economics 113, no. 3 (1998): 835-67.
132. Page S97 in James Coleman, "Social capital in the creation of human capital," American Journal of Sociology 94, Supplement (1988): S95-S120.
133. Powell and Smith-Doerr, "Networks and economic life," p. 374.
134. As noted by Granovetter, who found that job-seekers needing employment badly were more likely to rely on strong ties. See Mark Granovetter, Getting a job (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974).
135. Paul DiMaggio and Walter Powell, "The iron case revisited: institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields," American Sociological Review 48 (1983): 147-60.
136. See Brian Uzzi, "The sources and consequences of embeddedness for the economic performance of organizations," American Sociological Review 61, no. 4 (1996): 674-99.
137. See page 491 in Mark Granovetter, "Economic action and social structure: the problem of embeddedness," American Journal of Sociology 91 (1985): 481-510. defunct Job Training Partnership Act to help steer targeted workers toward employment opportunities.
138. Ivan Light and Edna Bonacich, Ethnic entrepreneurs: Koreans in Los Angeles, 1965-1983 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988).
139. Thomas Bailey and Roger Waldinger, "Primary, secondary, and enclave labor markets: a training systems approach," American Sociological Review 56, no. 4 (August 1991): 432-45.
140. Alejandro Portes and Julia Sensenbrenner, "Embeddedness and immigration: notes on the social determination of embeddedness," American Journal of Sociology 98, no. 6 (1993): 1320-1350.
141. Alejandro Portes, "Introduction," in Alejandro Portes, ed., The economic sociology of immigration: essays in networks, ethnicity, and entrepreneurship (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1994).
142. James Coleman, "Social capital in the creation of human capital," American Journal of Sociology 94, Supplement (1988): S95-S120.
143. Portes, "Introduction."
144. J. Miller McPherson and Lynn Smith-Lovin, "Homophily in voluntary organizations: status distance and the composition of face-to-face groups," American Sociological Review 52, no. 3 (June 1987), pp. 370-79.
145. The Private Industry Councils were created in 1983 under the now defunct Job Training Partnership Act to help steer targeted workers toward employment opportunities.
146. The historical literature is replete with examples that provide support for this point of view. In Dark sweat, white gold: California farm workers, cotton, and the New Deal (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), Devra Weber shows how the same networks that growers used to recruit farm laborers provided the linchpin for unionizing efforts, during the 1930s. Daniel Soyer tells a similar story in Jewish immigrant associations and American identity in New York, 1880-1939 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), although in this case the rupture pitted Jewish immigrant workers against bosses with whom they shared not only a common ethnic tie but the very connection, to a common hometown, around which the nexus at the work site had been built. A more recent chapter in labor history, the Justice for Janitors campaign in Los Angeles, similarly shows how immigrant networks were used for recruitment purposes but then provided "the chain" by which union organizers could "turn things around." See Roger Waldinger et al., "Helots no more-a case study of the Justice for Janitors campaign," in Kate Bronfenbrenner et al., eds., Organizing to win (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997).
147. These patterns are consistent with the conclusions drawn by other scholars. Harry Holzer, for example, found that referrals from current employees generated 25 percent of hirings; taking into account other informal sources, Holzer concluded that informal mechanisms accounted for 35 percent to 40 percent of new hires. See Harry Holzer, What employers want: job prospects for less-educated workers (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1996), p. 51.
148. A brief discussion is warranted of the "other methods" of recruitment used by printers. In most cases, such recruitment involves referrals from the local Printing Industry Association (PIA), an industry (employers') association, which also serves as an informal hiring hall for experienced workers. Seventeen of forty-five printers mentioned using referrals from the PIA. (Employers were not specifically asked about the use of referrals from other employers or from industry associations. It is possible that, if they had been, the PIA would have been mentioned even more frequently.) The PIA also acts as a training organization, as several respondents mentioned. In fact, the PIA plays a fairly important labormarket role, in this industry of primarily small and medium-size firms-both brokering employment and providing training opportunities that few of the firms could afford to handle on their own, especially given the need to keep expensive equipment busy and the potential costs associated with training errors. Thus, it is possible for labor-market institutions like the PIA to play a role that is networklike but does not compromise the authority of managers.
