Diane, thanks for the kind words and the mention of Raymond Williams.
The "mangerial" tone is what I'm talking about in industrial relations. I'd
express this by saying ID research has a unitary view of its field that
foregrounds the production process above all other processes.
How would AT deal with racism, sexism, homophobia, the conditions of sweatshop
workers, linguistic segregation? Well, at the very least it enables the
researcher to move around inside the system and see these as nodes of
contradiction in a set of nested contexts...they become visible. If your
focus is entirely on how productivity increases, you can't tell whether these
social relationships are taking place -- these social processes, actually,
because these are all actions.
Labor educators draw on a broad curriculum of materials to teach union rank
and file and leadership about these very concerns -- they're important because
they tear a union apart and make organizing next to impossible. These
educators are the people who I expect will find activity theory so intuitive
that they will wonder why we're even talking about it. But when we shift from
thinking about teaching to thinking about research, the need for some other
kind of theoretical framework becomes apparent because labor educators have to
present at the same conferences and publish in the same journals as the
industrial relations people. If the theoretical framework isn't explicit,
there can't be conversation about it.
Is this what you mean by "compicating the way relations are hierarchically
structured...?"
Helena
Diane Hodges wrote:
> helena,
> i read your article and thought i post methoughts, because i see promise
> in the prospect of providing labour relations with different methods for
> thinking
> about labour as a set of relations.
>
> having read a bit of the academic lit on labour and labour relations,
> (don't ask why) i've found the analyses to be more "managerial" in
> looking at the ways relations are "managed" - very similar to education,
> where the ways curriculum, or student behaviour is "managed" by the
> teacher -
>
> while i am not sure how AT can help unwrite some of these discourses of
> management, i see possibilities for complicating the ways relations are
> hierarchically structured, by norms of traditional practice written in any
> industrial or commercial history -
>
> to think about how tradition functions in these settings, i highly
> recommend
> Raymond Williams as a source for critiques on tradition, that is, how
> tradition
> functions to reify practice, language, relations, and so on,
> and how traditions are coded in ways to affirm their existence as normal
> and invisible at the same time, -
>
> i wonder how AT can deal with issues of racism, for example, in particular
> labour
> settings, like agricultural; how it can deal with sexism in traditionally
> male-dominated
> contexts, such as military, police, fire-fighters, heavy industrial
> labour,
> construction, and technology development -
>
> and i wonder how AT addresses the situation of queers in-relation to
> unions -
> i read an article about union changes being made at a GM plant and the
> ostracization of queers who tried to participate, to extent that several
> quit, unable to tolerate their being specific targets during the union
> negotiations, -
> i wonder how AT can address sweat-shops, where immigrant women work for
> piece-work wages in intolerable conditions, unable to negotiate for fear
> of being
> reported to immigration authorities, or because of language differences.
>
> mostly i wanted to tell you that i appreciated your concluding paragraph,
>
> >But for
> >academics in industrial relations, a theoretical framework that lays out
> >an
> >approach that is essentially non-unitary, that looks for problems rather
> >than norms, that enables a shifting perspective, that requires us to
> >consider how the subject -- the worker, for example -- is socially
> >constructed as an individual and as part of a collective, might be
> >refreshing. In addition, employed on a very large scale, it might help us
> >reflect on the multiple nested contexts of academic disciplines that are
> >presently neighbors, but not always engaged, in our interdisciplinary
> >field.
>
> in the way it points to progress amongst academics, in-relation to
> labour policy and labour changes, that is, bridging the distances within
> the academy towards more
> (and much needed) interdisciplinary approaches.
> thanks for the read.
> i enjoyed it.
>
> diane
>
> **********************************************************************
> :point where everything listens.
> and i slow down, learning how to
> enter - implicate and unspoken (still) heart-of-the-world.
>
> (Daphne Marlatt, "Coming to you")
> ***********************************************************************
>
> diane celia hodges
>
> university of british columbia, centre for the study of curriculum and
> instruction
> ==================== ==================== =======================
> university of colorado, denver, school of education
>
> Diane_Hodges@ceo.cudenver.edu
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