E.

PAUL DURRENBERGER

Department of Anthropology Pennsylvania State University University Park, PA 16802 SUZAN EREM Service Employees International Union Local 73 Chicago, IL

The Weak Suffer What They Must: A Natural Experiment in Thought and Structure
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, [experiment, cognition, structure, organized labor, unions, healthcare, culture, theory]

or some the experiment is the defining feature 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 nineteenth-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, 1997b; Erem and Durrenberger 1997), we had a chance to benefit from such a natural experiment. 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, represent the worker at a second-step grievance hearing with the supervisor. If this fails to untangle the difficulty, the steward may call a union rep-

resentative whom the local hires to represent members at a number of worksites. The union reps, 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. Union members do not establish the roles of steward, rep, supervisor, manager, or co-worker, but conduct their work lives in terms of them and construct various representations of these categories. Malinowski (1922) differentiated between internal views of the people he was trying to understand as "ethnographic" in distinction to external constructions that he called "sociological." Marvin Harris's (1999) distinction between the emic and the etic captures another difference that Sandstrom and Sandstrom (1995) discuss at some length. The people we are trying to understand build emic statements from discriminations they make. Such statements are wrong if they contradict participants' sense of similarity, difference, significance, meaningful ness, or appropriateness. Etic statements depend on distinctions upon which a scientific community agree. They are wrong if empirical evidence fails to support them (Harris 1999). In this example, the law and practice determine the external, or "sociological," perspective on union-management relations, and we can ascertain

American Anthtaaalneixt MU4):783-793. Copyrighl 2000. American Anthropological Association

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WORKER

STEWARD,

SUPERVISOR MANAGER

REP

HUMAN RELATIONS DIRECTOR VP FOR HUMAN RELATIONS Figure 1. Outside Scheme.

internal or emic views as Malinowski did, by ethnography, though neither is in Harris's terms etic. Figure 1 represents the externally defined categories irrespective of union members' constructions, experiences, views, or opinions. Members, stewards, and reps are the "union side" as versus supervisors and managers on the "company" side. Stewards are on the same level of management as supervisors while reps are equal to managers and vice presidents. In a previous study, Paul Durrenberger (1996) argued that union members develop their own conceptual schemes or folk models concerning these relationships. As part of our larger study of the local, I wanted to determine to what extent members agreed with this external view, with each other and with members at other worksites. One important dimension of culture is the shared aspects of mental pictures people create of related sets of words. People's judgments of similarities among an organized set of words or a semantic domain is an ethnographic means to construct individual mental pictures and measure their similarities to others' (Romney et al. 1996a). As Romney and Moore (1998:315) put it, "the meaning of each term is defined by its location relative to all the other terms." This requires some way to measure peoples' ideas of similarity among the items of an organized set of words. A triads test does this by asking informants to indicate which of three items is least like the other two for all possible combinations of three items in the set of words. In selecting one item as least similar, informants indicate that the remaining two are somehow similar. I arranged the terms steward, rep, manager, supervisor, "worker in the same department (or line)," and "worker in a different department (or line)" in all possible combinations of three on a page and asked each respondent to indicate the item in each line that was most different from the other two. Weller and Romney (1988) and Bernard (1988) discuss this procedure and its history in anthropology. For more recent discussions of the triads multidimensional scaling representations, and further citations to the methodological and substantive literature on the topics, see

