A COMPARISON OF UNION CONSCIOUSNESS IN …



A COMPARISON OF UNION CONSCIOUSNESS IN CENTRALIZED AND PARTICIPATORY UNIONS

E. Paul Durrenberger

Department of Anthropology

Penn State

THE PROBLEM

I propose to test the consequences of centralized vs. de-centralized organization in union locals that represent healthcare workers. I hypothesize, on the basis of ethnographic findings in fisheries, that union consciousness will be more developed among union members in the more de-centralized organization than the more centralized ones. I propose to test this by comparison of triads tests among worksites of the locals. I have completed the analyses for the more centralized locals and propose to collect and analyze comparable data for the less centralized one and to do the comparison between the two.

CONTRIBUTIONS

The theoretical contributions will include detailed explorations of the relationships between the organization of power and the organization of cognitive structures, the relationship between organizational structures and patterns of thought. The practical contributions will be in assessing the differences between centralized and participatory organization. The methodological contributions will include further development of recently developed instruments of measurement and their relationships to ethnography.

RATIONALE

Theoretical and methodological

Eric Wolf (1999) explored the ways cultural configurations articulate with power to arrange the settings and domains of social and economic life, especially the allocation and use of labor. He wanted to understand and analyze the ways relations that organize economic and political interactions shape ideation to make the world intelligible. He develops three examples but never actually shows how power, ideology, allocation of labor, and production are related beyond a few rather vague suggestions about tribute and class structure. He says that the "specification of ideologies in cultural terms can only be a part of our task. We must also know how these cultural forms engage with the material resources and organizational arrangements of the world they try to affect or transform." Because this work does not carry out this laudable program, in spite of the talk of dynamics in the abstract, each case seems rather static. Wolf did not show the inter workings of ideology, organization of labor, and disposition of products in the three examples so the complex dynamic that Wolf articulates remains an abstract if credible argument. Jean Lave's practice theory (e.g. 1988) goes a good way beyond Wolf's conclusions and offers more theoretical treatment than he does. Wolf poses significant questions, Lave provides a theoretical means of answering them, and Romney and others provide the means.

Meanwhile, Moore, Romney, and Hsia (1999) and Romney and others (2000) developed a means to explore and characterize and quantify similarities and differences in shared patterns of thought. They illustrate their method by examining terms for emotion in Chinese, English and Japanese. Culture, they argue, resides in the minds of people as pictures that are cognitive representations of semantic domains. A semantic domain is an organized set of words at the same level of contrast that refer to a single conceptual sphere. Using judgments of similarity, they use scaling and visualization procedures to make precise comparisons among what is in the minds of different individuals and they can measure the extent to which these pictures correspond or differ.

Ethnographic

Ethnographic studies of fisheries have shown that centralized management systems are too fragile and inattentive to changes to be responsive and adaptive while fishers find those that allow for participation to be more legitimate and are more likely to implement their policies and thus achieve management goals (Jentoft 1989, see Durrenberger and King 2000 for extensive citations).

Ethnographic studies of Unions in Chicago have shown that members share no conceptual model of their union but different ones depending on the realities of power and organization at their various worksites or at the same worksites at different times (Durrenberger 1997, Durrenberger and Erem 1999a). The union locals were centralized in their organization (Durrenberger and Erem 1999b, Erem and Durrenberger 2000). Not all unions or all locals are as centralized. One that provides for more member participation is in Pennsylvania. Both Chicago and Pennsylvania locals organize healthcare workers in similar types of workplaces—public and private hospitals, rehabilitation hospitals, and residential care facilities (see Breda 1997 for citations, literature and ethnography of organized nurses; Foner 1993.1994, 1995 for nursing home aids).

RESEARCH SITES

The ethnography of fisheries management indicates the importance the degree of constituent participation in or centralization of decision making. I hypothesize that the centralized organization of the Chicago locals made them less responsive to member concerns at worksites, so members responded to worksite conditions rather than to the union. Thus different worksite arrangements are associated with different models of the union. The fisheries work suggests that members would respond more to participatory organization by identifying more with their union rather than with conditions at their worksites. Therefore in a less centralized local, I expect there to be more agreement of members at different worksites, less variation among worksites, and higher union consciousness. I can measure this by the same triads tests I developed in the Chicago studies.

While I was working in Chicago, I heard from many in Service Employees International Union (SEIU) that 1199/P in Pennsylvania was less hierarchic in its organization than other locals. In January of 2000 1199/P instituted a series of reforms that a study suggested. That study indicated that while 80% of their members believed that what happened in the union affected them personally, fully 59% of them were not involved or only marginally involved in the activities of the union. Many locals would have taken this as a measure of success rather than a sign of a need for change. After membership meetings, the members voted on a number of changes in the bylaws of the local that even further decentralize power and authority.

Similar studies were conducted among locals in Chicago, but the findings were reported only to presidents who shared them sparingly with other officers. Never were they presented to or discussed by membership (Erem and Durrenberger 2000). Through a series of organizational moves that began in the mid 90’s the structure of Chicago locals has been even more centralized in recent years.