149. The federal government runs military-related hospitals, including the extensive chain of Veterans Administration hospitals and the hospitals that belong to each branch of the military services. There are no state-run hospitals per se in Los Angeles County, and the county's public hospital system is the largest and most important in the area.
150. For a similar discussion, see Philip Moss and Chris Tilly, Stories employers tell: race, skill, and hiring in America (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2001), chapter 6.
151. Moss and Tilly similarly conclude that "formality in screening does not eliminate subjectivity altogether," in Stories, p. 234.
152. For example, one tabulation of the Los Angeles Survey of Urban Inequality revealed that 37 percent of African-American men with a high-school education or less reported some experience in reform school, detention center, jail, or prison, compared to 10 percent of their foreign-born Latino counterparts. Based on the authors' tabulation from the Los Angeles Sample of Multicity Studies of Urban Inequality. Lawrence Bobo et al., Multicity Study of Urban Inequality, 1992-1994; Atlanta, Boston, Detroit, and Los Angeles household survey data; computer file; 3rd ICPSR version (Atlanta, Ga.: Mathematica; Boston: University of Massachusetts, Survey Research Laboratory; Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, Detroit Area Study and Institute for Social Research, Survey Research Center; Los Angeles: University of California, Survey Research Program [producers], 1998; Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2000).
153. Gary Becker, The economics of discrimination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957).
154. Ray Marshall, "The economics of discrimination: a survey," Journal of Economic Literature 12, no. 3 (1974): 849-71.
155. Joleen Kirschenman and Kathryn Neckerman, " 'We'd love to hire them, but... ' The meaning of race for employers," in Christopher Jencks and Paul Peterson, The urban underclass (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1991); Kathryn Neckerman and Joleen Kirschenman, "Hiring strategies, racial bias, and inner-city workers," Social Problems 38, no. 4: 801-15.
156. William J. Wilson, When Work Disappears (New York: Knopf, 1996).
157. The classic reference is Kurt Lewin, "Self-hatred among Jews," reprinted in his Resolving social conflicts (New York: Harper Brothers, 1948), pp. 186-200. Lewin's view that a positive relationship to the category to which one belongs (or to which one has been assigned) is a prerequisite for mental health was picked up by Kenneth and Mamie Clark. The Clarks' landmark article, "Emotional factors in racial identification and preference in Negro children," Journal of Negro Education 19 (1950): 341-50, documenting the psychological damage experienced by black schoolchildren in segregated school settings, affected the 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education.
158. Harry Braverman, Labor and monopoly capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974), pp. 67-68.
159. For an exhaustive summary of the literature, see John Duckitt, The social psychology of prejudice (New York: Prager, 1992). Thomas Pettigrew's "Theories of prejudice," Harvard encyclopedia of American ethnic groups (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980), is also useful.
160. The concern with equality is implicit in the continued centrality of the concept "social distance," which denotes the ways antipathies or preferences for certain groups prescribe or proscribe interaction at varying levels of intimacy.
161. R. M. Blackburn and Michael Mann, in a British study of unskilled workers in the early 1970s, found that "recruiters relied on their subjective impressions of the likely cooperativeness of the applicant," supplemented by likely indicators of this desired trait. For example, "the ideal worker was considered to be married with small children," on the grounds that "the worker with dependents will do as he is told, not risk losing his job, be keen to do overtime, and show himself capable of promotion to a higher-paid job." In general, Blackburn and Mann concluded that " 'Willingness to work' seems to be the crucial variable .... [m]en who will work on their own, who do not need to be pushed, who are responsible." See Blackburn and Mann, The working class in the labor market (London: Macmillan, 1979), p. 105.
