2012-02-22: reformatted for zotero 2011-09-30: CH replies to JM comments 2011-09-27: JM comments 2011-01-24: second draft started after sending

to MIT IWER Switch>

Comment [JM1]: I think we need to figure out whether this paper will be focused more around the internet, and how it relates to the future of the labor movement. Or if it will be structured more or less as is, with certain internet phenomena as an example of the group as a vehicle for the expression and development of self. Open to your comments here. Im not set one way or another. However, it greatly influence how the paper is structured and how much attention we need to give to e.g., research on online communities, and Facebook, etc. CH: Agree depends a good deal on the audience / outlet Formatted: Left, Space Before: 6 pt

Solidarities (not forever)

Charles Heckscher Second draft February, 2012

Introduction
The decline of organized labor has been too deep and long to be explained by economic or political factors alone. In America, it has continued through Democratic and Republican administrations, though the radical 60s and the Reaganite 80s, through economic booms and busts. The rest of the OECD nations are comparable. Since 1980, trade union density in the U.S. has declined by 11%; in other 29 advanced industrial nations in this database, trade union density has also declined by 11%. Of these 29 nations, all but Iceland had lower union density in 2008 than in 1980.1 Going beyond these broad numbers, the most careful and detailed comparative studies of labor movements have come to pessimistic conclusions across the industrialized world. Unions everywhere have been unable to deal with the rise of contingent work, have failed to penetrate new industries (both at the high and low ends), have lost political clout, and have not drawn younger members with strong commitment (Waddington and Hoffmann 2000; Boeri, Brugiavini, and Calmfors 2001). Outside the US there is perhaps less sense of imminent crisis, but these studies offer no reason to expect a return to union growth. The stagnation of wages since the 1970s, increasing levels of unemployment, and the severe crisis of 2008 are all economic factors that historically would have been expected to lead to a strengthening of labor but nothing of the sort has happened. Politically, efforts at labor law reform in the US under Carter, Clinton, and Obama have fallen increasingly far short of success. A key foundation of the labor movement, generally more stable than politics and economics, is solidarity or, as the American theme song has it, solidarity forever. It is now common for labor leaders to lament the decline of solidarity, often attributing this to the success of past generations in achieving gains in wages and working conditions. In a sense they echo the lament of many social critics who see a general decline over the last half-century in social connectedness. Solidarity has been somewhat neglected as an academic topic because it is very hard to analyze: there is little understanding of how it is created or how it has changed. In our increasingly positivist academic climate, studies of it have become scarcer and predominantly case-based. We want to be able to assess and explain the state of labor solidarity; to show how it can be modified and shaped; and to understand emergent trends that affect the possibilites for the future. More specifically, to anticipate our conclusions, we hope to show 1) that labor solidarity has declined because the nature of relations and commitments in workplaces and the society at large have changed; 2) that emergent trends have created the conditions for a new, friending form of relationships; and 3) that effective mobilization tactics in such conditions are different from those used by labor to date. The last two points, which are the key ones, go beyond available empirical evidence: there have not

Calculated from OECD databases at stats.oecd.org. Where data is not available back to 1980, as is the case especially for the former Communist countries of Eastern Europe, I have started with the earliest available data, usually 1995.

been many successful labor movements of any kind in recent years, and certainly not enough to establish a new form of action. Thus the analysis will depend on theoreticallygrounded projections. The use of theory for the analysis of the future has not been well developed. The vast bulk of social research assumes that the future will just continue trends identified in the present. Even Max Weber, having identified the trend to rationalization, grew gloomy in contemplating a future that, he assumed, would just go further on the same path. To figure out what the prospects are for something new, different tools are needed. Our approach will be to use some neglected tools of general sociology, especially Parsonian action theory, in combination with stage theory, as sketched in the appendix.

Comment [CH2]: Include the appendix?

The present
In the last thirty years there is every evidence that labor solidarity has weakened across the industrialized world, at least as measured by willingness to engage in strikes. Mass worker action has been declining almost everywhere, not just in the U.S.; in the OECD area, the strike rate has roughly halved in each decade since the early 1980s (OECD 2007). Even in France, which has historically been extraordinarily friendly territory for mass strikes, recent attempts at mobilization have had less and less success in the last two decades. Recently the most important movements have unquestionably been those of a very different sort: fundamentalist, restrictive turning back to traditional values and texts, narrowing the range of inclusion. American politics have moved sharply to the right; in Europe, the same kinds of movements have widely undermined the strength of the Social-Democratic consensus {}. This is not what should be happening if standard labor theories were correct. The usual view, though usually implicit, is that solidarity results from a widening of the class gap, and particularly from large scale oppression of workers. By that theory, the period since 1975 should have been fertile for organizing: it is now well-documented that the gap between the richest group and the rest has grown sharply in that period, especially in the U.S., and that wages have been stagnant {}; insecurity, both subjective and objective, has increased {}; and, of course, the level of unionization has declined markedly. In Europe, as with many of these trends, the problems began later but have followed a similar curve over the last ten to twenty years, with inequality levels increasing almost everywhere {}. Labor scholars have repeatedly expected an upsurge as a result of these trends. When AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland joined a sitdown strike at the Pittstown Mine in 1990; when John Sweeney defeated Kirkland for the office in 1995 by promising more militant mobilization, and followed up by developing new training for activist organizers and new coordinated campaigns; when labor joined the anti-globalization protests in Seattle in 1999; when Andy Stern, SEIUs President, led a split within the AFL-CIO in 2005 and charted a more militant course these and many other events were seen as potential moments of unleashing of the pent-up energy of solidary activism {}. But of course it hasnt happened. Unexpected eruptions of mass action are always possible: few people foresaw the disruptions of the 1960s or the Arab Spring. Labor activists sometimes recount stories of social scientists misreading the mood of workers and missing the conditions for 3

collective explosions (Fantasia 1989, 67). But by itself that is wishful thinking, not analysis, and its not a good guide to action. If the existing (implicit) theory of solidarity isnt working worse, if things have been running for a long time almost directly contrary to the theory then the question is whether we can advance at least some way to understanding the conditions and forms of solidary action.

A theory of solidarity
Within the labor relations literature there are many references to solidarity but practically no theoretical treatments. In general sociology we have a number of efforts to develop positivist theories, either on rational-choice or network-structure lines (Markovsky and Lawler 1994; Hechter 1982); these are not designed to capture broad historical trends and are not helpful for understanding the apparent long-term decline of labor solidarity. These approaches, seeking to focus on empirically testable propositions, define solidarity in multiple divergent ways, all of which are considerably narrower than usual usages; and they studiously avoid problems of historical context. Labor solidarity is often equated with the willingness of workers to sacrifice in strikes or other conflicts with management. This is too narrow a view. Strikes can certainly involve solidarity, but they are far from the only expression of it. A focus on strikes excludes other crucial types of solidarity such as the mutualist institutions of 19thcentury co-ops, the union-based social , and the craft institutions of apprenticeship and self-management. It also excludes more recent movements based on assertions of social identity, such as race and gender, which have had a deep impact on workplace rights. And by its narrowness it excludes the possibility of finding new, emergent forms. This is in effect the same error made by the craft leaders of the 1920s: they failed to recognize the potential of emerging movements of industrial workers because they had no understanding of or respect for the links that held those groups together. We will define solidarity as a shared sense of obligation to support others in collective action. The collective action can have varied aims: mutual aid, advancing the groups collective interests and purposes, or broader social change. Labor solidarity is the subset focused on collective action around work. That definition gets at issues that are significant for labor movements. It also both encompasses various types of solidarity in the past, and leaves room for the possibility of new ones in the future. Many mass outbursts or explosions of conflict, though they may be the stuff of labor legend, are not very solidary, because they dont involve mutual or collective obligations. In such cases the movements do not last long. They can occasionally have important consequences as can any disturbance, even the flap of a butterflys wings but they cannot be reliably anticipated or mobilized. It is the solidarity of participating groups that shapes their longer-run impacts. Solidarity is more pointed than trust or community: there are many trusting relations which are not solidary because not oriented to collective action. But there is a close relation between the two types of concept. Communities are structures of obligations and expectations; solidarity is the particular set of obligations concerning what you are supposed to do when the community engages in collective action. Labor organizing is easiest when it taps into already-existing communal bonds. Sometimes,

however, it involves creating or substantially strengthening communities; those cases are much harder and less likely to be sustained. There are two main bases for the sense of obligation that defines communities and, more narrowly, solidary networks:
1) 2)