Romney et al. (1996a), Romney et al. (1996b), and Romney and Moore (1998). If union members consistently used only single criteria to judge similarity, there would be three "pure" models or different mental pictures-based on three different criteria As an example, consider the triad: supervisor, co-worker, union rep. If a person selected supervisor as the most different, indicating similarity between workers and reps, it would imply a "union model." They are distinguishing in terms of union versus nonunion affiliation. The choice of co-worker would indicate a conceptual scheme based on hierarchy as "co-workers" are less powerful than supervisors and reps. Picking rep would indicate a workplace proximity scheme as that is the feature that supervisors and co-workers share. Tabulation of responses in a matrix of all possible relationships among items determines the similarity, "closeness," or proximity of any two items. Every time a respondent does not select two items in a single row of 3, every time a respondent selects the other item, the cell for the unselected pair in the matrix increases one point for similarity. Each row of each respondent's responses thus adds one point to some pair. In this design, since all pairs occur 4 times, the maximum score for any pair is 4, indicating the greatest degree of similarity between the two items. The summation of individual matrices into an aggregate matrix shows the strength of similarity for the population. Then the counts are converted into percentages to develop a measure of proximity from 0 to 1. It is not meaningful simply to sum responses unless there is some reason to suppose that the picture is somehow cultural, a representation that people of the group share (Romney 1999). As an example, consider the external legal model. If there were perfect consensus, all respondents would agree and always select the item that indicates that they are thinking in terms of union relationships. They would select manager or supervisor as most different whenever they occur in triads with steward, rep, and/or coworker. Thus, manager-supervisor would score 100% and supervisor-steward, supervisor-rep, supervisor-same or different line worker would score &likewise for manager in all of these pairs. Steward-rep would be 100% and different line worker-same line worker would be 100%. Worker-steward and worker-rep cells would be 50% or .5 because in those 2 (of 4) triads where workers, stewards, and reps all occur, union membership does not distinguish among the items, but either workplace proximity or hierarchy does. Thus the highest score could be .5 in the stewardworker cells and the rep-worker cells. Table 1 shows this similarity matrix. I used Anthropac (Borgatti 1996a) to make and score the triads tests. I then used Anthropac to test the individual proximity matrices for consensus. The aggregate matrices for each worksite indicate the strength of similarity between each pair of items. I used these aggregate proximity

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Table 1. Perfect Union Model. Supervisor Manager Steward Manager Steward Union Rep Dif. Line Same Line 1.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 Union Rep Dif. Line

0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0

1.0 0.5 0.5

0.5 0.5

1.0

matrices in two further ways. First, I correlated them to one another to determine the similarity between any two groups (see Table 2). For this, I eliminated the relationships that were universally deemed to be similarmanager-supervisor, worker-worker, and stewardreproughly, management with itself, members with themselves, and union officers with themselves. Eliminating these reduces the correlations from the full matrix of relationships and highlights differences rather than similarities that are artifacts of the instrument. Groups with highly correlated matrices share ideas about the similarity of roles while those that are not correlated do not. Some of the correlations are negative. I can offer no interpretation for these except that they indicate difference. Second, I used Anthropac's multidimensional scaling program to develop a visual representation of the "distances" among the items. Those items that are similar cluster together; those that are not are dispersed in the diagram, thus allowing a visual representation of similarities and differences that the aggregate proximity matrices measure. Table 2 shows the correlations among the "perfect model" and the union local's staff (n = 18), a public hospital (n = 9), a group of industrial workers ( n = l l ) , and Rehabilitation Hospital members in 1996 (n = 6) and 1998 (n - 25). To further test the reliability of this method, I administered the triads test to the staff of a different local in the same international union in Chicago (n - 25), and Table 2 shows that their similarity matrix is highly correlated to the one for the staff of the local in question as well as the "perfect" model. Because this shows a high degree of awareness of union/nonunion distinctions as opposed to alternative ways of organizing the same relationships (hierarchy or workplace), I suggested that this model indicates "union consciousness,"
Table 2. Correlations among Proximity Matrices. Sch96 Sch98 Sch96 Staff Indust Public Staff2 -.41 Staff -.47 .64 Indust -.18 -.16 .29 Public -.32 .68 .89 Staff2 -.39 .64 .98 .17 .88 Pure -.39 .67 .96 .21 .88 .96

