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O'Connor's Sectoral Model of the United States Economy: Examining Some Political Consequences

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2009

Carol Nackenoff
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Extract

During the past fifteen years, several economists, historians and sociologists have propounded a sectoral model of economic growth and change in the United States. According to this analysis, as large-scale, monopolistic enterprises began to emerge in the late nineteenth century, different investment considerations and labour market requirements were also evolving. A dual economy was beginning to be formed. The large-scale capital sector, and the small-scale capital sector each had its own economic environment of conduct. Each sector tended, too, to develop its own corresponding labour market, with monopoly sector or ‘core’ firms holding out certain economic advantages for employees: money, job security, benefits, and opportunities for advancement within the firm. Thus, the work experience in these two sectors increasingly diverged. Even if the large-scale capital sector did offer economic advantages, growth tended to be capital-intensive, and the growth of employment in this sector slowed down, and then stopped by the end of the Second World War. Employment shifted to trades and services, with lower wage rates, and, of course, to the public sector, which currently employs nearly a third of the American workforce.

Type
Notes and Comments
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 12 , Issue 2 , April 1982 , pp. 227 - 239
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1982

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References

1 Of great importance to the exploration of economic dualism is the work of Robert-Averitt, who has distinguished between centre and periphery firms in the United States (Averitt, Robert T., The Dual Economy (New York: W. W. Norton, 1968)Google Scholar). The time-trend argument is his.

2 In addition to O'Connor, James, The Fiscal Crisis of the State (New York: St Martin's Press, 1973)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, the reader is referred to the following: Berger, Suzanne and Piore, Michael J., Dualism and Discontinuity in Industrial Societies (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980)Google Scholar; Doeringer, Peter B. and Piore, Michael J., Internal Labor Markets and Manpower Analysis (Washington, DC: Office of Manpower Research, US Department of Labor, 1970)Google Scholar; Edwards, Richard C., ‘The Social Relations of Production in the Firm and Labor Market Structure’, Politics and Society, V (1975). 83–108CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Edwards, Richard C., Contested Terrain (New York: Basic Books, 1979)Google Scholar; Reich, Michael, Gordon, David M. and Edwards, Richard C., ‘A Theory of Labor Market Segmentation’, American Economic Review, LXIII (1973), 359–65Google Scholar; Stone, Katherine, ‘The Origins of Job Structures in the Steel Industry’, Review of Radical Political Economics, VI (1974), 113–73Google Scholar; and Weinstein, James, The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State 1900–1918 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968).Google Scholar

3 Hodson, Randy, ‘Labor Force Participation and Earnings in the Core, Peripheral and State Sectors of Production’, manuscript published in revised form in Politics and Society, VIII (1978), 429–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 Michael J. Piore makes a case for the discrete quality of labour markets in Berger, and Piore, , Dualism and Discontinuity in Industrial Societies, Chap. 2Google Scholar. Sam Rosenberg discusses some evidence concerning mobility from secondary to primary labour market jobs in ‘Marxian Reserve Army of Labor and the Dual Labor Market’, Politics and Society, VII (1977), 221–8.Google Scholar

5 While I have adopted broader occupational groupings than those used by Hodson, this follows in the spirit of the classification scheme he developed.

6 The occupational classification takes into consideration arguments made by Braverman, Harry, Labor and Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974)Google Scholar, and Wright, Erik Olin, Class, Crisis and the State (London: New Left Books, 1978).Google Scholar

7 For each year of the General Social Survey except 1972, respondents were asked whether we spend too much, about the right amount or too little money on the space exploration program; on improving and protecting the environment; on improving and protecting the nation's health; on solving the problems of the big cities; on halting the rising crime rate; on dealing with drug addition; on improving the nation's educational system; on improving the conditions of blacks; on the military, armaments and defence; on foreign aid; and on welfare. All eleven spending priority items were examined for underlying dimensions; only two factors emerged with relative clarity.

8 See Kernhauser, William, The Politics of Mass Society (New York: Free Press, 1959)Google Scholar; Lipset, Seymour Martin, Political Man (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1960)Google Scholar; Riesman, David, with Glazer, Nathan and Denney, Reuel, The Lonely Crowd (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1961)Google Scholar; and Verba, Sidney and Nie, Norman H., Participation in America (New York: Harper and Row, 1972)Google Scholar for some of these arguments.