162. Or, as Richard Jenkins argues, managers try to predict whether workers will "integrate smoothly into the managerial procedures and social routines of the employing organization." "Acceptability," as Jenkins calls it, is "a function of the general problems inherent in the capitalist labour process when viewed from a managerial perspective." See Richard Jenkins, Racism and recruitment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 47.
163. Although these "traits" can be seen as individual characteristics, what they have in common is that they are also markers of general-that is, not work-related-categorical distinctions within the population. Marking a trait offlimits represents a decision that a social category (e.g., sex) is not relevant to the employment decision, whether or not individual employers may agree. While "people who don't know how to work an offset press" is a category, it classifies according to a proficiency that is at once context-specific and independent of all characteristics (such as gender or nativity) not directly relevant to the context. Such a category, therefore, is unlikely to be a basis for unfair discrimination.
164. In most cases, the basis for discrimination is citizenship status rather than nativity. Recall, however, that discrimination against immigrants is built into the Constitution: the president of the United States of America must be native-born.
165. Robert K. Merton, "Discrimination and the American creed," in Robert K. Merton, Sociological ambivalence and other essays (New York: The Free Press, 1976), pp. 189-216.
166. In our investigation, this formulation may have been complicated by the fact that the employers with whom we spoke may have been thinking of a job of type X as if it were the entire universe of jobs, and thus did not pinpoint the limits of the jobs for which group A would be suited.
167. Justice Thomas is a token in the sense that, as an African American at the top of the U.S. judiciary, he is very much in the minority. This is the sense used by Rosabeth Moss Kanter in her groundbreaking 1977 work, Men and women of the corporation (New York: Basic Books).
168. Karen Hossfeld, "Their logic against them: contradictions in sex, race, and class in Silicon Valley," in Kathryn Ward, ed., Women workers and global restructuring (Ithaca: New York State School of Industrial and Labor Relations, Cornell University Press, 1990), pp. 149-78.
169. Herbert Blumer, "Race prejudice as a sense of group position," Pacific Sociological Review 1 (1958): 3-7.
170. This discussion draws on the pioneering work of Gordon W. Allport in The nature of prejudice, and on its reflections in the work of other authors. We use "attitude," however, to mean what Allport called "prejudice." To Allport, the attitudinal portion of prejudice was simply the emotion for or against the object of the attitude, not the cognitive component, or rationalization. See Gordon W. Allport, The nature of prejudice (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1979).
171. For an exhaustive, up-to-date discussion of the literature, see Susan Fiske, "Stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination," in Daniel T. Gilbert et al., eds., The handbook of social psychology, 4th edition, vol. 2. (Boston: McGraw-Hill, 1999). This discussion draws heavily on Thomas F. Pettigrew's work in Harvard encyclopedia of American ethnic groups, ed. Stephan Thernstrom (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1980).
172. See Thomas Pettigrew, Harvard encyclopedia.
173. Edmund Phelps, "The statistical theory of racism and sexism," American Economic Review 62: 659-61; Kenneth Arrow, "The theory of discrimination," in O.A. Ashenfelter and A. Rees, eds., Discrimination in labor markets (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973).
174. See Lester Thurow, Generating inequality (New York, Basic: 1975).
175. Of course, the ability to move between groups is more important, in distinguishing caste from class relationships, than are the outward differences in perquisites and appearances between the groups. Still, substantial movement within a firm is not very likely.
176. W.E.B. Du Bois, The souls of black folk: authoritative texts, contexts, criticism, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Terri Hume Oliver (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999), p. 17.
177. Lawrence Bobo and Vincent Hutchings, "Perceptions of racial group competition: extending Blumer's theory of group position to a multiracial social context," American Sociological Review 61 (1996): 951-72.
178. Benjamin Disraeli, Sybil; or, The two nations, reprinted. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981).
179. James Matles and James Higgins, Them and us: struggles of a rank-and-file union (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1974).
180. We note that some respondents, having worked up from the shop floor or service setting, had social backgrounds very similar to those of the workers they employed or supervised. At the time of our interviews, however, the respondents occupied managerial positions, which, in their implications for status, earnings, demeanor, and presentation of self, entailed considerable difference from the positions of the entry-level workers about whom we asked.