.14

the emic use of union/nonunion distinctions for ordering terms for the relevant workplace relationships. Having a way of characterizing the mental picture, internal scheme, or folk model of union-management relations at different worksites not only allowed me to compare these constructs at different places, but also allowed me to develop hypotheses about how the internal models are related to other variables such as level of activism in the union. I expected that more activist stewards would have a model of social relations more similar to the staff or the "outside" or "prefect" union modelto be more conscious of the union as an organizing principle and show it in their triads tests. A similar triads test administered to the stewards of the local gathered at their annual convention in 1996 indicated that there was no relationship between union activism and union consciousnesswhether or not stewards thought in terms of the "perfect model," one of the alternatives (hierarchy or workplace), or some mixture of the three (Durrenberger 1997). There was a relationship between union consciousness and the place of the union in the organization of worksitesa dimension of structure rather than thought or cognition. The aggregate similarity matrix for the triads tests of the union local's staff was very close to the external model. I therefore used this as the measure of union consciousness. To the extent that a group of members showed a similar cognitive pattern, I concluded that they exhibited union consciousness. Members at only two worksites exhibit union consciousness. One was a public hospital (Pearsons r = .89), where for various reasons the union is very strong and significant (Durrenberger 1997). The other was Rehabilitation Hospital (r = .64). I concluded that this was because of the small size of the membership and the strength of the chief steward who had been in office for several decades and cultivated a vast network of relationships of mutual obligation, not only among members but with management. Furthermore, just before I administered the first triads tests, there had been a union victory that all of the members had celebrated. I argued that without time depth it was not possible to know whether such cognitive configurations were stable through time or whether they respond to such episodes as a victory or a defeat for the union at a site (Durrenberger 1997). As shown in the multidimensional scaling diagram in Figures 2 and 3, the one difference between Rehabilitation Hospital (Figure 2) and the public hospital (Figure 3) was that the members at Rehabilitation Hospital departed from the "union model" to place their steward hierarchically above rather than below the rep, so their steward was on a par with the manager and the rep with the supervisor. Another, which represents the relative power of the union in the two workplaces, is the placement of the public hospital's stewards and rep at a higher level in the hierarchy than supervisors or managers (Durrenberger 1997). The reversal of the steward/rep

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DLWORKER

SLWORKER SUPERVISOR MANAGER

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DL WORKER SUPERVISOR

MANAGER SLWORK

STEWARD

UNION REP

want of any convincing measure of structure that would be more than a poor proxy. But we could argue, I suppose, that the cultures of worksites are sufficiently different to cause different structures. Just because it does not seem plausible to me does not mean that it might to someone else. However, when the chief steward at Rehabilitation Hospital retired just before the unit negotiated a new contract, Suzan and I were presented with the possibility of at least a quasi-experimental design. We had the triads tests from 1996, and now in 1998 we could administer them again, after a significant structural change, to detect whether the patterns of thought had changed with the change of structure. While this was a change of personnel within the existing collective bargaining arrangements, though the union structure remained intact with stewards and reps and law, there were changes of relations of power in the changing networks of the workplace. As this steward withdrew from the workplace, her well-developed relationships of mutual obligation with management and workers alike disappeared. This shift brought together what Alford (1998) calls multivariate, historical, and ethnographic approaches to bear on a single theoretical question that is at the same time a practical issuethe relationship between consciousness or patterns of thought and changing realities of power and organization (structure) at a single worksite.

Theoretical Backgrounds
Figure 2. (top) Rehabilitation Hospital 1996. Figure 3. (bottom) Public Hospital.

relationship at Rehabilitation Hospital was an accurate reflection of the chief steward's long association and developed networks with the management of the hospital. At the worksite, she in fact had more power than the rep, though the rep could reinforce it by putting the authority of the local behind her. Other hospitals had neither the extensive union structure of the public one nor the history of recent victories or intricate networks of relations that connected the leadership of the unit of Rehabilitation Hospital. I concluded (Durrenberger 1997) that union consciousness seemed to be related to features of structurerealities of power and organizationand perhaps history or recent events. That is usually where the story stops. We observe and deduce patterns. If we are quantitative in our tastes, if we want to show the patterns and make them accessible to others to observe and test, we translate some of these into measures. If we are empirically oriented, we test hypotheses about the relationships among variables we can measure and base other speculations on theoretical assertions and empirical findings of the past. The association of the cognitive pattern with the structure seems plausible for

From advertising to education there are modern institutional structures dedicated to the proposition that the way to change people's actions is to change their minds, a proposal that rests on the assumption that thought determines action. When Jean Lave (1988), attempting to understand how people learn and use that most cerebral of cognitive skills (mathematics), challenged transference theorythe notion that we can isolate abstract properties of systems and communicate them to others via symbolsshe advocated expanding our understanding of cognition from something that happens in the mind to a process that stretches over the environment as well as time into past experiences and future expectations. In doing so, she offered a new definition to a movement Ortner (1984) detected in the attempts to synthesize and sort out anthropological theorizing since the 1960s, a trend Ortner tentatively called "practice theory." Some who called themselves cognitive anthropologists, before boring themselves to death, as Keesing (1972) quipped in a pre-mature death knell (Durrenberger 1982), described well-structured patterns of thought they understood by talking to people. In a precursor of the now fashionable "linguistic turn" (P&lsson 1995), some (Black 1969) even argued that because cultures were things of the mind embodied in language, anthropologists had only to talk to people to understand their cultures.