Relations: a web of reciprocal ties, usually forming a defined group. Value-commitments: a cause or ideal you care about, which unites you with others working for the same ideal for example, solidarity with all those struggling for racial justice, or for working-class liberation, or for religious doctrines.2

Communities, and the obligations of solidarity included in them, are fragile at first, but can over time develop mechanisms that give them strength. Strong communities have established institutions, such as ways of socializing new members, assessing their contribution to the group, establishing reputations so that other members of the community can have confidence in each other, disciplining violations of obligations, and so on. These strong communities also become part of their members personal sense of identity and morality. Such institutions and identities develop slowly through daily relations and exchanges about what is right and what is wrong and who owes what to whom. As we have defined it here, solidarity is distinct from forms of collective action that are based merely on individuals self-interest, because it involves a sense of obligation which is more social than the economists viewpoint, less based on individual rationality (Polletta and Jasper 2001). Theorists like to focus on self-interest because it appears to be the easiest motive to analyze, especially from the armchair; but it is not a sufficient base for collective action. The advantage of obligation for collective action is that continues to motivate even when personal self-interest is not evident: it gives movements more solidity and flexibility, enabling them to call on sacrifices from supporters and to take actions without demonstrating immediate benefits. Aggregation of individual self-interest, the economists favored motive, can certainly be the basis of movements, but cant be counted on by itself, especially in early and fluid phases. Individual interests are never identical and tend to shift in the course of events, leading to continual fragmenting pressures and great difficulty in maintaining unity. That doesnt mean that self-interest cant be part of the motivational mix its easier to motivate people when they see benefit for themselves as well as others but it isnt sufficient for it. Over time interest and obligation have to be aligned: groups cant survive if they demand perpetual self-sacrifice, except by entirely subordinating the individual sense of self.
2

These two bases are based on Durkheims conceptualization of soldiarity, and on Parsons elaboration of them in the integrative and pattern-maintenance domains. Arnsperger and Varoufakis (2003) would argue that empathy is even more important. It is true that empathy can sometimes lead to collective action, as in outpourings of support for victims of natural disasters, and that they involve a sense of obligation to those victims. Including empathy, however, does not help this analysis much: merely empathic movements are erratic, hard to manage, and short-lived. (That is why the viral success of the video about Joseph Kony in March 2012 was so criticized by activists: those who had been working for years in the field had a developed sense of solidarity that based on real debate and experience; they feared that the wave of empathic solidarity would make things worse.)

Solidarity, this sense of obligation and commitment, is interdependent with but not determined by political and economic structures; it has its own dynamics. The economic sphere, for example, certainly has a consistent tendency to increasing inequality and the separation of classes, but that does not necessarily lead to class solidarity. Frequently economic polarization or disturbance leads to other forms of solidarity, such as intense national, religious, or ethnic cohesion. Thus there has not been, as Marxists have expected, a secular trend towards class consciousness. Since the 1960s, indeed, a series of new social movements have emphasized non-class links, either of social identity racial, gender, sexual or political purpose, notably environmentalism.3 Labor solidarity is of course strongly affected by relationships in workplaces; so an understanding of changes in the latter helps explain changes in the former. But it is also affected by relations in other parts of the society. For example, the rise of identitybased social groups has had an enormous impact on the kinds of collective actions that are possible and has been a major impetus behind the growth of workplace rights legislation since the 1960s. Similarly causes and value-commitments focused on work are most obviously relevant to labor mobilization, but other kinds of causes and values such as human rights can also have powerful effects.

The evolution of community and solidarity

We have had, in the history of the labor movement, two fundamental forms of community and solidarity: craft and industrial {}, which underlie corresponding forms of unionism. Neither of them appears strong at the moment. Craft community is based in closed groups that are relatively tight, personal, stable, and continuous; they maintain their boundaries with great care by apprenticeship and certification, and by protecting internal procedures and secrets. They have elaborated mechanisms of self-management, with no clear boundary between organization and community. Craft communities dont have to fight management to maintain solidarity: they can come together to fight when necessary, but they have other bases of obligation when theyre not fighting. They can be very long-lasting and resilient: some craft communities have lasted without great change for centuries. Industrial solidarity is able to extend more widely and openly, but at some costs. It seeks to include as many people as possible, and therefore does not have the kind of closed boundaries characteristic of crafts. Industrial communities are relatively shortlived, and they are heavily shaped by the nature of the employers production process: that is, they develop from the relationships on factory floors rather than from occupational communities with their own shapes. They can be relatively stronger or weaker some factories or industrial regions have had enough time to establish institutions of worker discussion and self-organization but industrial solidarity is
3

This view of solidarity is consistent with Webers treatment of the partial independence of civil society. In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism he argued that the success of capitalism was due not only to the development of key economic institutions but also to the emergence of values that emphasized selfmastery and rationalization of character; and that the latter arose from independent dynamics, not as an inevitable result of the economic shifts. The dynamics of solidarity, likewise, cannot be deduced directly from economic factors, though they are certainly affected by them..

almost never as thoroughly developed as the craft form. The solidarity of such communities is based primarily on unified opposition to management. Ideology may play a role, but not necessarily: though some industrial movements have rallied around a vision of a new society, often they focus more on specific conflicts of interests. Industrial solidarity is far more distinct from its formal organizations than craft solidarity. Craft communities include communally-developed mechanisms of authority and decision-making; industrial ones in general do not. Thus the latter have a bigger problem in establishing a connection between the organization and the community; a lot of organizing involves making and sustaining that connection. This distinction between labor communities reflects the nature of society as a whole. Sociologists have converged from many different angles on a basic distinction between two types of community, which we will call traditionalistic and contractual traditionalistic being stable, personal, particularistic, and contractual being rational, impersonal, systemic {Toennies}.4 Guild and craft unions have been dominant within primarily traditionalistic and transitional societies, and industrial unions have grown with the spread of large, impersonal mechanisms of markets and bureaucracies. From this broad perspective unions have been typical of their periods: they were part of a large set of fraternal societies that flourished in the 19th century, and they became in the 20th century the core formal institution balancing the power of the growing managerial and governmental bureaucracies. The closest approximation of true class solidarity emerged at the intersection of the two forms, as the industrial era began to take off and large numbers of workers were in transition from farm to factory. At that point there was a period of larger movements and dramatic conflagrations with a strong working-class element, although they generally drew in other groups, including large numbers of middle-class and skilled workers as well as the true proletariat. These produced collective conflagrations or general strikes in dramatic opposition to existing powers, and in a few cases even established counter-societies of their own; they include the revolutions of 1848, the Paris Commune of 1870, the wave of general strikes immediately after World War I in Europe and the U.S., and some waves of action during the Depression of the 1930s. These mass movements had weak communal bases and low solidarity by our definition: they were intense, but they collapsed quickly. They drew together many people who felt oppressed, but they did not build sustained relations. They were often led by solidary groups, especially crafts who were under attack from the forces of industrialization; but this basis of solidarity, as discussed above, was very ill-adapted to sustaining a mass movement. Karl Marx provided an ideology for class-based movement that motivated some, but never enough to legitimate sustained action on a wide scale.

I am radically compressing here a lengthy analysis which I have elaborated elsewhere (with Paul Adler) (Adler and Heckscher 2006; Adler, Kwon, and Heckscher 2008). Its worth underlining in a footnote, though, that there we differ from some widespread views. Many people see community as possible only in the traditionalistic gemeinschaft form. This leads to all kinds of conceptual and practical confusions. We argue instead that the traditionalistic is one form of community, with characteristic values and normative patterns; that contractual community is another form, with a different set of values and norms; and that those do not exhaust the possibilities. For more on the theory of community, see the Appendix.

By the 1950s, the industrial / contractual pattern was well-established: unions throughout the industrial world had become one of a small number of peak institutions ordinarily a triad of employers, government, and labor that negotiated ground rules for the economy as a whole, with each grounded in more personal communities (the informal management organization, political party chapters, and local unions respectively). Some labor scholars are highly critical of unionism in this period for having lost contact with its communal base, turning into business unionism {}; but this basic pattern was virtually universal throughout the civil society of the era. Craft solidarity, meanwhile, was pushed back into a much smaller set of industries that had not (yet) been subjected to managerial bureaucratization.

