Space Invaders : Categories , Valuation and Union Organizing Drives , 1961 – 1999

This paper develops a theory for why " audiences " who have traditionally preferred organizational " candidates " with clearly defined and specialized identities would come to prefer generalists. Such a transformation is demonstrated in the evolution of trade-union organizing in the United States between 1961 and 1999 away from exclusive industrial jurisdictions and toward diverse organizing. While the shift from specialists to generalists has been a puzzle for organizational research, this study proposes that the puzzle stems from a false dichotomy generated by considering categories as ends in and of themselves rather than as the first step in a social process of valuation. When audience members develop new theories about how organizations help them meet specific ends, they change the criteria they use to sort and rank organizations. These new dimensions can be orthogonal to the old ones and thus give the appearance of successful generalists. This study develops an empirical strategy for identifying changes to an audience's theory of value based on detailed interviews with union organizers and staff who were active during the era of upheaval. It proposes that changes to the role structures that support stable systems of categorization are the starting point for such changes, and that intermediaries that previous work have focused on for identification reasons may have major causal impact on such systems. The theory is corroborated using archival data on organizing drives filed with the National Labor Relations Board over the time period. 1 It isn't useful to go over the things you can get them in the negotiations... . You have to show them that you can get into those negotiations at all. And that means you talk up how you've unionized other groups of employees. [Interviewer: Similar employees, normally?] It helps, but they don't have to be. When you're selling yourself as an organizer, it's almost more impressive to say that you've brought in all kinds of different workers, because it shows that you can handle a lot of different challenges. [Carlos, a retired union staff member; emphasis added]