Stuck on blog
I'm up past my bedtime, which is far too typical. I am unfortunately stuck on a piece of research that I've been working on for quite some time—really, far too long. The data comes from the same study that How the Other Half Works (my book co-authored with Roger Waldinger) is based on. What we did for this study was interview managers with hiring responsibilities in six industries in Los Angeles County in the early 1990s (a long time ago already!).
The paper I'm working on concerns the hotel industry specifically. I don't have time to go into all of the background on the piece right now. I really just want to get down some thoughts about it before I go to bed that I can reflect on later.
The problem I'm having is partly one of framing and partly one of organization. The evidence I have comes almost exclusively from relatively short conversations with managers about what they do when hiring, how they think about the jobs they're hiring for, and what they think about racially/ethnically distinctive groups of workers. (The other evidence I have is from U.S. government surveys, primarily the decennial Census of Population.) What I want to know about is how managers take race/ethnicity and citizenship/immigration status into account when making hiring decisions. They don't tell me that, of course—they (almost) universally say that they select the "best person" regardless of personal characteristics. It is evident, however, that personal characteristics are part of what makes someone the best person. For example, in area of the hotel dominated by Spanish-speaking workers, there is a strong bias against hiring English-language monolinguals even though speaking Spanish is not a formal qualification for the job (in most instances). Being able to get along with others is an important consideration to many managers, and managers readily admit that being "like" the others one has to get along with is an important part of being able to get along.
The framing problem has to do with what I can say relative to the literatures on labor market structure (dualism/segmentation), immigrant economic incorporation (ethnic niches, ethnic economies), native-immigrant and black-immigrant labor market competition (including both wage and job competition and the evidence at the national and local levels), labor market discrimination (including pure prejudice, statistical discrimination, cognitive models, and job/labor queues), and more! In the quantitative model, I'm supposed to formulate a research question, come up with some hypotheses that follow from the question given the literature, and then test the hypotheses with the given data. This is primarily a piece of qualitative research, however. Still, I should have a research question that drives everything. The problem is that I can't decide precisely what the research question is; it keeps shifting. It's clear, however, that the research question has to be one that can be answered (at least in part) given the data at hand, and as I said the data at hand is what managers say about themselves, what they do, and what they think about certain jobs and various kinds of workers. We know that what people tell us about themselves and what they do is not the same as an "objective" report on who they are, what they do, or what they think because (a) there are often parts of what people do and think that are invisible to them (typically because they think of these things as natural and given and therefore unworthy of notice), (b) there are parts of what people do and think that are embarrassing to them (and possibly dangerous to them, if articulated) and therefore either omitted or distorted, and (c) there is a well-known disconnection between what people think and what they do.
In any event, I had tried to refocus the piece around the "cognitive maps" of employers. Cognitive maps are mental tools that people use to help them "navigate" the world; in this instance, they are tools that help them make employment decisions. I conceive of these maps as linking personal attributes of individuals with the attributes that managers most desire in workers for specific positions. The idea was that an understanding of these cognitive maps is the primary insight that we need to gain in order to understand what employers actually do when they hire. That is, managers have told us how they think; what we've done is to organize what they've told us into a coherent map of the world. This is an appealing way to go, but I don't think I can sustain it.
Instead, I'm thinking that I need to focus on job queues/labor queues as an explanation for racial/ethnic/immigration status change in the hotel industry. Between 1970 and 2000, the racial/ethnic/immigration status composition of the hotel industry in Los Angeles County changed drastically. For those who are concerned about the impact of immigration on the labor market prospects of natives, the hotel industry is a case that clearly deserves attention. The key question is "what accounts for demographic change in the industry?" However, although many of our respondents addressed the past, the interviews were basically cross-sectional, focusing on the particular time (1992-93) in which they were conducted. These interviews are good at revealing certain aspects of the state of things at this time, but not so good at telling us what happened during the 1970s and the first part of the 1980s. We can, of course, make inferences about the past based on what we're told about the present, but the present is sufficiently different from the past, especially from the early 1970s, to make that exercise questionable.
