Unions in Postindustrial Society. by John SchmidmanReview by: Harry C. KatzAdministrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 26, No. 2 (Jun., 1981), pp. 305-306Published by: Sage Publications, Inc. on behalf of the Johnson Graduate School of Management,Cornell UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2392482 .

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Book Reviews

tion between the two lines of thought, rather than the indepen- dent development more common in the field. The challenge for the organizational decision theorist is, clearly, to embed the "hot versus cold" debate firmly in an organizational context: in the world of loosely-structured, multi-person, "garbage-can" processes detailed by March and Olsen (1976) and the hectic, interrupted, harried world of Mintzberg's (1973) managers. Only by such contextual embedding, I would argue, can we hope to respond to a challenge such as that posed by Weick (1 979) to take seriously the idea that real thinking does (or could) take place in organizations. And only by such an embedding can we start to see managerial action not merely as the end-product of managerial thought but as a potentially crucial part of the decision process itself (Connolly, 1 980).

This is not to suggest that Human Inference will be of interest only to organizational decision theorists. It is hard to think of any serious student of organizational processes who will not find the work of major interest and value. The clarity and freshness of its writing make its ideas accessible to any serious graduate student; the breadth of its coverage makes it essential for the professional's library. It is, in short, a work of the highest importance, a triumph both of scholarship and of presentation. On the short list of 1 980 books to acquire, this must certainly be one.

Terry Connolly Associate Professor School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, and College of Management Georgia Institute of Technology Atlanta, GA 30332

REFERENCES

Abelson, Robert P. 1963 "Computer simulation of 'hot'

cognitions." In Silvan S. Tom- kins and Samuel Messick (eds.), Computer Simulation of Personality: 277-298. New York: Wiley.

Connolly, Terry 1980 "Uncertainty, action, and com-

petence: Some alternatives to omniscience in complex problem-solving." In Seymour Fiddle (ed.), Uncertainty: Social and Behavioral Dimensions: 69-91. New York: Praeger.

Janis, Irving L., and Leon Mann 1977 Decision Making: A Psycholog-

ical Analysis of Conflict, Choice, and Commitment. New York: Free Press.

March, James G., and Johan P. Olsen 1976 Ambiguity and Choice in Or-

ganizations. Bergen, Norway: U niversitetsforlaget.

Mintzberg, Henry 1973 The Nature of Managerial

Work. New York: Harper and Row.

Tversky, Amos, and Daniel Kahne- man 1974 "Judgment under uncertainty:

Heuristics and biases." Sci- ence, 185: 1124-1131.

Weick, Karl E. 1979 "Cognitive processes in organi-

zations. " In Barry M. Staw (ed.), Research in Organizational Be- havior, 1: 41-74. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press.

Unions in Postindustrial Society. John Schmidman. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1979. 1 52 pp. $1 2.00.

This book sets out to provide a theory of the labor movement in postindustrial society. The United States economy is said to have entered its postindustrial era in the post World War 11 period when the growth of the service or tertiary sector of the economy outpaced that of the manufacturing sector. I did not find in this book much in the way of a new theory of the labor movement. Any theory that is provided is essentially a restate-

305/ASQ, June 1981

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ment of what has come to be known as the Wisconsin tradition. The contributions provided by the book are a review of existing theories of the labor movement and a discussion of the likelihood that union organization will expand in the service sector of the U.S. economy.

Schmidman predicts that unions will be able to organize work- ers in the tertiary sector of the U.S. economy. Unfortunately, exactly how the union movement will overcome its past inability to organize white collar service workers in the private sector is left unstated. Schmidman apparently accepts largely as a matter of faith the proposition that union organization is inevita- ble because of the persistence of the authority relation in postindustrial society.

In places I found the book inconsistent. In Chapter 1, the author suggests that unions will evolve into a two-tiered form with upper level union officials dealing with broad political concerns while lower level officials deal with traditional job-related collective bargaining issues. A brief but interesting discussion follows that assertion in which the author considers some of the problems that might be created by such a bifurcation. Yet, in Chapter 6 the author offers a new prediction that in the future the American labor movement will easily accommodate itself to political action that reinforces its collective bargaining concerns. Somewhere along the way the problem of bifurcation has disappeared.

The best parts of the book are Chapters 2 and 3, which provide an extensive, although uncritical, review of existing theories of the labor movement. Readers might find those chapters useful as supplemental material in a course that addresses those theories.

The book's factual discussion of the economic environment in 1980 is sorely deficient. The author describes the state of the U.S. economy and labor market in 1980 by relying on predictions of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. I am puzzled as to whya book written in 1979 would rely on those predictions rather than refer to the facts. This is particularly troublesome in the light of some of those predictions. The author accepts the BLS prediction that in 1 980 nonfarm productivity will continue to advance at a steady rate. Well, it is now 1981 and the slowdown in the productivity growth rate is one of the nation's major public policy problems. Furthermore, that slowdown apparently began in the early 1970s and certainly should have been discussed in a book published in 1979.

That flaw is symptomatic of a much more significant error that plagues most postindustrial theories. Those theories adopt an unbridled optimism which assumes that industrial problems such as the economy's generation of eithera sufficient number of good jobs or adequate productivity growth have all been solved. I think the nation's current economic problems call into question both that sort of unbounded optimism and the basic premises of postindustrial theories.

Harry C. Katz Assistant Professor Sloan School of Management Massachusetts Institute of Technology Cambridge, MA 02139

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