The future: something old?

The options for the future aside from a continuing decline of solidarity are a revival of one of these historical forms, or the emergence of a new form. Many authors have turned, implicitly or explicitly to familiar models from the past, looking for signs of revival of class or industrial solidarity. Others have argued instead that something fundamentally new was emerging in the social-identity movements which reached takeoff velocity in the 1960s. Class solidarity No large-scale class movements have occurred since the early 1930s in any of the advanced industrial economies. The closest approximation, perhaps, were some of the upheavals of the 1960s, especially in France. But it is generally understood that these movements had a very different base: it was French theorists, indeed, who were the prime developers of the concept of New Social Movements to describe them. There is perhaps one reason to suggest that the current conditions are similar enough to those of the 1930s to breed true class movements. Inequality, at least in the U.S., is approaching levels last seen in that period. If your theory is that high levels of inequality breed class solidarity, then this would be a good time for it. And since those kinds of upheavals can spring up without much previous sense of community, their possibility can never be entirely discounted. Nevertheless, there is no good reason to think that things will go in that direction. The theory that inequality leads to class solidarity has been occasionally right, but more often wrong: inequality has frequently led on the contrary to to right-wing and fundamentalist movements, including fascism. Today, much of the U.S. working class has in fact turned towards fundamentalisms of various kinds, and significant numbers have joined quite solidary Tea Party groups that meet regularly, have deep relational commitments, and have developed an elaborated ideology of freedom with strong intellectual foundations in Hayek and Rand. Moreover, both the relational nor the ideological bases are moving away from class structures. Eric Olin Wright, the premier scholar of class, has come to agree that broad class polarities have been declining rather than widening. Instead, he has found a trajectory of change within developed capitalist societies towards an expansion, rather than a decline, of contradictory locations within class relations. (Wright 1997, 66) Class-based legitimations, which were widely attractive from the 1840s through the 1930s, have lost power; there has been a sustained rise of individualist and expressive ideologies, again broadly through the advanced 8

industrial world {Inglehart}. Occupy Wall Street has to some extent revived a leftpopulist and class-based value-system, but one of the most striking things about that movement is its determined lack of ideological clarity, and it certainly does not appear at this writing to be having a political impact anywhere near as great as that of the Tea Party. Its always possible that things will change abruptly, but history gives us no reason to think its likely. Industrial solidarity The basic conditions of industrial union solidarity included large, relatively stable workplaces, with a fairly homogeneous semi-skilled work force, and a sharp distinction between blue-collar and white-collar levels that defined sides in periodic struggles. These conditions have been largely undermined. In the workplace there has been clear movement to decentralization and fragmentation, with fewer workers in large factories. Automation has reduced the need for concentration in many instances and has also made batch-like, more flexible production increasingly feasible. Workplaces are also much more dispersed internationally, with the same work often being done in multiple countries. Companies have greatly accelerated the rate of restructuring and reconfiguration to keep pace with technological and market shifts. Routine work semiskilled work is being replaced by automation {Autor}. The organization of production through vertical integration within single companies, which was dominant in the highindustrial period, has been substantially replaced by a value-chain form in which each firm specializes in just one part of the process. These shifts are sometimes interpreted by labor as tactical tools of managerial control, but they run far deeper than that. Indeed, managers, too, are struggling to deal with them; companies are not at all confident of their ability to master the trends. Corporate leaders and middle managers, like workers, have much less security than they used to {}, even if they are usually better able to buffer themselves with high salaries. The set of changes that have changed the world of both management and labor can be traced fundamentally to a maturation of capitalist production. The core valueadded of 20th-century industrial firms was, as Alfred Chandler {} showed, the capacity for scale and scope: the winning firms were better able to manufacture and distribute large quantities of standardized products. Over the last decades there has been a shift: large companies are seeking frantically to get out of standardized commodity production and to develop the far more profitable capability for applying advanced knowledge {}, where they can make much higher profits. Though the move is slow and far from universal, from a broad perspective it appears to be inexorable. It has greatly weakened the relational basis for industrial solidarity. On the value front, the balance-of-power ideology which legitimated industrial solidarity retains some credibility; but it, too, has been significantly eroded by a set of values that emphasize self-development, and which have been a basis for a rather different set of recent movements. Thus neither the relational base nor the more powerful forms of legitimacy suggest that this old form of solidarity is likely to re-emerge.

Something new?: New Social Movements

Many scholars have claimed that since the 1960s a new kind of social movement has developed, based not on on common workplace experience and opposition to management, but on general social identities of race, in the original Civil Rights movement, then of gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and similar categories. Social-identity movements have had more success than the labor movement in expanding workplace rights during the last half century. Laws barring discrimination on the basis of race, gender, age, disability, sexual orientation, and other social-identity characteristics have focused not on the workplace but on social relations at large; nevertheless, their impact on employment relations has been enormous. Unions have had somewhat ambivalent relations to these movements. Craft unions, with their closed boundaries, have a record of considerable tension with new groups in general (including industrial unions). Industrial unions are more welcoming but their emphasis on seniority have made them resistant to aspects of affirmative action. Womens and minority groups continue to criticize labor for the lack of diversity in leadership. In the case of the disabilities movement which led to the passage of a rights act in 1990, unions were almost entirely absent. Some unions, activists, and scholars have argued that unions must do more to engage and include these new movements. The Service Employees union (SEIU) has been especially explicit and successful in reaching out to minorities, women, and gays. The overlapping scholarly literatures on community unionism and social movement unionism are heavily oriented to this kind of coalition of the new movements, reaching beyond the workplace to social identities. I myself argued 25 years ago that these groups would in time come together in a more generalized movement for workplace rights {}. But the actual trajectory has been different from out expectations. New Social Movements began as assertions of collective rights, which is familiar enough, but have increasingly morphed into something quite different: a basis for explorations of collective and individual cultures and identities, which poses entirely new challenges. Rights-oriented Movements Union-oriented approaches to New Social Movements generally focus on one particular type: ones that unite an oppressed or excluded group, and that are legitimated by claims to rights. These are different enough from the bases of industrial union to be difficult to connect, but similar enough for connection to seem possible. They are different, first, because the relations on which they are based are not focused on the workplace and do not naturally blend into broader class definitions. Industrial unionism has long drawn on this kind of solidarity: the factories of the 30s had many race and ethnic subgroups who were in tension with each other but could be united, at least temporarily, around a common enemy and sense of grievance. The focus on rights is also in many ways continuous with the language of industrial unionism. The problem is that as these rights claims have multiplied they have become divisive: rather than coalescing into a broader push for general human and employment rights, groups have continued to push separate claims with relatively little support from natural allies (see, for example, the extent to which Black groups have

10

resisted the gay-rights balance initiative). Rather than growing support for a broad definition of social rights, there is a strong backlash against the notion of special interests and fragmented claims. On the whole, this effort to build the labor movement by drawing on New Social Movements has had very modest results. SEIU has, to be sure, grown dramatically in size, but this success has been largely in the public sector, and largely through topdown organizing and political lobbying rather than through solidary action an approach which has led to disaffection from many within the union. Other efforts to connect unions to social-identity groups have not gone far. ACORN, once arguably the most successful coalition-building group in the nation, bringing together unions with neighborhood and ethnic associations (Osterman 2006), was abandoned by its partners at the first attacks from the Right. The rainbow coalition has not come close to materializing. More fundamentally, the new social movements have not stabilized into mature communal groups. The progressive identity groups blacks, women, and so on have remained fractured within and among themselves. The disabilities movement and the bill passed with its support in 1990 seemed at first a vindication of the power of rightsbased movements; but once the bill was passed this movement lost its unity and momentum, and the law itself has been stripped of much of its power (Triano, Feldman, and Williams 2003; Lathrop 2003). Since then the strongest and most sustained civil society communities have been those grounded in return to traditional foundations the Bible and the Constitution. Identity movements and the expressive turn But there is another aspect of New Social Movements that has grown more prominent: often they seek not to assert rights in a battle with their oppressors, but rather to develop a new sense of identity, both individual and collective. Though there is considerable overlap, at a certain point these two types go in very different directions. The Civil Rights movement, for instance, began as the first, but with the development of the Black Power strand became something else: it became not entirely, but considerably a quest for self-expression and cultural pride. The womens movement, similarly, is on one hand a demand for collective justice for a group that has been historically marginalized and underpaid in the workplace, but on the other a search for a redefinition of femininity and a development of a complete cultural view of womanhood that did not exist before. This orientation produces a type of solidarity one of group obligation and engagement aiming at social change; but it is not directed at the political or economic systems. Its direct goal is to change values and relations. The initial rights-focused movements have sustained themselves for relatively short periods while focused on legislative goals, but the expressive movements and communities have maintained themselves more solidly. The disabilities movement, to take one example, pulled together a wide array for groups for the push culminating in the Federal legislation of 1992, but fragmented almost immediately in political terms. Nevertheless, as Paul Longmore puts it, The movement of disabled Americans has entered its second phase. The first phase has been a quest for disability rights, . the task in the second phase is to explore or to create a disability culture. (Longmore 1995; see also Triano, Feldman, and Williams 2003) 11

Comment [CH3]: Add something here about collective vs individual rights as legitimating ideologies?