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Other cognitive anthropologists questioned the salience of such language-centered patterns. Van Esterik (1978) showed that there were no static taxonomies of spiritghosts in Thailand and concludes that "the process of creating guardian spirits is continuous" (Van Esterik 1978:405). Durrenberger and Morrison (1979) expanded on that finding. Challenging language-centered analyses, Gatewood (1985) discussed the complex patterns of cultures that are not encoded linguistically, not available for labeling, and not accessible to language or language-centered investigative techniques. People learn some things not by hearing about them but by doing them. Actions, he said in his title, speak louder than words. A decade later Palsson (1994), reflecting on similarly nautical experiences, reached a similar conclusion. Few today would argue that any structurescognitive, political, economicendure. We have seen too much change in patterns of economic, political, and cultural relations for the premise of systems in equilibrium, even dynamic, to be persuasive (Wang 1997). The riddle repeats an earlier onewhat are the directions of causality? From thought to action as structuralists and cognitivists would have it? Or from structures of power and other relationships to thought as materialists would have it? One solution is the extreme postmodernist one, which argues that structures of meaning are not anchored in the outside world (Layton 1997:186). Another might be to affirm that everything affects everything else and we cannot sort it all out because it is too complex. At best we can provide an appreciation for the complexity by some attempt to recapitulate it in another mode. Replication of reality needs no mediationonly experience, not reflection, analysis, or depiction. This is counter to the principles of both art and science, which highlight some dimensions and underplay others to organize and filter reality rather than replicate it. While it may be true that everything is related, we do not see hurricane forecasters watching butterflies to detect how the beat of their individual wings will impact El Nino. Here we return to a practical issue and the work of Jean Lave. If patterns of thought are situational, determined by changing social structures, then it is not effective to try to change social patterns by changing minds. Education, in the sense of transference of patterns, is not the answer. The only contradiction here is that we are trying to change your mind by just that means! On the other hand, we are content with the understanding that while we will change no one's mind, we may add to the empirical findings of anthropology an example that will be of use to others of similar empirical bent. For some, these questions are of more than theoretical or academic interest. Suzan Erem is the union representative assigned to Rehabilitation Hospital. Here, she takes up the story to tell what happened. We see her formulating and testing various hypotheses and attending to the outcomes

because it was those outcomes that were important in trying to bring about the changes she desired.

The Story
When Delia retired from Rehabilitation Hospital Rehab after 30 years as chief steward, I knew the union would never be the same. She warned me she was retiring, but it took a year or more for her to finally leave, so after awhile her complaints of the pain in her wrists from dishing out food for three decades didn't register with me as poignantly and I thought she would stay at least as long as I would. But finally Delia announced the date she would leave. She assured me that the gangly young jokester who'd just "become union" a year before would make a good steward. Bernard adored Delia, that was clear, but so did everyone else. She was the center of the hospital, like a grandmother is the center of a huge family, so it was hard to believe this tall, thin, fun-loving but inattentive character could ever fill her shoes. I knew Delia's judgment was sound, so I trusted she'd teach him everything he needed to know. A year earlier, the other veteran steward, Marie, from housekeeping, retired. Her retirement wasn't as noticeable because Delia was the true matron, but it left an entire department without a steward. Between Marie's retirement and Delia's was Monica's promotion. Monica was the young, articulate, and fastidious steward from the nursing department. About three months after running a successful union protest against the hospital, she was promoted out of the union into a management position as a schedulera position that, because it is considered management, is by law not in the bargaining unit. Within a year she had a baby. When she tried to return to work, Rehabilitation Hospital "couldn't find" a position for her. Around the hospital the workers would say they knew Rehabilitation Hospital did her wrong after the way she helped run that boycott last year, but it was her fault for getting out of the union. So Delia was the last and most effective steward to leave the shop, and that left me with a vacuum. Bernard took over the kitchen, and at a membership meeting a quiet man named Greg volunteered to take on housekeeping. No stewards came forward from nursing. Greg and Bernard spent a Saturday morning to come to a stewards' training I held at the union office for healthcare workers. They gave up another Saturday to attend the 1997 annual stewards' conference as well. (Well, Bernard tried to attend, but after he picked up Delia in a snowstorm his car broke down on the expressway. They were both stranded for hours.) Greg called at least once a week to update me on problems, but often indicated he "had it under control." Bernard, younger and cockier, and that much less secure, never called. When I'd hear problems from other members, I'd ask him about them, but he always assured me "he had taken care of it."

