There is a growing consensus that the discipline of sociology and the social sciences broadly need to engage more thoroughly with the legacy and the present day of colonialism, Indigenous/settler colonialism, imperialism, and racial capitalism in the United States and globally. In Disciplinary Futures, a cross-section of scholars comes together to engage sociology and the social sciences by way of these paradigms, particularly from the influence of disciplines of American, Ethnic, and Indigenous Studies.
With original essays from scholars such as Yến Lê Espiritu, Sunaina Maira, Hōkūlani K. Aikau, Salvador Vidal-Ortiz, Ben Carrington, Yvonne Sherwood, and Gilda L. Ochoa, among others, Disciplinary Futures offers concrete pathways for how the social sciences can expand from the limiting frameworks they traditionally use to study race and racism, namely: the black-white binary, the privileging of the nation-state, the fixation on the US mainland, the underappreciation of post- and settler-colonial studies, the liberal assumptions, and the limited conception of what constitutes data. In turn, the contributors reveal that sociology has many useful questions, methodologies, and approaches to offer scholars of American, Ethnic, and Indigenous Studies. Disciplinary Futures is an important work, one which renders these disciplines more intellectually expansive and thus better able to tackle urgent issues of injustice.
The book is a comparative and historical analysis of the factors that helped or hindered workers in their attempts to build unions in the U.S.’s 11 basic industries, 1900-2015. For each industry, we analyze shifts in union power (union density), as affected by the state and macro context, replacement costs of workers, union and employer strategies, and the impact of employment, race, gender, and occupation.
Ultimately, we aim to reveal the lessons that these struggles may offer to today’s labor movement.
We invite you to make use of our publicly available data repository for your own research. The data that we collected includes industry-level information on union membership and density, strikes, elections, unfair labor practices, employment size, race, gender, and occupation of workers, and more.
If you want to purchase the book, the 30% discount code from Oxford is ASFLYQ6. Or you could ask your library to purchase it (instructions here). The first chapter is available here.