Some strands of this second, cultural aspect of current movements have become almost purely expressive, with identities that are deliberately chosen and constantly constructed: rather than members being determined by membership in the group, the group becomes a vehicle for self-development. Gamson (1995) sees instability indeed as essential to the nature of these groups: they want to subvert the very idea of stable identity to see it as a choice, as fluid, as always being constructed. He identifies a general predicament of identity politics, whose workings and implications are not well understood: it is as liberating and sensible to demolish a collective identity as it is to establish one. (p402). Thus theories have begun to explore more deeply the problem of fluid and intersectional identities (McCall 2009). This type of orientation is completely outside the frame of the labor tradition, industrial or craft; indeed, it is beyond most conceptions of community and solidarity and is viewed with great suspicion by those who favor more established relations. It is more the focus of postmodernist scholars. It seems impossible to build anything on it: a systematically self-deconstructing group, it would seem, cannot become a stable stakeholder on which political action can be based. Yet there is a great deal of momentum in such groups, and they cannot be so easily dismissed. In many respects it seems that the direction of movement favors them: many of the New Social movement have gone more towards the cultural focus over time. A number of sociologists indeed argue that we are in the midst of an expressive revolution that is fundamentally changing the nature of social relations.

Beyond traditionalistic and contractual: friending communities

From close up, the expressive movements appear to be just one of many on the social horizon. From a broader perspective, they look more like a key to the future. We have discussed the general types of civil society, traditionalistic and contractual, and suggested that the key types of labor movement solidarity have been particular expressions of those. Now it looks like both are in serious decline. Expressive relations are the only ones that are rising. Social-capital theorists have focused on on the decline of first type, traditionalistic community: bowling leagues, especially those which were popular in the 1950s, fit in this category. Putnams evidence is certainly consistent with a widespread feeling that this type of community is under siege. The decline of stable local relations, whether at the dinner table or in the bowling alleys, is one indicator; so is the decline of deference, documented across countries in the World Values Survey (Nevitte 1996); and also the sustained challenge to traditional social roles, especially those of gender and race.5 There are also strong survey data, especially from the GSS, that primary, strongtie social networks in general have been narrowing and fragmenting. The main analysis of these data finds: Discussion networks are smaller in 2004 than in 1985. The number of people saying there is no one with whom they discuss important matters nearly
5

Despite the intensity of fundamentalist movements, there is no evidence of any overall numerical shift to a more fundamentalist or religious view of society: religious activity has declined for generations, and recent surveys have not shown a change in the trend (Baldassarri 2008; Norris and Inglehart 2004)

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tripled. The mean network size decreases by about a third. (McPherson, Smith-Lovin, and Brashears 2006, abstract). These strong networks, they find, are increasingly centered on family members. The other familiar type of community, the contractual form, has also declined sharply and widely in the past few decades, as evidenced by decreased faith in large institutions. In the US the overall index of confidence in institutions dropped by about 40% between the 1960s and 1970s and has stayed at roughly the same level since (Harris Interactive 2005)(see figure 1). Unions have certainly felt this decline, but they shouldnt take it personally: big businesses, government, and other large organizations have been hit by it in equal measure. Moreover, a similar deep and long-lasting loss of confidence has been documented, at least for government, across the industrial democracies (Pharr, Putnam, and Dalton 2000; Dalton 2005). Thus the two historically most important bases for trust anchoring social relations the belief in tradition and local community, and the belief in formal systems and rule-based order have indeed demonstrably decreased. There is also a great deal of evidence of growing individualist values across the industrial world (Schwartz 1994; Inglehart 2000; Hofstede 2001; Inglehart and Oyserman 2004). The debate then is: does this mean that people have withdrawn from community, into some sort of individual amoralism, or does it mean they are forming different kinds of communities? Have all bases for solidary action eroded? Here the evidence is less clear. Although people seem to have withdrawn from many types of familiar groups and express increasingly individualist values, they also seem to engage in a great deal of sociability and joining. Putnam (1996) at his gloomiest feared that people would increasingly sit in isolation watching television; but that has not been at all what has happened. They are connecting in new ways which generally reflect the expressive turn described earlier. Thus Wuthnows (1994) data show over 40% of the population participating in small voluntary groups. Others show high volunteerism in the US and elsewhere (Curtis, Baer, and Grabb 2001). The most careful analysis of the longitudinal data from the General Social Survey concludes that since the 1970s there has been only a modest shift, with a some people who were members of only one group losing that connection, but some increase in the number of people who were members of multiple types of groups (Baldassarri 2008). And such surveys have not fully caught up to one of the most important developments in civil society: the growth of the internet and especially of social media. It is surely important for our purposes that today over 75 million people in the U.S. log in to Facebook on any given day (Facebook 2011). However you assess this activity, it is not indicative of a spread of isolated television-watchers. Thus we need to recognize that there are some kinds of widespread associational joining, yet also a general growth of individualism along with a rather strong rejection of the dominant institutions of society. Though existing surveys dont give us much help here, there are indications that the resolution lies in a movement from long-lasting membership in enduring groups to more temporary and contingent association.

Comment [JM4]: This might be a useful place to go into online communities not necessarily Facebook just yet, but online communities (e.g., the Well) in general. Comment [JM5]: There is a great deal of work on online communities. The question is how much to go into it, and where. A lot of this work took off from Anderson (1993), who described invisible communities, or communities of the mind. This book has nearly 24K citations, if I remember correctly. I have the Kindle version, and have read part but not all of it. In any case, this formed a basis for work on online communities because it meant that communities could transcend proximity, so long as members saw themselves as belonging to a community. I believe Rheingold, who you cited in an email, drew from this work. Palloff and Pratt (1999) define online classroom communities as having the following characteristics: Clearly define the purpose of the group Promote effective leadership from within Define norms and a clear code of conduct oNeeds to be open, honest, safe oNever say anything you could not tolerate seeing in print on the front of your daily newspaper. Allow for a range of roles Allow for creation of sub-groups Allow members to resolve their own disputes This work has been appropriated by scholars to understand online communities more generally.

