The Cultural Anthropology Program's funding priorities include investigations into the resilience and robustness of sociocultural systems, including research on adaptation, conflict resolution, and cooperation and altruism. This award supports an international workshop on labor unions, which are one mechanism through which the American economy has traditionally promoted conflict resolution and cooperation in the workplace. However, the prevalence of unions has declined over the past few decades. Studies suggest several different explanations, including economic change, government policy, and a national culture of individualism. However, anthropology is empirical and comparative and we have little equivalent empirical evidence from other countries for comparison that would help researchers determine which factor is more important or how they might work together. While anthropologists in Greece, Israel, Argentina, Sweden, China, Brazil, Turkey, Switzerland, Post-Soviet Eastern Europe, Mexico and Spain have been doing field studies of labor unions in their countries, they have not necessarily addressed the same questions. A comparative perspective will help researchers determine the dynamics of the processes involved.
This workshop will bring together an international group of anthropologists at the University of Iowa to discuss and compare their findings. The goal is to develop a new, comparative understanding of labor unions and the factors that affect them in contemporary national and international economies. Each workshop participant will write a chapter-length contribution to an edited volume that will be the major product of the workshop. The book will provide cross-cultural and cross-national empirical ethnographic evidence for understanding the role of organized labor in the process of globalization and the effects of culture and policy. The workshop will include graduate students and so will also launch a multi-generational network of anthropologists to carry on this work with an international perspective.
