Fall 2003
Robert Goldman
Bodine 211
e-mail: goldman@lclark.edu
phone: 503 768 7662

office hours: MW 2:30-4:30, Thursday afternoon

This course examines work, leisure and consumption as intertwined social, cultural and economic relationships. Sociologists in the tradition of historical materialism view production relations as pivotal in shaping the basic institutional frameworks that condition almost all other spheres of social life. This is especially so in an economy where labor is organized through markets -- those not engaged in paid labor in such societies are either unemployed, retired, or perform non-paid labor (the latter, historically, a role performed primarily by women).

Each of these latter categories immediately conjures up moral connotations as well. In modern market-based societies labor is not just a material imperative, it has also been an idealized activity that rooted in moral judgments. The work ethic has been a prized cultural possession of the middle classes. Until the twentieth century, work's opposite -- leisure -- was deemed sinful by some, a luxury by others. The social and cultural changes that have occurred in the twentieth century with respect to work, leisure and consumption have been vast. In the most capitalist societies, many people now practice an ethic of consumption. In contrast to the asceticism practiced by those who embraced the Protestant work ethic, today we see an uneasy drift towards an ethos of commodity hedonism. How did the mechanization and bureaucratization of work change the experience and meaning of work? What historical forces made leisure and consumption activities more attractive and acceptable to people? Has work been devalued?

Just as scholars were proclaiming the US a post-industrial leisure society in the 1970s, the tides turned again and leisure time began a long-term decline for many people. A massive process known as "deindustrialization," began in the mid 1970s and resulted in the loss of heavy industrial jobs such as steel production and machine building, and triggered the erosion of many relatively high-skill and thus, high-paying, union jobs. At the same time, the aggregate economic importance of consumption has continued to expand. In fact, many areas that have been hard hit by the loss of industrial firms and skilled jobs have tried to replace these jobs with tourist-based or service-sector economies. Think also of how many urban landscapes are now dominated by shopping malls and gallerias.

Today, processes of "corporate downsizing" and “outsourcing” continue, as "lean and mean" corporations continue to reshape themselves to compete in global markets. But now it is getting difficult to annually coax sufficient Christmas purchases from consumers who are making less money as workers. What will the relationship be between our work identities and our consumer identities as we enter an age that some have labeled as "postmodern" (in part because the salience of consumption has become so pervasive)?

Linked to downsizing and deindustrialization is the emergence of the “high-tech” economy driven by computers and advanced telecommunications. How will the emerging computer and Internet technologies transform the social relations of work? Will telecommuting become widespread, literally changing the spatial arrangements of our cities? Do new technologies have the capacity to do away with the authoritarian and controlling relationships that have dominated workplaces since industrialization? Or will these new technologies be used to more closely monitor and surveil employees' work behaviors? How will the changing organization of workplaces in conjunction with new technologies alter income inequalities? Can these new technologies actually increase productivity enough to offset the loss of other industries?

And now my usual caveat. Every syllabus makes choices, and hence must also leave out major issues and relationships. Among the matters not explicitly addressed in this syllabus are the critical importance of labor migration; the computerized monitoring of work activity; the often tense relationship between work life and family life (e.g., child care arrangements, or family leave policies); the history of labor unions; the funding of pensions and benefits; or sexual harassment in the workplace, to name but a few. My intent is that we will be address these issues anyhow in our conversations and weave them into our journey.


Required Books:
Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. 2001. Metropolitan Books.

Juliet Schor. The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure. 1991. Basic Books.

Leah Hager Cohen, Glass, Paper, Beans: revelations on the nature and value of ordinary things. 1997. Currency Doubleday.

Richard Sennett, The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism. 1998. Norton.

Jeremy Rifkin, The End of Work. 1996. Tarcher/Putnam.

John De Graaf, et al, Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic. Barrett-Koehler Publishing. 2002.


Course synopsis:
We'll begin with Barbara Ehrenreich's recent writings about her experiences of working at low-wage jobs in America. Similar to Barbara Garson's All the Livelong Day: The Meaning & Demeaning of Routine Work written in the 1980s, Ehrenreich addresses the meanings and experiences of people's worklives. Work at, or near, minimum wage, is usually manual labor or service labor.