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The emergent structure of community: friending My hypothesis is that both the declines and the rise reflect a transition in community to something new. Traditionalistic community is based on stable, ascriptive, strong relations; contractual communities is based on relations of deliberate contracts and formal rules impersonal and rational. The communities reflected in the expressive form of New Social Movements, and in many internet platforms, are neither. The most general term might be one taken from Facebook: friending. Friendship is obviously not a new idea, but it has had a vexed history in the older forms of community. In traditional traditionalistic friendship was either assimilated to strong ascriptive duties, or seen as actually a bad thing: Weber notes the strikingly frequent repetition, especially in the English Puritan literature, of warnings against any trust in the aid of friendship of men,(1930, bk. 4.A) and the same theme is strong in Augustine. In the modern contractual order friendship was pushed deep into a separate private realm (Silver 1989); if it leaked into the public arena, is has been seen as likely to be a source of corruption and other distortions of rationality.6 The communities emerging from the New Social Movements and social media, however, put friendship front and center. That is, they are based on relations that are chosen, negotiated, constructed, public yet unlike contracts, not essentially rational. They engage the whole person at the level of values and culture, and can also be a platform for ongoing relationships of varying strength. Friending communities are neither individualistic, in the sense of classic Western political philosophy, nor collectivist. The former sees the individual as prior to society, and society as a contract among them; the latter sees the individual as a product of the society. Friending communities, by contrast, are defined and built from free exchanges and dialogues, and they are also vehicles for the expression and development of the self. Evidence for this trend comes from various levels and angles. At the level of general theory, this is a development explored at the start of the 20th century by Mead (1934) and Simmel (1964), conceptualizing the self as constructed from the intersection of multiple social relations. This is now a widespread theme of postmodern theories of identity (Leinberger and Tucker 1991; Somers 1994; Cinnirella 1998). Similarly, analysis of group memberships from the General Social Survey (Baldassarri 2008) shows that many forms of association, including political, professional, and hobby, have not declined. The widely-noted decline in group membership is actually centered in just three types of associations: fraternal societies, religious groups, and labor unions. The first two of these are particularly clear examples of traditionalist associations based on enduring relations Skocpol (2003) traces fraternal orders in the 19th century and bemoans their current fragmentation and professionalization. Labor unions are also strong-tie in the sense that membership is generally linked to enduring employment in firms. Moreover, as McPherson et al. {} note, the surveys that lament the decline of community focus on strong ties but miss the weak-tie networks. And here we have less
6

The classical world, especially the Greeks, did incorporate a more public form of friendship. There is much in Aristotle, in particular, that prefigures the current friending and collaborative trends.

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rigorous but nonetheless overwhelming evidence of a quantum increase. Quantitative: the more than 150 million active Facebook users in the U.S. have an average of 130 friends. Survey data from the Center for a Digital Future, using a definition of friendship that depends less on strong ties than the GSS and including internet relations, finds only 5% of the population lacking social connections, as opposed to the 23% found in the GSS (McPherson, Smith-Lovin, and Brashears 2006), and those ties did not decline between 2002 and 2007 (Hua Wang and Wellman 2010). Wellman, one of the most thorough students of the development of online relations, finds that even in the early 2000s the growth in this kind of connection was emerging as an important part of the online world across a wide swath of the society (2004). Wellman et al. (2003) call this type of community networked individualism. In contrast to both group and local solidarities, they find, internet-mediated structures form rich and shifting patterns of both local and global ties. Similarly, Torrents and Ferraro (2010) identify a distinctive network form in the open-source software community of Debian, which they call cohesive small worlds: unlike common smallworld models that combine strong-tie groups with a sparse number of weak-tie links, these communities are rich in both and rely less on a few key bridgers. Friending community: an ideal-type description A friend is not someone you obey, or whose values you internalize; it is someone whom you discuss with and share with. These interactions build social bonds with a sense of obligation, a we linkage that is not dependent on a superior force, whether an authority or a charismatic leader or a father-figure or a foundational text. Through this social interaction friends test and create their own identities. Although there are obligations to friends, these are not codified and fixed: one leaves friendships behind as one changes, and perhaps comes back to them later, in a way that one cannot leave a family or a tribe or a nation or, for that matter, a contract. These characteristics of interactivity, mutual development, and voluntarily constructed bonds are central to new types of community ranging from the communes and consciousness-raising groups of the 1960s to New Social Movements to religious support groups to web-enabled platforms like Facebook. From studies of these we can draw a number of common characteristics, positive and negative, that distinguish them from both previous forms of community: They are held together primarily by general cultural orientations symbols, meanings, a common sense of what is cool rather than by specific social obligations. They are centered on two related kinds of discourse: discussions of cultural phenomena (including the latest movies, styles, fads; and building and redefining collective identities through new symbols of pride); and discussions of personal identity. The members may have commitments to each other, and may come together at times for collective action, but these social obligations are secondary to the search for meaning and identity. They are highly fluid and voluntary. Unlike contractual communities, which also supports voluntary relations, they are not limited to specific utilitarian agreements; friending relations are based on diffuse discussions of identity 15

and culture. They can also tolerate, even encourage, lurkers people who do not actively participate but learn from and are influenced by the discussions (Wollebaek and Selle 2002). They bring personal issues into the public realm. The old feminist slogan, The personal is political, was the opening of a door in which open communal discussion of personal and intimate phenomena become part of the defining quality of the community. This is a reversal of a trend since at least the 18th century which has relegated such matters to a highly private realm of intimacy (Paine 1969; Silver 1989). They are resistant to hierarchical controls, even democratic ones that is, they dont work on the notion that periodic elections can legitimize an otherwise hierarchical form of command. The most long-lasting feiending communities are quite structured, but the structuring focuses on mechanisms of interdependent process management {Adler & Heckscher} rather than bureaucracy. The core institutional mechanism is reputation. Web-based communities have developed reputational mechanisms to a very sophisticated level, through combinations of reviews and ratings of reviews and reviewers, liking, and complex alogorithms measuring contribution. There are ongoing struggles to head off those who try to manipulate their reputations; this draws far more attention than questions of authority or incentive, hich are so crucial in other kinds of community. There are important, emergent values that are treated as binding on members: these are essentially the values of friendship, including mutuality, reciprocity, and helping. They are unlike traditional notions of friendship in advancing norms of maximum openness and diversity. People who violate these values in the online world are called trolls, and the problem of many friending communities is how to control trolls while maintaining the openness and diversity that are crucial to the friending interaction. As part of the orientation to culture and identity, story-telling is a central institutional feature: that is, the communities usually have regularized and organized ways for people to tell their own stories to each other, for example through personal profiles. Putnam et al summarize the attitude of groups they studied: We tell our own stories, and through our stories we redefine who we are. (2004, chap. Conclusion) {add other stories refs} They are not held together by the classic glues of communities through the ages. First, they are not oriented to strong leaders (especially father-figures), even when they become more goal-focused. It is striking, for example, that there are no clear leaders for the current incaranations of the civil rights and womens movements, as well as the gay community, Occupy Wall Street, and the Tea Part. Similarly and even more striking from the labor perspective friending communities are not oriented to battling an enemy: Putnam et al note, we were surprised to notice that in many of our casesthe Shipyard Project, Do 16

Something, Experience Corps, the Chicago libraries, craigslist, Tupeloit is virtually impossible to discern any enemy at all against whom the organizers sought to rally support (2004 Kindle location 4705). The relation of friending to diversity is important but contradictory. On one hand, the high level of voluntariness might to encourage a gathering of self-reinforcing similarities what {Bellah et al.} called spontaneous community with the like-minded, in contrast to enduring association of the different. On the other, the friending emphasis on learning, openness, and development encourages the opposite an inclusion of differences in order to create richer, more vibrant interactions. Most empirical research has found little overall effect one way or the other, suggesting that these two tendencies may cancel each other out {}. Online platforms like Facebook do, however, build bridges among groups that would otherwise not interact (Ellison, Steinfield, and Lampe 2007), and that there is a mild tendency for new communities, online and off, to be more diverse and more tolerant than face-to-face analogues (Goode 2007; Park 2008; Gentzkow and Shapiro 2010).

Solidarity and friending communities

Can friending communities be a basis for solidarity? Can they be organized into collective actions? This question stretches beyond available evidence. The rapidly-growing literature on the theme of new types of social movements, and on the use of the web to organize social action, remains scattered and disorganized, and things are evolving so rapidly that much of it, even from a few years ago, is already out of date. It has tended to treat political mobilization as separate from cultural movements (Polletta and Jasper 2001, 296 ff). Those who have tried to make the connection have tended to make circular arguments: we know that mobilization works when it works, and it doesnt work when it doesnt. Those who value old models of civil society are skeptical of value or even the reality of friending communities. Many see them as essentially narcissistic, uncommitted, and shallow, and fear that their children will lose the capacity for true social interaction whether true is defined from the left or the right, in terms of committed activism or moral dutifulness. Traditionalists naturally reject, with intensuty and passion, the lack of a stable moral center. A considerable amount of the heat around the culture wars comes from this clash: partisans of friending association see the traditional visions as narrow and intolerant; partisans of traditional relations see friending as self-indulgent and chaotic. Friending communities are certainly profoundly at odds with the kind of relations, community, and trust at the core of the industrial labor movement. We suggested that the industrial labor movement was the key civil society representative of the contractual model, contributing to general trust in the societal system by establishing stable rule-based relations. It appeals to a sense of fairness built on equal application of rules and reduction in personal or traditional managerial discretion. Its power is based on mass unity around broadly shared interests, whether identified through the Marxist lens of class or more pragmatically in a balance-of-power frame. The fragmented, seemingly uncommitted world of current associational relations undermines the 17

