Loading...
Laboratories of Bureaucracy: The Development of Labor Market Institutions in Wisconsin, 1900-1940
Myers, Alexander J.
Myers, Alexander J.
Citations
Altmetric:
Abstract
How do formal institutions emerge and grow, and in what ways can they embody and even calcify the ideologies of the societies in which they exist? Using primary source documents from the University of Wisconsin Archives as well as the Wisconsin Historical Society, this research explores the origin and operation of some of the most important institutions in contemporary capitalist societies; these institutions include unemployment insurance, workman’s compensation and public employment exchanges that structured labor markets for the better part of a century. It asks who built them, the imprint they bear of their political, economic and ideological origins, and how the institutions and the actors inhabiting them fit into the broader evolution of social welfare in the United States. The three chapters are empirically interrelated but make theoretical contributions to three distinct literatures. By analyzing economist John Commons’ role in the creation of the Wisconsin Industrial Commission in 1911, the first chapter argues that individuals can have substantial and long-lasting impacts on even large, bureaucratic institutions. Commons did this by using his own theories as institutional blueprints for the Commission. The second chapter examines how the state’s investment in a system of public labor exchanges helped create a robust institutional infrastructure that propelled it to become the ideological center of social welfare administration during the New Deal. The third chapter takes a critical perspective on Wisconsin’s influential unemployment insurance model, arguing that making recipients’ benefits contingent upon an “active” job search and requiring job seekers to take the first available work, the state ossified a system of social sorting and categorical inequality—between the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor—that remains with us to this day. Taken together, these three chapters highlight the dynamic nature of formal institutions as well as the need to pay greater attention to their origin and evolution.
Description
Date
2022-01-01
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
University of Kansas
Collections
Archive Status
This item contains archived web content.
Files
Myers_ku_0099D_18810.pdf
Adobe PDF, 870.66 KB
- Embargoed until 2172-05-31
Research Projects
Organizational Units
Journal Issue
Keywords
Formal organizations, Historical sociology, Labor market institutions, Wisconsin