This is a study of conflict in the service sector of the economy, employing a new computer system for analyzing written text. It will systematically examine some of the hypothesized ways that prior case studies suggest labor strikes in the service sector may differ from strikes in the industrial sector: 1) threats of strikes and actions short of strikes but greater willingness to resolve disputes without resorting to open conflict; 2) positional power of some workers; 3) third-party involvement in labor relations, particularly the state and the public; 4) political vulnerability of state officials as employers. Data on 3,767 individual labor disputes, in both service and industrial sectors, have been coded from 14,016 newspaper articles. The present project will carry out data analysis after some further data checking and validation. %%% The research employs a linguistic, computer-based methodology for collecting and analyzing text, based on semantic grammars. The investigator has developed a prototype software system, "Program for Computer-Assisted Coding of Events," that follows closely the linguistic underpinning of the grammar and that structures narrative text in relational form. Once the data are in this form, a set of procedures using Structured Query Language extracts the desired information. The present research project is a demanding test of this computer-based approach to the analysis of textual materials. Success would permit scaling the system up to larger computers and potentially to the National Information Infrastructure, and results of this work will inform the development of alternative linguistic tools for the NII. %%% Given the shift of emphasis in modern societies from industry to service, this research will increase scientific understanding of the labor conflict dynamics of a major sector of the economy. Thus it will contribute to industrial sociology, economic sociology, and economics. In addition the methodological innovations in the computer-assisted analysis of text has the potential to contribute to a wide range of social sciences.