conditions required for large-scale struggles. This criticism, it is worth noting, recreates in a new arena the views of craft leaders a century ago, who similarly felt that industrial organization was too thin, temporary, and uncommitted to sustain a serious movement. There have been efforts by unions to connect to new communities via social media, but these have generally been unsuccessful. SEIU, one of the most open to this kind of experiment, tried to launch its own social media platform called MyLife, but it never gained traction. Various groups on Facebook host discussions of labor issues, and occasionally web sites have been used to coordinate unconventional member actions (Anon. 2009), but these have been very marginal. Organized friending A first implication of this transformation is that friending communities may not produce traditional labor solidarity or organization. Unions frequently view identity communities as merely pre-conscious, immature industrial communities. But the fundamental premises of relations are different; just as craft and industrial workers tend to organize differently, so may the new workers have their own character. Communities with friending characteristics have sometimes succeeded in sustaining long-term, effective, goal-focused projects; and some effective solidary movements have come from such communities, even though they do not turn into industrial movements. Some come relatively close to familiar territory for example, online student groups supporting Living Wage efforts (Biddix and Park 2008), or the international network supporting the Liverpool dock strike (Carter et al. 2003). The Arab Spring movements, especially the Egyptian, fit that category but only in part: the Facebook and Google platforms did help foster an awareness that erupted into action, but there were also more familiar types of political organizations that had been working for a long time. Many of the best cases of friending solidarity, like New Social Movements, have come from domains outside the workplace. The movement to democratize the ICANN process, key to internet governance (Klein 2001), was essentially a mass social change movements. Open-source software, perhaps the most-studied online movement, is more like a craft community, building its own governance structures to organize a work process and banding together at times to fight off challenges to its autonomy. A somewhat purer case was the use of social networking in 2007 to register over 20,000 bone marrow donors for an entrepreneur diagnosed with bone cancer (Aaker 2010). By 2011 the pace was quickening: major events included the huge reaction to Komens cutting of funding to planned parenthood and the viral video on Joseph Kony, both of which activated large numbers of people through friending communications and which had real impacts. There are some lessons across this range that suggest the ways in which friending movements are similar to, and ways in which they are different from, those of the past. 1. Structure: the power of platforms The fundamental pattern of successful organized friending is not the familiar bureaucratic hierarchy, but a platform. A bureaucracy seeks ways to maximize the

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effective implementation of plans formed at the top. This does not necessarily mean that there is no participation or involvement: good bureaucracies have mechanisms for effective listening to the perceptions and needs of those throughout the organization. But such participatory processes are distinct from decision and implementation: it is the job of the top to gather all the inputs and to make a decision, and from then on it is the job of the rest of the organization to carry it out. This describes most unions. A union is a democracy, so members have rights to elect officers and vote on strike authorizations; but it is the leaders who decide when to strike, and an effective union is one where that decision gets carried out swiftly and consistently by all members. A platform has an entirely different implication: the goal of the leadership is to maximize the ability of members to use the organization for their own purposes. The World Wide Web is perhaps the uber-platform: its power comes from the fact that it has enabled an almost infinite number of new uses which had not been foreseen by its designers. It is not particularly good at carrying out a coherent policy, but it is very good at generating innovative projects. Within the web more focused platforms have grown up, such as YouTube or Twitter or, of course, Facebook, each creating a new level of capability on the wider base of the internet as a whole. The principles that make for effective bureaucracy are still essentially those spelled out by Max Weber over a century ago: clear hierarchy of authority, strong accountability, rational rules. The principles that make for effective platforms have not been so magisterially defined, but they clearly include accessibility, interoperability, mutualism, and utility. A platform, in other words, must be: Accessible to a maximal range of people the wider the access, the more it serves its purpose. Thus web-based platforms, for example, publish open apis or protocols that enable others to dock onto and use their tools. The apis of Firefox or Facebook enable programmers to design extensions to add new utility; within software development projects, the protocols guide contributors who want to create new modules and capabilities. Accessibility poses a complex challenge to proprietary strategies, whether for the purpose of profit or for effectiveness in conflict: by opening a platform you may draw in more people, but you may also lose control. For commercial products there is considerable evidence that proprietary strategies limit innovation and often do not increase profits, because the increase in access at least offsets the lost profits due to sharing (Lessig 1999; Benkler 2002; Oberholzer-Gee and Strumpf 2007). Interoperable: able to connect as much as possible to other platforms and projects. Again, the more the better, for the essential generative purpose of a platform. This, even more than accessibility, may pose challenges for competitive economic models. For example, there are currently struggles over how much Facebook and Google Plus competing social media platforms will allow interoperability, so that posts or information or tools on one platform can be easily used on the other. The commercial interest, at least from the classic perspective, is to limit interoperability, in order to lock users into one platform or the other. There are arguments, as with other forms of openness, that interoperability actually increases use by drawing in new customers.

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 Mutualist: not oriented to a central distribution point either to disseminate or receive communication, but a way for members to interact with each other, to define their own priorities and activities. Useful, primarily by providing specialized tools. Facebook is more useful for certain purposes than the internet, on which it is built, because it provides focused tools for sharing personal information: streams, photos, chats, and so on. Other more focused platforms are built on Facebook to facilitate, for example, the creation of social-action networks. More focused sites have more specialized tools and purposes; this restricts their reach, but interoperability can enable links as needed to other specialized groups. 2. Focus: the development of purpose A pure platform like the Internet can be used for almost anything. What moves towards an organized form is the addition of purpose or shared goal. Adding purpose to a platform can produce a social organization that is high-high: it combines high decentralization and autonomy with goal-focused effectiveness. The best example, or at least the one that has been studied most, is open source software. This form violates almost all traditional assumptions about collective action: armies of volunteers working on Linux or Firefox has been able to outperform, at least for considerable periods, enormous corporations like Microsoft in head-to-head market cometititon. The lessons are particularly useful for social-action groups that have to rely on volunteers.7 Open-source draws on the attitudes and skills developed in friending communities attitudes and skills of independence, helping, exploring, combining, innovating. For all its voluntariness, it is strongly structured socially, with clear operating procedures and strong values often debated in the community and enforced through peer pressure. The motivational base rests in large part on a key component I have identified as characteristic of friending communities: a prioritization of individual development that is, people contribute to these communities largely for the learning opportunities and the chance to develop their personal skills and reputations. But there is also, becoming more clear over time, a set of normative and moral constraints. As in any social system, individuals must to some extent conform to the society; but these constraints are quite different in nature from those of traditional or contractual societies. Open-source systems are highly structured, though not bureaucratic. They have developed an array of mechanisms to enable coordinated action. There are strong processes based on standardizing interfaces among modularized units of code.

The following set of characteristics is constructed from a large literature. Though no small set of references captures these dimensions, I would recommend {Langlois & Garzarelli, 2008; Crocker, 2009; Lakhani & von Hippel, 2003; Strmer & Myrach, 2006}; and in general the papers at opensource.mit.edu/online_papers.php.