181. It is also the case that many of the managers earned less than the twenty-dollars-per-hour wage enjoyed by the ex-aerospace workers. On the other hand, restaurant and department store managers generally wanted persons from middle-class backgrounds for front-of-the house positions, although here the halo effect produced by interactions with high-status patrons compensated for the relatively low wage. Revealingly, the omnipresent actors bore significant similarity to the immigrants, in that the actors' sense of self-worth derived from achievement accomplished outside of work. (And waiting tables not only paid the bills, it allowed for the flexibility needed for auditions.)
182. This refers to teenagers from the San Fernando Valley, assumed to come from the affluent families in its more select areas. The reputed "spoiled" manner of these teens was lampooned in the movie "Valley Girl," starring Nicholas Cage, and in the Frank Zappa song of the same name.
183. As argued by Kenneth Arrow, "What has economics to say about racial discrimination," Journal of Economic Perspectives 12, no. 2 (1998): 91-100.
184. Here, we echo the critique of the Beckerian approach made by Ray Marshall in "The economics of discrimination: a survey," Journal of Economic Literature 12, no. 3 (1974): 849-71.
185. As argued by Edna Bonacich in her works on the "split labor market": "A theory of ethnic antagonism: the split labor market," American Sociological Review 37 (1972): 547-59, and "Advanced capitalism and black/white relations in the United States: a split labor market analysis," American Sociological Review 41 (1976): 34-51.
186. Lawrence Bobo, James R. Kluegel, and Ryan A. Smith, "Laissez-faire racism: the crystallization of a 'kinder, gentler' ideology," in Racial attitudes in the 1990s: continuity and change, ed. S. A. Tuch and J.K. Martin (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1997).
187. Donald R. Kinder and David O. Sears, "Prejudice and politics: symbolic racism versus racial threats to the good life," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 40 (1981): 416.
188. There are a variety of views about the origins of the "urban underclass" and about its most salient features, and we have neither room nor reason to delve deeply into the topic here. William Julius Wilson's version of the concept has been one of the most influential, even though Wilson plays down the importance of "welfare dependency," emphasizes the importance of black middle-class migration, and reworks the "culture of poverty" notion. Conservative views, like those of Lawrence Mead, still remain salient. See Lawrence Mead, The new politics of poverty (New York: Basic Books, 1992); William Julius Wilson, The declining significance of race (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978); William Julius Wilson, The truly disadvantaged: the inner city, the underclass, and public policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
189. Here, "rational" is used in the economists' sense, meaning "maximizing material gain."
190. For an elaboration of this argument, see Roger Waldinger, Still the promised city? African Americans and new immigrants in postindustrial New York (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), ch. 1.
191. Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Men and women of the corporation (New York: Basic Books, 1976).
192. To state this another way: members of a group will often strive, as workers, to attain social closure over a job or set of jobs; workers from other groups, in striving to enter and themselves attain, perhaps, social closure, are in effect struggling for diversity. The situation with customers is similar, with the key difference being that customers from a particular group are more likely to be concerned that their group be represented than that their group be dominant. As emphasized later in the chapter, employers typically desire diversity only when it serves an instrumental function, e.g., creating a workforce with the linguistic skills to serve a given customer base. Diversity causes friction, and may increase training and other costs. Employers recognize that there are risks in "putting all of their eggs in one basket," yet this has not stopped many from doing so, in positions that require little customer contact.
193. See Corwin P. King, "When people bite: how to handle conflicts," HR Focus 70, no. 1 (1993): 19, for a "human resources" handling of this issue.
194. This is not an isolated example. Concerns about men, especially immigrant men, not taking direction from women were common.
195. As emphasized in Waldinger, Still the promised city? see especially chapter 4.
196. Realistic group-conflict theory holds that intergroup conflict is the result of contradictory interests or competition over resources, rather than of, for instance, innate dispositions. Robert A. LeVine and Donald T. Campbell, Ethnocentrism: theories of conflict, ethnic attitudes, and group behaviour (New York: Wiley, 1971)
197. Because private contractors in this industry typically hire nonunion Latino immigrants, and because many of the incumbent hospital workers the immigrants replace are African-American, this is an instance in which outsourcing has led to the substitution of Latino for African-American workers.