Initially, I was going to argue that demographic change in the industry was an entirely benign process, wherein incoming Latino immigrants assumed positions that were being abandoned by natives, White, Black, and Latino. Examination of data on the experienced unemployed/non-employed seems to contradict this position, but I'm not sure if I want to include that data (it's iffy and somewhat of a digression). I want to trace the history of the demographic transition because that's the history of the present (or the present of the interviews)--the context within which the interviews make sense.
The article can be about what employers do, taking their word for it. The article can be about what employers think, taking their word for it, more or less. We can compare what they say they do and think against our understanding of discrimination and against our understanding of labor/job queues. But this doesn't answer our question about what accounts for demographic change.
OK, I'm completely running out of time ...
The main thought I had that I wanted to get down here was that we can talk about job queues and labor queues. Job queues are what workers construct when they evaluate jobs relative to each other (in the abstract), placing, e.g., a job as a supervisor in an ice cream factory above, e.g., scrubbing toilets in a hospital. Labor queues are what managers construct when they evaluate workers relative to each other (in the abstract), placing, e.g., women above men and Latinos above Blacks for hotel housekeeping positions. My contention would be that in 1970, hotel housekeeping jobs were higher in the job queues of native workers than they were in 2000. This is for a few reasons, including the fact that native workers were better-educated in 2000 than they were in 1970, leading to increased job prospects (and aspirations); that more occupations were open to women in 2000 than in 1970, so that women (who comprise almost all of the housekeeping workers) had more alternatives, and finally because, as Piore suggested, these jobs have become immigrant jobs and are therefore seen as undesirable. (Alternatively, they could be seen as undesirable immigrant jobs because immigrant dominance makes the jobs difficult to obtain as a result of linguistic shift, immigrant hostility, and other processes of social closure.)
Argh! This isn't getting me anywhere. Another place to start is with the bad attitudes/good soldiers dichotomy. In this view, working class workers are all sneered at by employers, but not for the same reasons. Black workers are thought of as too uppity and ambitious, whereas Latino workers are thought of as hard-working but unambitious. These are employer impressions of workers that (especially for the Latinos) do not correspond to notions of discriminatinon. They do suggest an ordering for the labor queue (they may disapprove of low ambition among housekeepers, but they really do count on it, so it's not truly a liability for them to hire people with low ambition except in the long run). OK, that's got to be it ...
The paper I'm working on concerns the hotel industry specifically. I don't have time to go into all of the background on the piece right now. I really just want to get down some thoughts about it before I go to bed that I can reflect on later.
The problem I'm having is partly one of framing and partly one of organization. The evidence I have comes almost exclusively from relatively short conversations with managers about what they do when hiring, how they think about the jobs they're hiring for, and what they think about racially/ethnically distinctive groups of workers. (The other evidence I have is from U.S. government surveys, primarily the decennial Census of Population.) What I want to know about is how managers take race/ethnicity and citizenship/immigration status into account when making hiring decisions. They don't tell me that, of course—they (almost) universally say that they select the "best person" regardless of personal characteristics. It is evident, however, that personal characteristics are part of what makes someone the best person. For example, in area of the hotel dominated by Spanish-speaking workers, there is a strong bias against hiring English-language monolinguals even though speaking Spanish is not a formal qualification for the job (in most instances). Being able to get along with others is an important consideration to many managers, and managers readily admit that being "like" the others one has to get along with is an important part of being able to get along.
The framing problem has to do with what I can say relative to the literatures on labor market structure (dualism/segmentation), immigrant economic incorporation (ethnic niches, ethnic economies), native-immigrant and black-immigrant labor market competition (including both wage and job competition and the evidence at the national and local levels), labor market discrimination (including pure prejudice, statistical discrimination, cognitive models, and job/labor queues), and more! In the quantitative model, I'm supposed to formulate a research question, come up with some hypotheses that follow from the question given the literature, and then test the hypotheses with the given data. This is primarily a piece of qualitative research, however. Still, I should have a research question that drives everything. The problem is that I can't decide precisely what the research question is; it keeps shifting. It's clear, however, that the research question has to be one that can be answered (at least in part) given the data at hand, and as I said the data at hand is what managers say about themselves, what they do, and what they think about certain jobs and various kinds of workers. We know that what people tell us about themselves and what they do is not the same as an "objective" report on who they are, what they do, or what they think because (a) there are often parts of what people do and think that are invisible to them (typically because they think of these things as natural and given and therefore unworthy of notice), (b) there are parts of what people do and think that are embarrassing to them (and possibly dangerous to them, if articulated) and therefore either omitted or distorted, and (c) there is a well-known disconnection between what people think and what they do.