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 The systems develop reputation verification to an unprecedented degree: extremely elaborate mechanisms gather information on contribution and are used in distributed ways to build collaborative linkages. Governance is largely democratic, but not democracy in the sense of periodic elections of leaders of otherwise bureaucratic structures. A great deal of activity starts on the periphery rather than being controlled from the center. Democracy thus means not only electing leaders but redefining the nature of leadership as a means of maximizing opportunities for individual development and contribution. Moral obligations center on contribution. Mere status based on credentials, office, education, social class, gender, race, or other traditional or technical criteria is strongly devalued; what is valued instead is demonstrated ability to contribute to the work of the community, including openness, willingness to help others, and sharing credit. Those who violate these obligations are strongly condemned. With development open-source communities also become increasingly integrated with mechanisms of economic exchange and governance. A very interesting debate is under way within this community on the nature of property, with potentially deep implications for the future of capitalism (Lessig 1999; Klang 2005); for the moment a symbiosis is growing between open-source contributors and distributors who gain profit largely from maintenance and service (Dahlander and Magnusson 2005). In governance there are ongoing debate about how to handle trolls and other violators of norms, and to how to prevent forking (splitting of code by people who want to go their own way) (Metiu and Kogut 2001). Creative solutions, consistent with the basic principles of open community and the value of contribution, are constantly being developed. These emergent characteristics of open source projects are aligned with, though not identical to, those that Adler and I have proposed for collaborative community for the firm level: values focused on contribution; interdependent process management; matrixed structures of authority; and rewards based on peer assessments of contribution (Heckscher and Adler 2006). Open-source emerges in the arena of free association rather than within firms, so these aspects of the group are in effect less constrained versions of the basis for collaboration found in effective companies. They also appear to capture a normative order (and a set of structures) that reflect the complexity and openness of the friending model of relations and can therefore, with some further generalization, serve as a basis for it. Most important, they form a real, observable basis for a public and collective version of what is often seen as a purely individualist, self-indulgent form of society. 3. Collective action: swarming In a civil society built on friending communities, citizens are used to the norms, relations, and techniques of engagement in platforms, and they are less accepting of norms of disciplined obedience. This makes open mutualist actions more effective, and top-down mass strategies less effective, than they were in contractual civil society. When friending turns to true collective action, it take a distinctive form that has been evocatively named swarming by the Rand Institute (Ronfeldt and Arquilla 2000). 21
Comment [CH6]: Deal with civility values

This term was originally developed in a military context to capture a fundamental shift in strategy, from brute force massing to more nimble forms of engagement: Swarminga seemingly amorphous, but deliberately structured, coordinated, and strategic way to strike from all directions, by means of a sustainable pulsing of force and/or fire, close-in as well as from stand-off positionswill work best, and perhaps will only work, if it is designed mainly around the deployment of myriad, small, dispersed, networked maneuver units. (Ronfeldt and Arquilla 2000, 45) As the RAND authors stress, swarming is often extremely effective but difficult: it depends not only on a strong infrastructure of communication but also in changes of attitudes and organization structures: the technical tools to support it already exist So, moving toward swarming is going to be more a function of cultivating an appropriate turn of mind and a supple, networked military form of organization than it will be a search for new technologies. (Ronfeldt and Arquilla 2000, 5) There have been some swarm-like movements for social change. The disabilities movement leading up to passage of the 1990 law pulled together a wide range of actors, from small radical groups to old-line, staid lobbying associations; this range was more effective than any one piece could have been on its own {Heckscher and Palmer}. The RAND study cites the Zapatistas in Mexico, which temporarily united a range of international NGOs with indigenous movements, with considerable impact over about a decade (Lakin 2009). Perhaps the most sustained success has been the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, which has brought together a many types of organizations across the world. Unlike many such campaigns, it seems to have survived its initial (partial) success: after achieving a major treaty and signing on hundreds of nations, it has maintained a strong interoperable network of varied groups working on implementation and extension of the agreement. For labor, all this is foreign both to the closed solidarity of the craft world and to the mass solidarity and bureaucratic organization of the industrial world. Unons prefer the logic of disciplined brute-force massing and have rarely been comfortable with swarming. In the 1980s the Jobs With Justice effort tried to unite local labor and other groups in community campaigns; paradoxically paradoxical finding that these campaigns were most successful where labor was weak, especially in the South. This was because to use swarming terminology where labor was strong it tried to unite all organizations under a its leadership in brute-force massing approach, while where it was weak it became a more equal player in a larger swarm that engaged in more varied and unpredictable types of actions {Heckscher & Palmer}. We have not found developed platforms directly related to labor. Most labororiented web sites are built for sharing information or publicizing actions, and are quite clearly aimed at building strength for eventual real unionization. Some independent sites have created platforms for categories of employees to share their experiences, but we have not found any have have lasted long or developed into a wider range of activities than complaining about company actions. ACORN, the long-lived community action group, has been unusually successful in establishing interoperability in the form of ongoing alliances and exchanges with allied groups like unions and environmental advocates, but it has largely remained limited to local geographic communities. The

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Freelancers Union, a New York-based association of independent workers, is (as of spring 2012) in the process of launching a member platform that is intended to provide a set of tools for members to create projects, exchange services, give mutual advice and information, and build support for collective goals. This is at least conceptually a direct attempt to bring a loose category of workers into a more organized friending community. It is also beginning to establish interoperability with other related organizations, from unions to identity groups to employee associations of various kinds. The massing conception still guides most union-sponsored collective action, even when they adopt new communications technologies. Unions have sponsored web sites and informal associations at Wal-Mart, IBM, and other companies where conventional organizing tactics have failed; these have, with few exceptions assessed their progress by how close they get to the ideal of having a large number of workers confront the boss in a unified group. If they reach beyond the worker core, their ask other groups to add their strength to the workers. One can find only a few, small exceptions labor actions that have coordinated multiple groups for short periods in strikes from all directions (Carter et al. 2003; Anon. 2009). So far they have been focused on rather specific goals and have rarely extended further. 4. The role of central organizations and leadership It is often assumed that the new communities are necessarily decentralized and spontaneously self-organizing. But there is strong evidence that, to the contrary, the longer-lasting and more effective ones need overarching organization for two purposes: to articulate a unifying vision, and to maintain coordinating mechanisms of varying kinds. For the first, Minkoff (1997) makes a persuasive case (as against Putnams more decentralized view) that national movement organizations have been crucial to the development of common symbolic foci and identities linking marginalized peoples. In open-source projects as well, a very strong element of vision and values plays a crucial role in maintaining unity and motivation. The Mozilla Project, the coordinator of development for the Firefox browser, pays a great deal of attention to articulating ideals that will bring in open-source developers: together we can drive innovaiton on the Web, promoting openness, innovation and participation on the Internet. And these kinds of statements, common to virtually all open-source projects, are not mere windowdressing: they are constantly debated, often becoming flash-points of conflict among members, sometimes leading to forks as groups with slightly different beliefs split off to form new projects. Resolving the paradox of leadership and enabling is an ongoing process, with open-source projects often going through rather painful developmental transitions as they grow more complex {Ferarro, OMahony}. There are continuing debates over the line between leadership and oppression, about the handling of deviants (trolls), and about how to prevent forking (splitting of code by people who want to go their own way) (Metiu and Kogut 2001). Nevertheless, two basic points are clear. First, there is an important role for formal worker organization in catalyzing the consciousness of identity. Second, neither industrial nor craft unions are well-suited to the job of mobilizing friending

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communities. Craft unions are relatively participative, with many autonomous projects, but they are quite closed and place strong value on stable status hierarchies. Industrial unions are more open, but are oriented to mass action organized by a disciplined bureaucracy. Neither has been able to effectively touch the motivations that have been successfully mobilized in open source or in certain New Social Movement actions. 5. Outreach: going viral Organizing in the sense of winning new members is even less developed, and has fewer potential models, than the problem of coordinating and motivating existing members. The marketing profession is struggling with this problem and experiencing considerable uncertainty a sense of paradigm shift. The images used to describe this changing landscape are similar to those we have seen in friending communities in general: from the push marketing or broadcasting of the past to a more distributed and engaging approach (French, LaBerge, and Magill 2011); or as Scott Cook, the founder of Intuit, puts it, A brand is no longer what we tell the consumer it is - it is what consumers tell each other it is. One common buzzword is viral marketing: techniques to motivate people to pass on recommendations to their friends. This was highly effective in the Obama campaign (Cogburn and Espinoza-Vasquez 2011) and in some other examples of socialmedia activism. Commercial companies have struggled to master it but are making significant progress (Leskovec, Adamic, and Huberman 2007; Barnes 2012). There is convincing evidence that a friending approach to outreach is distinct from the broadcast model, but the understanding of how to make it work is in its infancy. It is likely that the two approaches are not opposites but can be combined in more complex strategies (Watts, Peretti, and School 2007). In any case, a viral approach certainly should be applicable to labor organizing as to other social causes, since the appeal to identity and culture is likely to be particularly effective for these purposes; but it may be a race to get there before commercial companies dominate the social-media environment.