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More than a year passed before I realized something serious was going wrong at the hospital. Just before Delia left, the hospital approached the union to eliminate two jobs from the bargaining unit. The hospital was eliminating 31 positions and was careful not to target the union. Instead of taking the layoff, the members votedwith Delia's leadershipto take a cut to 7 hours of work per day. We signed an agreement to that effect, which also indicated that when the patient count reached an average of 77 for 90 days, everyone would go back up to the full 8 hours. We were confident the count would go up soon with the opening of the new addition to the hospital scheduled for the Spring of 1998. Delia retired, and six months later Rehabilitation Hospital opened its new wing, doubling the size of the hospital. Everyone expected their hours to go up, but instead, the hospital hired more workers, and kept their hours at 7 as well! The members were enraged, and so was 1.1 made furious phone calls to management, asking what right they had to do such a thing, but they said they'd told us they were going to do it. I had no memory of such discussion, and neither did Delia, whom I called at home. It made no sense for me to ever agree to such a thing, since taking the layoff would have resulted in our people coming back to work if we'd thought they were going to hire new staff any time soon. Meanwhile, we had just wrapped up six months of bargaining for a new contract before the regular expiration of the previous one. These two stewards and some observing members sat through it all, no matter how late it ran, whether or not it was scheduled for an off day. I knew I couldn't afford any internal problems during bargaining, so no matter what I suspected, I kept those two stewards until we were done and the contract was signed. But every time I went to the hospital, members approached me with the same question: "When are we gonna get our hours back?" I'd update them on the latest phone call but it did no good. I thought they were angry with management for what it had done, but within a few months I began to get a sense it was not management who was getting the brunt of it. To test my theory, I told the stewards we needed to run a petition against management on its decision to hire more workers instead of increasing the hours back to 8 for the people already working there. I even typed up a petition and gave them copies. Then I gave them a week to get everyone to sign it. A week later, the petition was nowhere to be found. I asked the stewards, and they said they passed it to so-and-so who never got it back to them. I asked members, and they said they heard about it but never saw it. Now I knew we were in trouble, but the stewards needed to know that I knew before I could approach them with the problem. I gave them another assignment: take a group of employees with you and meet with the human resources department over the issue. As I expected, the stewards

couldn't get a single person to go with them. This was the hottest topic of the year, and not a single person was willing to follow the union steward on it. Finally, I started asking the most honest questions and getting some answers. 'They say the union is weak," said one person. "The union gave our hours away and can't get them back." I realized I had a serious leadership crisis. More often than not, members started coming up to me with their grievances about a nasty boss or denied vacation. I received phone calls from members I'd never heard from asking if management had the right to do this or that. I'd refer them to the stewards, but they would say the steward didn't know. Worse, they'd go away without talking to the steward, and without telling me, unsatisfied and believing the union was weak and ineffective to help with their workplace problems. In February 1998, after negotiating a new contract, we held the contract ratification meeting where I described what we'd negotiated, and we distributed the same triads test Paul had done more than a year before, when Delia was still there. Members voted, then filled out the triads tests, and then received their contracts. The contract was ratified. With bargaining behind me, I could focus on the internal problems more carefully. I sat down with the two stewards. I said, 'This isn't fair to you and it's bad for the union. These folks won't follow you and you're beating your heads against the wall." Both men nodded enthusiastically at that assessment. I agreed to hold steward elections, define the job of steward, and reinforce that once members vote for a steward they have to trust and follow that person. The word went out through the kitchen that Bernard was up for election, and the older workers looked concerned. "Why?" they asked me. "Because you're not following him, and the union can't afford that. If you're going to follow him, then re-elect him; if not, then vote for somebody else. But we've got fights to fight, and we can't be screwing around." By the end of that week, Bernard called me and announced that he'd taken six workers from the kitchen with him to the human resources department and demanded to meet with the director. They'd met for almost a half hour. I congratulated him loudly. Later that day I received a phone call from management requesting that only one person meet with them. I knew we'd made a point. The next week, the members re-elected him steward. Housekeeping didn't turn out the same way. I asked members what they thought good qualities in a steward were. They listed them: "They ought to speak up for people. They ought to study up on the laws and the contract. They ought to never be cutting their own deals, but looking out for everybody." So I relisted them"so they should defend their co-workers, go to trainings, and lead." They agreed. Then I reminded the members that if the steward holds up his end of the deal, they have to hold up theirs'