C. Wright Mills' essay launches us into a discussion of what "work" has meant in our culture -- both as an idealized work ethic and as an alienating experience. We will revisit this thematic issue throughout the course because the gap between the ideal and what people experience has deep implications for how we structure work, leisure and consumption activities and where people place their energies.

Juliet Schor's overview of the shifting balance between work and non-work activities over the last century and a half gets us looking at a wide range of issues including the seemingly paradoxical relationship between labor saving devices for the home and the increasing time spent on household labor by women.

The section on commodity chains is intended to get us thinking about the many linkages today between the realm of production and the realm of consumption. For example, we will look at Benetton and Nike in this regard. We will examine how the production of consumer-goods items is now often orchestrated from half a world away in the new global economy. We shall examine these questions by reading the book by Leah Cohen Hager as she follows three objects - glass, paper, and coffee beans - through the relationships that get them to their end-user.

Harry Braverman's pathbreaking analysis of the division of labor and his thesis concerning the twin processes of "the degradation of labor" and the "deskilling" of work in the twentieth century will push us to examine how new technologies have generally been organized to regulate control over the work site as well as control over wages. There is a vast literature on the everyday "politics" of the workplace and Braverman gets us looking at those questions surrounding the "labor process."

C. Wright Mills writing at mid-century described the transformation from industrialization to a white-collar society. Robert Reich, a Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration, has written about the extension of the white collar worker into the next stage of occupational development, which he calls the "rise of the symbolic analyst." The flip side of what Reich describes is documented by Maria Fernandez-Kelly in her study of how the international division of labor depends more and more on low-wage female labor forces in maquiladora work. And more recently we have begun to hear again about sweatshops both in the US and in developing regions of the global system. Carla Freeman's essay looks at the outsourcing of pink-collar work: another aspect of globalization, this process falls between the poles of skilled and unskilled labor.

We will examine in greater depth the relationship between technology and the changing face of the workforce in our reading of Jeremy Rifkin’s provocative book, The End of Work. Rifkin takes on some of the big questions about new relationships between advanced technologies and jobs and the quality of life.

The section on leisure and consumption begins by looking at our cultural history concerning the meanings of consumption. Beginning early in the 20th century, the reorganization of worklife along with dramatic growth in material production, brought about a revolution in leisure and consumption. Rodney Clapp's essay counterposes the shift from ascetic religions to the cult of consumption. As many authors have observed, there took place a shift from the work-based notion of 'character' to the leisure consumption notions of 'personality' and 'style.' Readings by Schor, Willis and Glassner, and Fiske bring us to current work/leisure arrangements and the kinds of selves and relationships they give rise to. One major theme of this section concerns questions about how we construct identities through consumption in the contemporary era.

The final section focuses on tourist consumption and the spaces that have been corporately constructed for these activities -- malls and theme parks. In what has been labeled as The Society of the Spectacle, shopping malls and theme parks have emerged as important extensions of the media as spaces for organizing consumption and experience. It thus seems appropriate to take up questions concerning tourism and the construction of vast theme parks such as Disney World.


Assignments and Course Grading:

Your intellectual participation in this class is essential. That means both thought and action. Ultimately that is what I will have to evaluate you on. Class attendance. A basic obligation of your being in this course is attending class, and coming prepared to be an active participant. Attendance is required. If you have been in class every time then it can only work in your favor when it comes time to evaluate your work! No grade points towards the final grade are gained from attendance; however, absences will count against the final grade. Here is how it works. Attendance will be taken each class day. Four absences will be permitted. Upon a fifth absence however, one letter grade will be taken off the overall course grade. And so on -- for every additional absence, another half grade point will be subtracted.

There will be a mid-term exam. Taken together, the exam and classroom participation in discussion of readings and application of ideas will be weighted as 40% of your total course grade.

The other 60% of the total course grade will be based on two papers and an Internet Web project and presentation that will be scheduled as the Final. Two papers are required. Please select two of the options presented here. Eight pages each. Due dates are weeks 6 and 12.

1) Research how a technological change has altered the social conditions and relations of work in either a particular industry or in particular kinds of jobs. E.g., barcodes or manual typewriters .