Thus, the Chicago locals and 1199/P contrast on the dimension of the degree of centralization and member participation and make an ideal comparison for this study. In the Chicago locals, triads tests show that members’ understandings of their union varied according to the structural realities of the worksite.

TRIADS

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.

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.

The externally defined categories, independent of union members constructions, experiences, views, or opinions classify members, stewards, and reps as 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 I wanted to determine to what extent members agreed with this external view, with each other and with members at other worksites. In Chicago they did not.

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 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, 1999, 2000, 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. Ethnographic observation and interviews might indicate other criteria of classification such as e.g. gender (if all co workers are women and supervisors men) race or ethnicity (if workers tend to be of one category and management another), or age.

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 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. Thus the highest score could be .5 in the steward-worker cells and the rep-worker cells.

I used Anthropac (Borgatti 1996) 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. 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 correlated do not. 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.

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 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 or other) I suggested that this model indicates “union consciousness,” the emic use of union-non-union distinctions for ordering terms for the relevant workplace relationships.

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).

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. Because the aggregate similarity matrix for the triads tests of the union local’s staff was very close to the external model I used it 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 exhibited 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 a 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 among members as well as management. Furthermore, just before I administered the first triads tests, there had been a union victory which all of the members had celebrated.

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 the 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.

However, when the chief steward at the rehabilitation hospital retired just before the unit negotiated a new contract, I was presented with the possibility of a quasi-experimental design. I administered the same triads test again in 1998, after a significant structural change, to detect whether the patterns of thought had changed with the change of structure.

The union structure remained in tact with stewards, reps, existing collective bargaining arrangements and law throughout this change of personnel , there were changes of relations of power as workplace networks changed. 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. 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). The earlier pattern was similar to the staff pattern (r=.64), but the second was not (r=-.47).

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 showed that workers saw themselves closer to a more powerful management.

The multi-dimensional scaling representations of the two showed a shift away from a model based on union membership and the workers at the rehabilitation hospital were no longer seeing themselves primarily as union members, but as workers for the management. They no longer held union officers to be more powerful than management (Durrenberger and Erem 1999).

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 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 mode 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.

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—structure. While culture is more than 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 (Romney, 1999:113).

CENTRALIZATION/DECENTRALIZATION

Rappaport (1971) argued that technological development disrupts the cybernetics of adaptation by altering the relationship between sanctity and authority. In stratified societies, authority is uncoupled from any quality of unquestionable truthfulness that people impute to unverifiable propositions—sanctity--and from the actions they imply, actions that adjust the system to its changing environment. He contrasts societies in which sacred conventions adjust to changes in the absence of authorities with those in which authorities have great power but little sanctity. To put this in other terms, in egalitarian societies many equivalent messages converge to adjust to changes while in centralized states a single voice or a few voices dominate. Adaptation in egalitarian societies is slow but sure and while adjustments in centralized states may come quickly, they are liable to error.

In egalitarian systems, unequal distribution of benefits are errors, easily corrected by direct information exchange between reciprocating independent individuals. Instead of concentrating on the coercive or power dimension of social orders, one can focus on the exchange of information and the means for identifying and correcting inappropriate or bad decisions or actions, errors. In more complex orders, independence of subordinates is traded for effective and efficient information handling and decision making. Decision making becomes specialized and some people make decisions about lower order decisions instead of about production or distribution. A third level of information processing corrects and coordinates lower level decisions. In certain conditions of material plenty, complex exchange, and conflict such systems are advantageous, but they become self perpetuating and "error" is not necessarily associated with inequitable distribution of benefits (Wright and Johnson 1975, Rappaport 1994).

The decisions result in policies that define differential access to resources and divergent interests. Thus, members of different classes continually contest their access rights and endeavor to improve them by whatever means are available. This contention makes states dynamic, always re-adjusting rights of one group to those of others.

Structural relationships define the practice that is associated with cognitive systems or folk models. Structural relationships are largely determined by the policies of states and people contest those policies depending on their interests and access to resources the policies define.

Thu and I argued (1997) that the multiplicity of interests makes adaptation an inappropriate concept for understanding states. Force is rarely exercised because it is expensive and alienating (Nader 1997). And we assumed that the ruled are no less clever than the ruling. We argued that we can understand such processes as the industrialization of swine production and its discontents by considering states as information processing systems (Flannery 1972, Johnson 1978, Johnson 1982, Kus 1981, Reynolds 1984, van der Leeuw 1981, Wright 1986) and tracing the role of cultural signals to pinpoint the loci of their impact on policy.

For comparing forms of organization such as union locals, we can follow the same process of tracing signals through the system—where do they originate, by what means to they travel, how are they amplified and damped, and how do they contribute to decision making. In centralized systems, signals flow to the center where a single figure or coalition collates them to make decisions. In a participatory model, signals flow to many places and many constituents contribute to decision making. There are means of measuring these differences, but that is not the central objective of this project.

The hypothesis I propose to test is that participatory organization of union locals is associated with a higher degree of union consciousness than centralized organization.