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and follow. They agreed. Then they voted in a new steward, and I had to start over again with training. Members in the nursing department also held a spirited meeting and steward election and voted in two stewards. Finally, the union was back on the upswing, but months of deterioration were going to weigh heavily on morale. The key was to win back the full-time hours. That would be the first real test.

Triads Revisited
The same triads test administered just after the ratification of the new contract shows a cognitive pattern quite different from the first one more than a year before (r = -.41) (see Table 1). Whereas the first pattern was similar to the staff pattern (r = .64), the second is not (r = -.47). This could be because different people responded to the two tests, but the proportions of people in different departments are about the same, and at least some of the same individuals responded to both. In this unit, unlike some others, there are no factions, so differential representation of factional views could not be a factor. The multidimensional scaling representations of the two schema in Figures 2 and 4 show there is a shift away from a model based on union membership and hierarchy to one based on workplace proximity and hierarchy. In the first 1996 model (Figure 2), reps and stewards are higher than supervisors and managers; the second 1998 model (Figure 4) reverses this hierarchy; the superiority of the steward to the rep in the first model is reversed in the second. This suggests that members at Rehabilitation Hospital were no longer seeing themselves primarily as union members but as workers for the management of Rehabilitation Hospital. They no longer held union officers to be more powerful than management but management more powerful than union officers. The triads test was administered at the same time as an overwhelmingly positive vote to ratify the contract, tantamount to a survey of satisfaction with the new contract.

The ratification vote was strong, so the shift in the triads cannot indicate alienation because of the new contract. The shift must be related to what appeared to Suzan to be a leadership crisis, the change in the structure of the unit occasioned by the withdrawal of all of the experienced stewards and the chief steward and the disappearance of those networks of relationships from the unit. The cognitive models reflected the changing realities of power and organizationstructurein the worksite. The fact that the cognitive model changes to mark reorganization of the structure leads to the conclusion that structure causes cognition, not the other way around.

Details
Here we report in more depth the statistics of this exercise. Those who find such material boring will perhaps forgive the exercise and skip to the next more qualitative section on structure, agency, and class so that our colleagues with more developed senses of methodological aesthetics will not be neglected. A comparison of the proximity matrices of different worksites shows just how they differ. Table 3 shows the proximity matrix for a group of industrial workers. Table 4 shows the proximity matrix for the public hospital, which was considered a model of strong organization. Table 5 shows the proximity matrix for the staff. The "perfect" model and staff model show a 0 or near 0 similarity between union reps and stewards on the one hand and supervisors and managers on the other, while the industrial model shows a stronger similarity. The "perfect" and staff model show a near 0 similarity of members with supervisors and managers but the industrial model shows significantly stronger relations. The "perfect" and staff models show a similarity of about .5 for stewards and reps on the one hand and members on the other. The industrial model shows a much weaker similarity. All together, these 12 relationships indicate that industrial members see themselves as closer to management and farther from union officers than the "union model" would. The multidimensional representation of these relationships shows the contrast among industrial members and staff as Figures 5 and 6 indicate. These representations suggest that while staff see a clear demarcation between union and management and a hierarchy much like the outside model, the industrial members
Table 3. Industrial Members.

DLWORKER SLWORKER

STEWARD REP

Supervisor Manager Steward Manager Steward Union Rep Dif. Line Same Line .73 .23 .09 .16 .25

Union Rep

Dif. Line

MANAGER SUPERVISOR

Figure 4. Rehabilitation Hospital 1998.