2) Start with a tool or a set of tools and explore how tools shape, and are shaped by, the mode of production or consumption that prevails at a given historical moment. You might start in an "antique" store which has tools from an earlier era, or at a firm like Intel where people work with very different kinds of tools. Again, work backwards from the tool to reconstruct the social relations that surround its use.

3) Start with an object of consumption -- for example, a ball point pen, a shoe, an automobile, a computer, a skirt, a dirt bike, a hamburger, etc. -- and then research the chain of production relations and distribution relations associated with that object before it reached you the consumer. You may also want to trace out the "post-consumption" environmental consequences linked to the commodity. And, remember that some commodities have an "afterlife" -- e.g., yard sales, flea markets.

4) In recent decades labor force composition has changed dramatically. Research an aspect of labor force changes in relation to an issue such as the glass ceiling, or occupational segregation, or the structuring of benefits, etc.

Recent incarnations of this course have each produced Web sites around the questions posed in this course. To continue to develop this new tradition, I'd like you to examine critically the materials that currently comprise these web sites and consider ways in which we can make these pages better. I urge you to construct these assignments as multi-media presentations rather than as simply written documents. You may choose to work alone or in groups (of up to four persons) on your Web projects. I encourage and reward efforts to work collaboratively, but I understand those who feel they work best alone.


Readings

Work Relations
Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America.

C. Wright Mills, "Work," pp.215-238 in White Collar. Oxford University Press, 1951

Commodity Chains -- linking consumption with production

Leah Hager Cohen, Glass, Paper, Beans: revelations on the nature and value of ordinary things.

Work Relations Continued

Juliet Schor, The Overworked American.
"The overworked American," pp.1-15.
"Time squeeze: the extra month of work," pp.17-41.
"A life at hard labor: capitalism and working hours," pp.43-82.
"Overwork in the household," pp.83-105.

Harry Braverman, Labor & Monopoly Capital in the Twentieth Century. Monthly Review Press, 1974.
"Labor and labor power," pp.45-58
"Division of labor," pp.70-84
"Scientific management," pp.85-122.
"Habituation of the worker," pp.139-152.

C. Wright Mills, "The Great Salesroom," pp.161-188 in White Collar. Oxford University Press, 1951.

Carla Freeman, "Designing Women: Corporate Discipline and Barbados' Off-Shore Pink Collar Sector," Cultural Anthropology, (1993) Vol. 8 (2):169-186.

Maria Patricia Fernandez-Kelly, "Mexican border industrialization, female labor force participation & migration," pp.205-223 in June Nash & Maria Patricia Fernandez-Kelly (eds.), Women, Men, and the International Division of Labor. SUNY, 1983.

Jeremy Rifkin, The End of Work.
“The two faces of technology,” pp.3-56.
"The third industrial revolution,” pp.59-106.
“The decline of the global labor force,” pp.109-162.
‘The price of progress,” pp.165-217.
“The dawn of the post-market era,” pp.221-295.

Richard Sennett, The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism.


Leisure and Consumption

Juliet Schor, The Overworked American.
"The insidious cycle of work-and-spend," pp.107-138.
"Exiting the squirrel cage," pp.139-165.

Rodney Clapp, "Why the Devil Takes Visa," Christianity Today, October 7, 1996, pp.19-33.

John De Graaf, et al, Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic. Barrett-Koehler Publishing. 2002.

Susan Willis, A Primer for Daily Life. 1991. Routledge.
"Work(ing) Out," pp. 62-85.
"Playing house," pp.86-107.
"Sweet dreams," pp. 133-157.

Dean MacCannell, "Staged Authenticity," pp.91-107, in The Tourist. Schocken. 1976.

Barry Glassner, "Fitness & the Postmodern Self," Journal of Health & Social Behavior, v.30, June 1989, pp.180-91.

John Fiske, "Shopping for Pleasure: Malls, Power and Resistance," pp.13-42 in Reading the Popular. 1989.

Jon Goss, "Once-upon-a-time in the commodity world: an unofficial guide to the Mall of America," Annals of the Association of American Geographer, 89 (1), 1999, pp.45-75.




Readings that are not in the required books will be available on reserve in Watzek Library.