Relational Categorization: Evidence from the Diversification of American Labor Unions
This article draws upon the changes in voting patterns for American laborunions in recent decades to extend organizational theory about howcategorization systems are reproduced and break down. Recent categorizationresearch emphasizes cognitive mechanisms for the reproduction of categoryschemes: actors explicitly evaluate organizations against an ideal set ofcategories. This article argues that category schemes can also bereproduced as the epiphenomena of stable social interactions. Such“relational” mechanisms are particularly useful for understanding whyspecialized organizations sometimes manage to diversify, despite havingsimilar audiences. When stable patterns of social interaction aredisrupted, category schemes that were reproduced by such interactionsquickly fall apart. Predictions based on this theory are tested on theattempts by American labor unions to diversify their memberships between1961 and 1999. Consistent with the theory, workers after the early 1980scame to vote for unions that diversified their organizing acrossindustries, but only if those unions had adopted organizational reformsconsistent with those described in recent literature on labor-unionrevitalization. The interaction between such revitalization attempts byindividual unions and the strength of union jurisdiction is explored usinga combination of interviews with current and former union staff andorganizers, and quantitative analysis of four decades’ organizing drives.