The Weak Suffer What They Must — A Natural Experiment in Thought and Structure
Client: American Anthropologist
Format: Academic journal
This piece appeared in American Anthropologist, this country’s top anthropological journal, in December 1999. It is part of a series of academic papers resulting from an anthropological study of a local union. Please note that all charts and graphs were removed in this online version.
Summary: Because of a change at a hospital we are able to contrast two different structures of leadership in a union worksite. Since we had tested a cognitive construct we call union consciousness before the change, the difference in structure provides a natural experiment to determine the consequences of structural change for cognition. We repeated the test after the change and found a different cognitive structure. We conclude that cognitive structures are not enduring configurations but that they change as structures change. This leads to the further conclusion that external structures are powerful determinants of patterns of thought.
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Introduction
For some the experiment is the hallmark of scientific research. An investigator deduces from theoretical conjecture and empirical findings that an independent variable is causally related to a dependent variable, determines procedures and practices by which to create a situation that tests the assertion, does the test, and assesses the results. Then philosophers take over and debate whether the finding confirms or merely fails to disconfirm the hypothesis while scientists integrate the result into the empirical findings and theoretical speculations of the field (Kuhn 1970; Kuznar 1997).
This is more or less the 19th century archetype of the practice of physics, which many take to be the ideal for scientific inquiry. Other sciences, among them, anthropology, developed techniques of observing and recording phenomena not readily amenable to experimental manipulation. However once in a while a natural experiment presents itself while we are observing and recording.
In the process of a study of a union local in Chicago (Durrenberger and Erem 1997a,b; Erem and Durrenberger 1997), I (Paul Durrenberger) had administered triads tests to the union local’s staff, stewards, and members at five hospitals and several industrial jobsites. Workers at a jobsite who are organized into a bargaining unit of a union local elect co-workers to enforce the provisions of the contract, convey worker concerns to management, help bargain new contracts, resolve worksite problems, and if they cannot be easily resolved by talking with supervisors, representing the worker at a second step grievance hearing with the supervisor. If this fails to untangle the difficulty, the steward may call a union representative who the local hires to represent members at a number of worksites. The union rep, as they are called, can represent the member at a third step hearing with the department manager and the company’s vice-president of human resources. If the grievance is not resolved at the third step hearing, and if both sides agree, it can be submitted to the judgment of an arbitrator whose decision is binding.
Thus law and practice have established a set of roles for dealing with workplace problems through union mechanisms. In the parlance of cognitive anthropology there is an “etic grid,” (Kay 1966) as illustrated in Figure 1, a set of categories, which are not defined by the consciousness of participants. However, members also develop their own conceptual structures or folk models (Durrenberger 1996) concerning the same relationships. It was these I was testing with the triads test.