In any event, I had tried to refocus the piece around the "cognitive maps" of employers. Cognitive maps are mental tools that people use to help them "navigate" the world; in this instance, they are tools that help them make employment decisions. I conceive of these maps as linking personal attributes of individuals with the attributes that managers most desire in workers for specific positions. The idea was that an understanding of these cognitive maps is the primary insight that we need to gain in order to understand what employers actually do when they hire. That is, managers have told us how they think; what we've done is to organize what they've told us into a coherent map of the world. This is an appealing way to go, but I don't think I can sustain it.
Instead, I'm thinking that I need to focus on job queues/labor queues as an explanation for racial/ethnic/immigration status change in the hotel industry. Between 1970 and 2000, the racial/ethnic/immigration status composition of the hotel industry in Los Angeles County changed drastically. For those who are concerned about the impact of immigration on the labor market prospects of natives, the hotel industry is a case that clearly deserves attention. The key question is "what accounts for demographic change in the industry?" However, although many of our respondents addressed the past, the interviews were basically cross-sectional, focusing on the particular time (1992-93) in which they were conducted. These interviews are good at revealing certain aspects of the state of things at this time, but not so good at telling us what happened during the 1970s and the first part of the 1980s. We can, of course, make inferences about the past based on what we're told about the present, but the present is sufficiently different from the past, especially from the early 1970s, to make that exercise questionable.
Initially, I was going to argue that demographic change in the industry was an entirely benign process, wherein incoming Latino immigrants assumed positions that were being abandoned by natives, White, Black, and Latino. Examination of data on the experienced unemployed/non-employed seems to contradict this position, but I'm not sure if I want to include that data (it's iffy and somewhat of a digression). I want to trace the history of the demographic transition because that's the history of the present (or the present of the interviews)--the context within which the interviews make sense.
The article can be about what employers do, taking their word for it. The article can be about what employers think, taking their word for it, more or less. We can compare what they say they do and think against our understanding of discrimination and against our understanding of labor/job queues. But this doesn't answer our question about what accounts for demographic change.
OK, I'm completely running out of time ...
The main thought I had that I wanted to get down here was that we can talk about job queues and labor queues. Job queues are what workers construct when they evaluate jobs relative to each other (in the abstract), placing, e.g., a job as a supervisor in an ice cream factory above, e.g., scrubbing toilets in a hospital. Labor queues are what managers construct when they evaluate workers relative to each other (in the abstract), placing, e.g., women above men and Latinos above Blacks for hotel housekeeping positions. My contention would be that in 1970, hotel housekeeping jobs were higher in the job queues of native workers than they were in 2000. This is for a few reasons, including the fact that native workers were better-educated in 2000 than they were in 1970, leading to increased job prospects (and aspirations); that more occupations were open to women in 2000 than in 1970, so that women (who comprise almost all of the housekeeping workers) had more alternatives, and finally because, as Piore suggested, these jobs have become immigrant jobs and are therefore seen as undesirable. (Alternatively, they could be seen as undesirable immigrant jobs because immigrant dominance makes the jobs difficult to obtain as a result of linguistic shift, immigrant hostility, and other processes of social closure.)
Argh! This isn't getting me anywhere. Another place to start is with the bad attitudes/good soldiers dichotomy. In this view, working class workers are all sneered at by employers, but not for the same reasons. Black workers are thought of as too uppity and ambitious, whereas Latino workers are thought of as hard-working but unambitious. These are employer impressions of workers that (especially for the Latinos) do not correspond to notions of discriminatinon. They do suggest an ordering for the labor queue (they may disapprove of low ambition among housekeepers, but they really do count on it, so it's not truly a liability for them to hire people with low ambition except in the long run). OK, that's got to be it ...
posted by mightbe at 7:06 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home