Apples and Oranges Revisited: Contextualized Comparisons and the Study of Comparative Labor Politics
Apples and Oranges Revisited: Contextualized Comparisons and the Study of Comparative Labor Politics
复制标题
重温苹果和橙子：情境比较和比较劳工政治研究
DOI：
10.1177/0032329295023003004
复制
发表时间：
1995
影响因子：
2.4
通讯作者：
K. Thelen
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
R. Locke;K. Thelen
导言所有发达工业国家的劳工流动都面临着共同的挑战(例如，国际竞争条件的变化、大规模的工业变革、分散谈判的压力和增加的“灵活性”)。国际竞争和技术创新的新术语从根本上改变了市场和生产组织。同时，全球化和国家市场的分割使所有发达工业国家的传统商业做法变得不那么有效。技术创新不仅缩短了产品生命周期，还为公司创造了在各种新维度上竞争的机会。2国家市场的分裂促使个别公司甚至整个行业尝试各种替代商业战略，以检验和/或超越传统的劳资关系做法。在世界各地，工会都遇到了要求更大的“灵活性”的新压力，这往往与雇主要求下放谈判权力有关。3本文考察了这些变化对劳动专业学生的影响，因为他们试图理解正在出现的新的劳动成败模式，以及制度的弹性和崩溃。解决这些问题的传统方法是专注于一个单一的过程，如讨价还价、权力下放或工作重组，并将其作为跨国比较的基础。在这篇文章中，我们列出了一种基于我们所说的“情景比较”的替代研究策略。这一替代方法建立在许多劳工学者从不同理论和方法角度进行的先前研究的基础上，并对其进行了扩展。特别是，我们在很大程度上依赖于最近的制度主义和我们所说的“政治建构主义”分析。4通过推动机构分析的核心类别，我们展示了共同的国际压力实际上如何折射为围绕特定国家做法的不同斗争。然后，借鉴政治建构主义方法的见解，我们展示了为什么在任何给定的国家内，某些问题(而不是其他问题)会引发激烈的冲突，因为它们与联盟身份本身所依赖的基础联系在一起。情景比较并不是为了取代传统的“匹配比较”，而是对传统的“匹配比较”的补充；它们通过突出传统文献认为非常不同的案例之间出人意料的相似之处，并反过来强调通常被视为“最相似”的案例之间的显著差异，为劳动学术带来了新的见解。本文分为三个部分。第一部分概述了比较劳动研究的传统方法，并对其相对优势和劣势进行了评估。…
Introduction Common challenges (e.g., changing conditions of international competition, massive industrial change, pressures for the decentralization of bargaining and increased "flexibility") confront labor movements in all the advanced industrial states. The new terms of international competition and technological innovation have radically altered markets and the organization of production. The simultaneous globalization and segmentation of national markets has rendered traditional business practices in all advanced industrial nations less effective. Technological innovations have not only shortened product life cycles but also created opportunities for firms to compete along a variety of new dimensions. 2 The break-up of national markets has spurred individual firms and even entire industries to experiment with a variety of alternative business strategies that test and/or transcend traditional industrial relations practices. Everywhere, unions have encountered new pressures for greater "flexibility", often in connection with demands from employers for a decentralization of bargaining. 3 This article examines the implications these changes hold for students of labor as they seek to make sense of emerging new patterns of labor success and failure, and of institutional resiliency and breakdown. The conventional approach to these questions is to focus on a single process like bargaining decentralization or work reorganization, and to use this as the basis for cross-national comparisons. In this article, we lay out an alternative research strategy based on what we call "contextualized comparisons." This alternative approach builds on and extends previous research by a number of labor scholars working from different theoretical and methodological perspectives. In particular, we rely heavily on recent institutionalist and what we call "political constructionist" analyses. 4 By pushing the core categories of institutional analysis, we demonstrate how common international pressures are in fact refracted into divergent struggles over particular national practices. Then, drawing on the insights of the political constructionist approach, we show why within any given country certain issues (and not others) spark intense conflict because of the way they are connected to the foundations on which union identities themselves rest. Contextualized comparisons are not meant to displace but rather complement traditional "matched comparisons;" they bring new insights to labor scholarship by highlighting unexpected parallels 1 across cases that the conventional literature sees as very different, and conversely, by underscoring significant differences between cases typically seen as "most similar." This article is divided into three sections. The first part outlines the traditional approach to comparative labor research and assesses its relative strengths and weaknesses. …