A Gedenkschrift to Randy Hodson: Working with Dignity, edited by Lisa A. Keister and Vincent J. Roscigno. Emerald, Bingley, 2016, 237 pp., ISBN: 978‐1‐78560‐727‐1, £72.95, hardback.
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/bjir.12246 |
| Author | Tessa Wright |
| Published date | 01 September 2017 |
| Date | 01 September 2017 |
British Journal of Industrial Relations doi: 10.1111/bjir.12246
55:3 September 2017 0007–1080 pp. 676–683
BOOK REVIEWS
A Gedenkschrift to Randy Hodson: Workingwith Dignity, edited by Lisa A. Keister and
Vincent J. Roscigno. Emerald, Bingley, 2016, 237 pp., ISBN: 978-1-78560-727-1,
£72.95, hardback.
I came to this book as someone unfamiliar with the work of Randy Hodson, so this
review is written from the perspective of a neophyte, one of the intended audiences
of this book, although it also has much to oer readers already versed in Hodson’s
ideas. It is an edited collection of chapters in tribute to Randy Hodson’s influential
contribution to the sociology of work, published in the Research in the Sociology of
Work series. Its 10 chapters, plus introduction and preface, provide a personal and
intellectual tribute to Hodson, who died in 2015, and who, it seems, ‘worked with
dignity’ both at a personal level and as a concept to apply to workplace relations.
The breadth of Hodson’swork encompasses worker resistance and labouractivism,
inequalities in labour market outcomes and income, workplace bullying and worker
and management behaviour. Cornfield sets the scene by outlining Hodson’s key
contributions to the historical development of the sociology of work, starting in
the 1980s with pioneering work in new institutional analysis (or labour market
segmentation theory) that moved away from the largely individual level of the
status attainment model of social stratification to incorporate institutional eects on
individual earnings,such as industry structure, firm size and unionization. In the 1990s,
Hodson and others sought to include both structure and agency in understanding
worker behaviour, with his 1995 chapter ‘The worker as active subject’ developing a
typology of worker behaviours that spanned orientations towards individual, group
and organization goals.One of Hodson’s major contributions — referred to at several
points in the book — was the development of a new sociological method which
involved a team of researchers in a quantitative analysis of ethnographic accounts.
The Workplace Ethnography Project created a database of UK and US workplace
ethnographies, coded to allow for statistical comparisons of worker agency across
workers, workplaces, geography and time. This comparative method overcomes the
limitations of generalizability from single case studies, as Tomaskovic-Devey and
Avent-Holtnote in their chapter. Hodson used this methodology in his highlyregarded
2001 book Dignity at Work, pointing out that the achievement of dignity relies on
the ability of workers to exercise agency, but also on the realization of goals such
as ‘job satisfaction, a liveable place of work, and creativity and meaning in work’
(Hodson 2001: 237). Finally,Cornfield highlights the work he and Hodson engaged in
together to develop an international sociology of work, which recognized the variety
across geographical areas, but also identified core themes such as industrialization,
democratization and the role of trade unions, increasing women’s labour force
participation, immigration, etc.
C
2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
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