.18 .25 .25 .20

.89 .18 .27

.27 .18

.82

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Table 4. Public Hospital Members. Supervisor Manager Steward Manager Steward Union Rep Dif. Line Same Line .93 .10 .18 .10 .05 Union Rep Dif. Line

REP/STEWARDS

MAN/SUPER

.08 .25 .08 .08

.88 .35 .48

.28 .30

.90

see management and union officers as being equally different from and more powerful than members. The contrast between Rehabilitation Hospital in 1996 (Figure 2) and 1998 (Figure 4) shows the structural change that Suzan's story illustrates. The corresponding 1996 and 1998 proximity matrices illustrated in Tables 6 and 7 show the contrast as members see stewards and reps as closer to managers and supervisors in 1998 than in 1996, see themselves as closer to managers but somewhat less close to supervisors, and see themselves as less similar to reps and stewards. In these respects, the 1998 proximity matrix for Rehabilitation Hospital resembles the industrial one. To what extent do these figures and tables represent shared patterns of thought? This has been an issue since Wallace raised it (1961). Romney, Weller, and Batchelder (1986) outline the theory and mathematics for computing respondents' consensus on cultural domains, and Borgarti (1996a, 1996b) includes it in Anthropac. Here, the purpose of using consensus analysis is only to assess the agreement among respondents. The procedure computes a factor analysis of the chance-adjusted measures of agreement among respondents. If the first factor is less than three times as great as the second, there is no consensus. Table 8 shows the ratio of the first to the second factor for each group and the number of respondents. It is clear that there is sufficient consensus at each site to consider the proximity matrices cultural constructs. Given that there is consensus among respondents, to what extent are the samples of respondents representative of the whole group? Sampling techniques were neither very consistent nor very pure. The exigencies of shifts, transportation across a wide area, dubious quality of membership liststhe only available sampling frameand other factors made the random sampling that we desired
Table 5. Staff. Supervisor Manager Steward Manager Steward Union Rep Dif. Line Same Line .83 .04 .00 .04 .08 Union Rep Dif. Line

WORKERS

Figure 5. Industrial Members.

and attempted hopelessly quixotic. To do the work, we had to rely on other techniques, chiefly opportunistic sampling. Some of the samples represent almost the entire population, and for those sampling is not problematic. Virtually the entire staff of the local responded, so that is not an issue. Almost all of the nonsupport staff of the second local responded, and that included virtually all of the reps. Rehabilitation Hospital has about 60 members (64 in 1996, but the number varies as Suzan's narrative in this paper indicates); thefirstsample of 6 is thus about 10%; the second is nearly half, 42%, and represents all departments as does the first sample. While these are neither random nor stratified samples, they are fairly representative of the membership. The industrial sample is from a random sample list of four industrial sites Durrenberger drew from the membership list. This represents about 1 % of the total industrial membership of the local. The public hospital sample is partially from a random sample List I drew from the membership list and partially an opportunistic sample of its 674 service employees and 79 technicians (753 total), about a 1 % sample. The samples of the staffs and Rehabilitation Hospital members are probably representative, but there

WORKERS

SUPERVISOR

STEWARD

MANAGER

.06 .07 .06 .03

REP

.68 .64 .73

.49 .44

.94

Figure 6. Staff.

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Table 6. Rehabilitation Hospital 1996. Supervisor Manager Steward Manager Steward Union Rep Dif. Line Same Line .81 .13 .10 .28 .31 Union Rep Dif. Line

Table 8. Sites, Numbers of Respondents, and Ratio of First and Second Factors in Consensus Analysis. Site Rehab96 Rehab98 Staff Staff2 Public Industrial

N
6 25 18 25 9 11

Ratio 4.5 4.0 5.8 5.2

10.6 11.2

.06 .07

.22 .26

.60 .31 .26

.17 .26

.88

may be some doubt about the industrial and public hospital samples, though the sampling was more purely random.

Structure, Agency, and Class

Alford (1998) points out the problems of the multivariate approach in understanding historical phenomenadependent variables may become independent variables as systems of relationships change over time. In highly stratified social orders defined by differential access to productive resources (Fried 1967), agency and structure may have different positions in different classes because access to resources, hence class position, rests on differential power, a structural dimension given by position in the social order. Among the working class in the United States there seems to be dual awareness of both structure and agency, whereas middle-class persons think more in terms of agency than structure. This suggests that the concern anthropologists have with the topic of agency may be a projection of our own class-based folk models onto the rest of the world (Dumenberger and Erem 1997b). Working-class awareness of structures is less a cultural convention than a recognition of the reality of powerlessness (Griffith 1995; Hackenberg 1995; Hunt 1996; Newman 1988,1993; Rubin 1992). The relationship has never been stated more clearly than in the words Thucydides put into the mouths of the Athenian delegation to Melos in the sixteenth year of the Peloponnesian War: "You know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must" (Crawley n.d.:359). They went on to make the nomothetic observation, "Of the gods we believe, and of men we know, that by a necessary law of their nature they rule wherever they can," elaborating that they
Table 7. Rehabilitation Hospital 1998. Supervisor Manager Steward Manager Steward Union Rep Dif. Line Same Line .86 .32 .28 .17 .21 Union Rep Dif. Line

