Professor Martin and Grad Student Olsson win Dorothy Day Award
Professor Cathie Jo Martin and graduate student Erik Olsson, along with Dennie Oude Nijhuis (Leiden University) have been awarded the Dorothy Day Award for Outstanding Labor Research for their coauthored paper entitled “Culture, Coordination, and Liberalism: Industrial Relations and the Cultural Constraint” from the Labor Politics Organized Section, American Political Science Association. Congratulations!
Here is an abstract from the paper:
Denmark, the Netherlands and Sweden had institutional capacities for industrial coordination by the early twentieth century; in contrast, Britain failed to develop institutions for industrial cooperation. We explore how cultural conceptions of labor depicted in literature resonated with policy choices for industrial cooperation versus competition, using computational text analyses applied to large corpora of literary texts and brief case studies. Denmark, the Netherlands and Sweden shared similar cultural tropes (narratives and word associations) about labor, and these differed from British tropes. In snippets of text surrounding labor relations words, coordinated countries (unlike Britain) had cultural tropes associated with cooperation, the state and skills. Both coordinated and liberal countries experienced moments of class conflict, yet cultural depictions of labor found in coordinated countries eased the path to labor market coordination. The research has significance for our understanding of the role of culture in the evolution of modern political economies.