Adaptability and long term system viability is likely to be local. The findings from maritime anthropology (see Durrenberger and King 2000) translate into a concern for policies that allow for and foster realistic management, close to the people and systems they are designed to regulate, policies that allow for constant local monitoring, change, and adaptation, and policies that guarantee sufficient local commitment that they are self-policing. This is the difference between centralized and participatory organization that we can detect between the Chicago locals and the Pennsylvania ones.

PRACTICAL IMPORTANCE

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.

In his interview with a corporate culture guru—someone with a definite stake in the idea that he can teach people out of whatever troubles corporations are in—Newfield (1998) concluded that the problems are structural and systemic and beyond the reach of employee empowerment attitudes. He found that practice is more important than concept. The human relations revolution never happened because one cannot persuade people who have gotten ahead by deferring to rather than challenging superiors to flatten an organization. The power comes from above and the ones in the middle are its instruments. Knowing this, they are incapable of changing the structure. Programs of “participatory management” such as quality circles and team structures may be less participatory than means of creating a compliant work force (Lamphere and Zavella 1997).

This is as much an issue for unions as it is for corporations since the new leadership of the AFL-CIO has initiated a massive organizing campaign (Bronfenbrenner et al 1998). But local unions may become victims of their own successes. When union members at a worksite are dissatisfied with the service they receive, they can vote to oust or de-certify the union. Units with more participatory organization tend to win and those with more centralized organization tend to lose. A study of national level statistical data showed that decertifications were not rooted in worker dissatisfaction with pay, benefits or conditions or with employer challenges. Those units that had at least one steward per thirty voters, conducted new employee orientations, held regular membership meetings, published newsletters, publicized grievance victories and losses, and trained stewards to organize around grievances fared better than others. Win rates were higher in units with active rank-and-file bargaining committees. Those units that tended to lose were ones in which stewards were appointed rather than elected, where few grievances were filed, where most grievances were related to discipline and discharge, and where the rep never visited the workplace (Juravich and Bronfenbrenner 1998).

Nationally, SEIU is aggressive in its organizing drives but it also has the highest rate of decertification. This indicates that in spite of success at organizing, SEIU has not been successful in maintaining the members they already represent. Centralized organization of some of the locals works against this goal by not providing flexible and adaptive local services to members. It was for this reason that decertification was an ever-present threat in the Chicago locals where I did ethnographic work. This study can contribute to an understanding of how unions keep the units they organize.

Lave suggests that knowledge and practice are inseparable. This conclusion follows from her finding that it is impossible to abstract analytical knowledge from practice and transfer it directly to others. 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 way to change minds, if that is an objective, is to change the practical realities, the organizational structures, that configure peoples lives and actions.

PROCEDURES

One of the objectives of this research it to discover to what extent 1199/P is a significant unit to its members. It is not appropriate to assume that it is. Worksites are significant units. Thus, this project will be organized around worksites as units. I will match the Pennsylvania worksites as closely as possible to the Chicago ones, and if time allows, expand it to others.

The time periods in this list assume one assistant working half-time. All of these times are estimated on the basis of past experience with the study of union locals in Chicago, but allowing for additional travel time as the worksites of 1199/P are located across the state of Pennsylvania and not as concentrated as the ones in Chicago. This schedule allows time for consulting with members, stewards, reps, and officers of the union about the findings and time to prepare written materials for presentation to the local. While I do not conceive of this study as an exercise in applied anthropology, I do think it appropriate to make the findings available to the local so that they may be useful.

1. Study of 1199/P historical records, procedures, and documents. 3 months.

2. Ethnographic observation of union meetings, training sessions, and decision processes—4 months.

3. Ethnographic observation of stewards and reps at work negotiating contracts, handling grievances—3 months

4. Ethnographic interviews with members, stewards, reps and officers—4 months

5. Design and administration of survey instruments that derive from steps 1-3—2 months.

6. Administration of triads test from the Chicago studies to members from at least 9 different worksites—2 months

7. Coding and entering of data—1 month

8. Analysis, conclusions, and preliminary writing—2 months

9. Discussion of results with 1199/P members, stewards,reps, and officers. 1 month.

10. Analysis and writing of results for 1199/P—2 months

Sampling

In doing any of the survey work, I shall discuss with the officers and staff of the local which worksites would be most appropriate to sample. Phases 1-4 of this study will provide sufficient ethnographic information to make independent informed judgments about these suggestions. I will endeavor to draw a random sample of members from each selected worksite using membership lists as sampling frames. My attempts to employ such procedures in Chicago resulted in total failure because the membership lists were inaccurate and I had to operate under severe time limitations. One of the reforms of 1199/P is to maintain up to date charts—membership lists—for all worksites. This is important to a decentralized organization because it must be able to reach all members rather than just a few key figures. If the organization does have such records that I can use for sampling frames, and there is sufficient time, I shall do my best to insure random sampling. If this is not possible, then my alternative would be to do what I did in the Chicago studies and use informed opportunistic sampling. By informed, I mean that if about 25% of the members are in the dietary department to have about 25% of the respondents in the sample from the dietary department. Though this is not random sampling, it is more representative than strictly opportunistic or snowball sampling. Snowball sampling is the least desirable as it introduces the most bias by taping only certain networks and ignoring all others. Opportunistic sampling can introduce a number of other biases.

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