did not make this law, but found it "and shall leave it to exist for ever after us" (Crawley n.d.: 361-362). The democratic Athenians then besieged the place and finally, after the Melians surrendered, killed all of the men and sold the women and children into slavery (Crawley n.d..-365). The Athenians' observations are as valid for modem social orders as for ancient ones. The chief goal of the union movement in industrial social orders is to redress the structural imbalance and give some sense of agency to those who provide labor but do not necessarily control the conditions for its use. It does this by attempting to develop collective power based on structural principals other than wealth. The intentions of the powerful are more consequential than those of the unpowerful. Thus by the actions of the powerful do their intentions become structures that shape the cognition of the powerless. Cognition and agency may determine structure for some classes while for others structure may determine cognition; the causal arrows may be functions of class position or power rather than being constant across the whole social order. Thus even the question of causal relations between structure and cognition is not a constant but varies by class. This is one theoretically important reason that anthropologists should not perpetuate the American folk model of the classless society but should explore the structural, cultural, and practical dimensions and consequences of stratification in our own society (see the works in Forman 1995) and other social orders ancient and modern.

Conclusion
We have offered an analysis of some triads tests and a story. The story explains the results of the testsit explains the ethnographic data. When people saw union stewards as powerful and effective, they stressed union membership and the power of union officers compared with management personnelthey were conscious of their union as efficacious. A little over a year later, following the loss of all the seasoned stewards and their networks of mutual obligation with management, a source of power and influence, after a series of ineffective interventions to meet management imprecations, the same triads test shows that workers see themselves closer to a more powerful

.22 .23 .19 .28

.70 .19 .18

.22 .22

.84

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management. The triads tests provide the ethnographic data upon which we can base statements about the relationships between patterns of thought and relationships of power and organizationwhat we call "structure." While culture is more than the dimensions of contrast among sets of words as critiques of language-centered approaches have shown, such semantic domains are important dimensions of culture. Furthermore, they are quantifiable aspects of culture that are amenable to empirical ethnography, so we can ask just how similar two cognitive schemes are or how similar two items are within a single scheme. We hope that this exercise can contribute to the accumulation of "the will, the skill, and the modesty required to bring our ideas into the 'empirical arena' " where assertions can be tested (Romney 1999:113). We hope we have suggested that the world is more complex than the unqualified conclusion that structure causes cognition would indicate. Not only is the causality between ideas and action complex and two-way, dialectic as Lave put it, but the class structures of complex social orders mean that the cognition and action of members of different classes are differently related and differentially efficacous. We hope that this story and this analysis will contribute to an increased effort to understand the complexities of hierarchy and class.

Hart, President of SEIU Local 1, both of Chicago, for their support during various phases of this project. We also thank the staff, officers, and members of these two locals for their assistance. We thank Robert W. Sussman, editor of the American Anthropologist, for his editorial suggestions and the four anonymous readers whose reviews helped us improve the paper.

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Epilogue
Here Suzan takes up the story again. By the middle of the summer of 1998 we had everyone back up to 8 hours at Rehabilitation Hospital, and I had held meetings to train managers and supervisors to work with the stewards as they are required to by law. I'd trained stewards on how to be treated as equals by management when they were used to being treated as subordinates mutually agreed upon meetings (rather than just meeting when management demanded a meeting at a time and place management dictated), how to command meetings (rather than be a passive audience), how to show solidarity when they needed to (rather than each person only looking out for him or herself). With high turnover among management, new stewards, and the law behind me, I have some power to create new structures. If management elects not to participate, they know I can file charges against them with the Labor Board and cause them more trouble than they want. More importantly, the members are regaining a sense of ownership in the union and of their own ability to affect what happens at their jobs as they become more organized and see the consequences of their concerted activity.

Note
Acknowledgments. We thank Tom Balanoff, President of Service Employees International Union Local 73, and Doug

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