Bill -- thanks for the note about the socio-etc. This seems basic, to me.
And the other two point (I'm thinking of them as separate):
a. Activity theory. I am being actively discouraged, explicitly, by my
department (by my department and my executive committee during my third year
review, which otherwise went fine, and in my third year review letter) from
doing anything with AT. It is not an Industrial Relations concept. (I can go
on and on, here.) But I have been told (and I think it's probably true) that
when I come up for tenure, they'll send out tenure review letters, and if my
'academic identity" has "Activity Theory" connected with it, I will be regarded
as a flake and will fail to get tenure.
So this is a bit of a bother.
b. Co-Authors. In Labor Education, working with a co-author from the field
is pretty normal. It's a good way for a university person to get access to a
unionized workplace. Unions are justifiably uninterested in having someone come
and study them. Although over the years, this has probably contributed to many
average people in the public not knowing much abut what it means to work in a
unionized workplace, there is a whole lot goes on that will look strange to an
outsider and unions are just not interested in having their internal efforts
studied by someone who is going to require a lot of education and will probably
never figure out which way was up. Imagine if someone tried to do an
ethnogaphic study of an army in battle and didn't understand that there really
was a war going on. So for exmaple, I co-authored an article on how a public
sector union responds to welfare reform with the local president and
vice-president (this was in this spring's issue of Labor Studies Journal). The
learning was definitely mutual; I got to learn a whole lot about what it takes
to run a good, fast defensive campaign and they became more involved in the
labor education scene (including starting to come to our annual conference and
join our prof. association, UALE.)
Is that what you had in mind when you asked what I had learned? Seems to me
your question was designed to be as open-ended as possible, and I don't want to
go on and on.
Helena
Bill Barowy wrote:
> In the middle of looking for trouble, I forgot a couple extremely important
> things that I wanted to comment on your paper right up front, and then a
> brain-cramp set in, and they slipped.
>
> 1) You set the social-historical circumstances around the project very well.
> It reads nicely.
>
> 2) Working with a co-author and bringing activity theory into the
> conversation are strategies of high interest to me -- can you comment some
> more about what you have learned with these approaches?
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