198. Toni Morrison, "On the backs of blacks," in Arguing immigration: the debate over the changing face of America, ed. Nicolaus Mills (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), pp. 97-100. See also Jack Miles, "Blacks vs. browns," Atlantic Monthly, October 1992, 41-68.
199. For a recent summary of studies on racial inequality, see Marcus Alexis, "Assessing 50 years of African-American economic status, 1940-1990," American Economic Review 88, no. 2 (1998): 368-75. To be sure, researchers disagree regarding the state of racial inequality and the socioeconomic condition of African Americans. For example, William A. Darity Jr. and Patrick L. Mason, in "Evidence on discrimination in employment: codes of color, codes of gender," Journal of Economic Perspectives 12, no. 2 (1998): 63-90, document the continuing significance of race in the labor market. James J. Heckman, in contrast, contends in "Detecting discrimination," Journal of Economic Perspectives 12, no. 2 (1998): 101-16, that it is not race but the limited skills of African Americans that sustain the apparent racial gap in the labor market.
200. Since most contemporary migrants come from urban centers, not from rural villages and farms, likely the discontinuity is less. In addition, skills learned elsewhere may need augmenting and updating, but the skills needed by a carpenter in Mexico, for instance, are likely to be similar to those needed in the United States. Still, the average Mexican or Central American immigrant-or the average Southeast Asian refugee-does not arrive with the competencies that America's Brave New Economy is supposed to require.
201. As we pointed out earlier, the status of more highly esteemed jobs also enhances the status of groups that hold them.
202. At least, we hope that greater educational attainment means greater acquisition of skills and knowledge, and not simply credential inflation.
203. Albert Rees, "Information networks in labor markets," American Economic Review 56, no. 2 (1966): 559-66.
204. Virtually without cost to the employer, of course, not to the passed-over workers. If we believe Becker's Economics of discrimination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), however, that costlessness may be illusory. Becker argues that employers pay in wages and efficiency, when indulging their own or their workers' taste for discrimination. That cost may have been so invisibly integrated into the "contract" underlying labor-market segmentation, however, that it was invisible to the participants.
205. On page 413 in Howard Wial, "Getting a good job: mobility in a segmented labor market," Industrial Relations 30, no. 3 (1991): 396-416.
206. In fact, several employers told us that they preferred candidates without a history in their industry, since they did not want to have to try to break "bad habits" inculcated by other employers.
207. Although many persons may be involved in the hiring process, we found that the final choice to hire a specific person is almost always the responsibility of a single manager. This is true even where candidates are interviewed and ranked by committee, or where multiple managers-and sometimes workers- sit in on the process.
208. Richard Alba and Victor Nee, "Rethinking assimilation theory for a new era of immigration," International Migration Review 31, no. 4 (1997): 826-74.
209. Roger Waldinger and Jennifer Lee, "New immigrants in urban America," in Roger Waldinger, ed., Strangers at the gates: new immigrants in urban America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001), pp. 51-52.
210. William A. V. Clark, "The geography of immigrant poverty: selective evidence of an immigrant underclass," in Waldinger, Strangers at the gates, p. 167; data are for the New York and Los Angeles Consolidated Metropolitan Statistical Areas.
211. The data for Los Angeles apply to the larger region; in Los Angeles County itself, the foreign-born share of the population was one-half percent higher.
212. The literature on immigrants in Los Angeles, although growing, remains underdeveloped, especially in comparison to the corpus available for New York City. The volume Ethnic Los Angeles, ed. Roger Waldinger and Mehdi Bo-zorgmehr (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1996), provides the most comprehensive overview, although it is largely, possibly excessively, based on information gleaned from U.S. population censuses through 1990. Much of the remaining section draws on this work, and also updates Roger Waldinger's "Not the promised city? Los Angeles and its immigrants," Pacific Historical Review 68, no. 2 (1999): 253-72. For another overview from a geographic perspective see James Allen and James Turner, The ethnic quilt (Los Angeles: California State University at Northridge, 1997). Thomas Muller and Thomas J. Espenshade's book, The fourth wave: California's newest immigrants (Washington, D.C.: Urban Institute Press, 1985), represents an early, now dated but still valuable, effort to assess Los Angeles's immigrant transformation. A number of recent collections contain additional valuable material on the region's history, with some attention to matters of immigration and ethnicity. Among the most notable are Allen J. Scott and Edward W. Soja, eds., The city: Los Angeles and urban theory at the end of the twentieth century (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), and Michael J. Dear, H. Eric Schockman, and Greg Hise, eds. Rethinking Los Angeles (Thousand Oaks, Ca.: Sage Publications, 1996). The monographic literature and studies of individual ethnic groups remain in a state of bad repair, with a few exceptions. Koreans have received valuable treatment, especially by Ivan Light and Edna Bonacich in their Immigrant entrepreneurs: Koreans in Los Angeles, 1965-1982 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988); and Pyong Gap Min, Caught in the middle: Korean communities in New York and Los Angeles (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996). The Chinese settlement in Monterey Park, California, has also been the object of considerable work; John Horton's The politics of diversity: immigration, resistance, and change in Monterey Park, California (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995) provides the best treatment. Amazingly, Mexicans have been relatively neglected, perhaps because the size of the group involved and the complexity of its experience makes study of the recent Mexican immigrant experience a daunting task. Valuable material can still be found in the Mueller and Espenshade book noted above. George Sanchez's Becoming Mexican American: ethnicity, culture, and identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993) is essential, but is limited to an earlier period. A key reference for the current period is Vilma Ortiz, "The Mexican-origin population: permanent working class or emerging middle class?" in Ethnic Los Angeles, ed. Waldinger and Bozorgmehr, pp. 247-78.
213. Leo Grebler, Jeffrey Lionel Berlant, Joan Moore, Ralph Guzman, The Mexican-American people: the nation's second largest minority (New York: Free Press, 1970).
214. Lucie Cheng and Philip Yang, "Asians: the 'model minority' deconstructed," in Ethnic Los Angeles, ed. Waldinger and Bozorgmehr, pp. 305-44; Mehdi Bozorgmehr, Georges Sabagh, and Claudia Der-Martirosian, "Middle Easterners: a new kind of immigrant," ibid., pp. 345-78.
215. David Lopez, Eric Popkin, and Edward Telles, "Central Americans: at the bottom, struggling to get ahead," ibid., pp. 279-304.
216. Allen J. Scott, Technopolis: high-technology industry and regional development in Southern California (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 13-14.
217. Allen J. Scott, "The manufacturing economy: ethnic and gender divisions of labor," in Ethnic Los Angeles, ed. Waldinger and Bozorgmehr, pp.215-44.
218. Roger Waldinger, "Ethnicity and opportunity in the plural city," ibid., p.457.
219. On the ethnic economy of the Chinese "ethnoburb" in the San Gabriel Valley, see Yu Zhou, "Beyond ethnic enclaves: location strategies of Chinese producer service firms in Los Angeles," Economic Geography 74, no. 3 (1998): 228-51; see also Yu Zhou, "How do places matter? a comparative study of Chinese ethnic economies in Los Angeles and New York City," Urban Geography 19, no. 6 (1998): 531-53.
220. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Current population surveys, for March 1988-98. Data were extracted for two-digit industries; no data were available for "Eating and drinking places before 1993."
221. Note, however, that shifts were taking place within health services, away from hospitals and toward smaller clinics. This was a result of the practices of insurers and HMOs, which demanded shorter hospital stays and more outpatient services. Unfortunately, this shift is hidden by the level of aggregation of the data used for this table.
222. In furniture, the production worker, regardless of skill, is almost always a man.