Conclusion
As Mark Twain said, There is something worse than ignorance, and that's knowing what ain't so. Those who think about labor solidarity mostly know that it was stronger in the past and that it will revive once economic inequality and injustice get bad enough. The theory behind that view that inequality causes working-class solidarity, and that mass confrontations with employers are the best catalyst is occasionally right but mostly wrong, and it has been frustratingly ineffective as a guide to labor revival. Unions keep waiting for injustice to get bad enough, and for the next battle to finally spark an explosion; but meanwhile things keep going in the wrong direction. A historical view tells us that solidarity is more complicated than that and partially follows its own laws, and that it has gone through different periods and structures. It draws our attention to the importance of transformations in civil society. The decline of labor solidarity is part of a more general decline in trust of various kinds

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throughout the societal communities of advanced industrial capitalism. At the same time, in these communities, something new has been rising: a form of interaction and morality structured as something like the relationship of friendship. It is more fluid, open, deliberate than familiar solidarities; but it has proved capable, in some contexts, of generating collective actions that are more powerful than the brute force massing of industrial unionism. By encouraging the development of individual and group capabilities, and by organizing these partially-autonomous actors into coordinated swarms, new movements have shown flashes of promise. A historical view also tells us that even if there is really a transition under way from contractual to friending community, it will not be an abrupt shift. When labor moved from the craft to the industrial form a century ago, there was a great deal of combination and mixture: at some points the two forms combined in powerful movements, though at others they found themselves in conflict. It likely that friending movements, or advanced New Social Movements, will at times coordinate with industrial and craft unionsm, and that various hybrids will emerge. In any case there is a great deal for existing unions to learn from the lessons of open source, of swarming, of viral campaigns, and other aspects of the general rise of friending community.

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Original draft Introduction

I would like to take this opportunity to return to some problems that I have not addressed directly since 1988 (in The New Unionism). At that time the decline of the labor movement had already been under way in the US for over thirty years; since then it has just continued unrelentingly, and it has become even clearer that the causes are both broad and deep. Yet most analyses, even now, start from too narrow a focus. Those who blame the Tea Party, or Obama, or the economic crisis ignore length of the decline, through Democratic and Republican administrations, though the radical 60s and the Reaganite 80s, through economic booms and busts. Those who blame American exceptionalism or employer hostility or strategic mistakes by unions at least address the full historical decline in the U.S., but they ignore the extraordinary international breadth of the trend. Since 1980, according to the OECD, trade union density in the U.S. has declined by 11%; in other 29 advanced industrial nations in this database, trade union density has also declined by 11%. Some seek hope in exceptions, but they must deal with this difficult fact: of these 29 nations, only one has higher union density in 2008 than in 1980: Iceland.8 For the rest, we are just putting hopes in a slower rate of decline. Going beyond these broad numbers, the most careful and detailed comparative studies of labor movements have come to pessimistic conclusions across the industrialized world. Unions everywhere have been unable to deal with the rise of contingent work, have failed to penetrate new industries (both at the high and low ends), have lost political clout, and have not drawn younger members with strong commitment (Waddington and Hoffmann 2000; Boeri, Brugiavini, and Calmfors 2001). Outside the US there is perhaps less sense of imminent crisis, but these studies see no reason to expect a return to union growth. So we need explanations that cover both a long period and a wide scope. I argued in 1988 that the industrial union model was untenable because of fundamental changes in the business environment, in politics, and in civil society. I have spent much of the intervening time trying to understand the first of these. The main point I have investigated and argued is that the changes in the managerial world have represented a fundamental shift in strategy and structure, driven by forces beyond its control especially the maturation of capitalist markets and the growing centrality of knowledge production. I have characterized this as a shift from bureaucratic organization to collaborative enterprise (Heckscher 2007). That shift in turn transforms the entire problem of employment representation, just as the move from craft to mass production transformed it in the early 20th century. This point is consistent with, though a great deal more elaborated than, my view at the start of the journey. Regarding civil society, however, I think that my view twenty years ago was in critical respects just wrong. I argued then that the transformation of civil society would

Calaculated from OECD databases at stats.oecd.org. Where data is not available back to 1980, as is the case especially for the former Communist countries of Eastern Europe, I have started with the earliest available data, usually 1995.

be driven by the new social movements built around social identities and seeking rights; that these would become the core of stable communal groups that would act as stakeholder interlocutors of business; and that representation would therefore become a matter of negotiations among multiple stakeholders or associational unions, grounded in these communities. The role of government would then be to formulate and guarantee a core Employment Bill of Rights, which would essentially replace the Wagner Act, and to act more as a convener of multilateral processes than regulator or a direct provider of services. In retrospect I might say was drawn to a model of pragmatic associationalism: that society would move in the direction of a self-regulating interaction of voluntary communities. Now I think there are several things wrong with that vision. Most important, the new social movements have not stabilized into mature communal groups. The progressive identity groups I focused on blacks, women, and so on have remained fractured within and among themselves. The disabilities movement and the bill passed with its support in 1990 seemed at first a vindication of the view that new identity movements would ground a new civil society; but once the bill was passed this movement lost its unity and momentum, and the law itself has been stripped of much of its power (Triano, Feldman, and Williams 2003; Lathrop 2003). Since then the strongest and most sustained civil society communities have been those grounded in return to traditional foundations the Bible and the Constitution. The focus on rights has become one of the sources of the problem of civil society rather than a solution. My expectation was that groups seeking particular rights would gradually coalesce into a broader push for general human and employment rights, with at least some grudging support from employers hoping to reduce the chaos of fragmented claims and suits, and that this would be the basis for a new kind of community. But there has been little coalescence. Groups have continued to push separate claims the gay movement is the current dominant expression with relatively little support from natural allies (see, for example, the extent to which Black groups opposed the gay-rights balance initiative in California). Unions receive little significant support from social-identity groups and have not gone far in reaching out to them. ACORN, once arguably the most successful coalition-building group in the nation, bringing together unions with neighborhood and ethnic associations (Osterman 2006), was abandoned by its partners at the first attacks from the Right. Rather than growing support for a broad definition of social rights, there is a strong backlash against the notion of special interests and fragmented claims. This fractured development of civil society is the principal reason, I think, that associational unions have not developed as I expected. Franoise Carr and I reviewed the available evidence a few years ago, including examples like the Xerox Black Caucus, Washtech, the Northern California Black Employees' Association, The Business of Women, GLOBE (Gays and Lesbians), the Asian Pacific American Employee Association, and so. We concluded was that such quasi-unions have proved viable on small scales relative to most unions and for opening new experimental avenues, but that they have nowhere overcome the obstacles to wider effectiveness and growth. They generally remain small and highly insecure; funding is uncertain; their average lifespan appears to be short. (Heckscher and Carr 2006).

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I therefore think it is important to understand what is going on with civil society, why the image of a rainbow coalition and a negotiated order has not come to pass, and what this means for employment representation. My premise is that unions or employee groups must draw on the resources of solidarity generated by civil society; and that these take different forms at different historical periods and profoundly shape collective action. The question is: On what basis will people engage in collective action to balance the dynamics of economic exchange; what values and relational patterns can draw them together through the divides of a fragmented civil society? I have a practical as well as a theoretical reason for this question: the Freelancers Union, an association of independent workers, is currently exploring the question of how to build solidarity among its loosely-connected members. I will return to this focus after considering the broad trends in civil society.

Comment [JM7]: If this is going to focus on the internet more explicitly, that should be drawn out here, I think. Maybe this is a better approach, and we shouldnt focus so explicitly on the internet and Facebook. Im not sure. We should have the conversation. CH: YES

Community and its discontents

Civil society is a form of community. Both terms refer to a realm of society based on voluntary association, in contrast to formal organizational or governmental structures and to markets. I will use community as the most general term for this aspect of all societies: this is consistent with Durkheims treatment of solidarity and with many recent treatments based on a tripartite analysis in terms of market, hierarchy, and community (Bradach and Eccles 1989; Powell 1990; Adler 2001). I will use civil society to refer to the more differentiated form of community characteristic of modernity. I also follow Durkheims (1893) distinction between two crucial aspects of community: that based on similarity and that based on interdependence. The first, mechanical form is built on shared values, and the second, organic form on differentiation of roles within a group. A community centered primarily on shared values and is rigid and limited; therefore the trend of social evolution is to increase the social differentiation of labor and organic solidarity.9 Durkheim initially believed that the organic aspect of community the proliferation of a web of voluntary associations and the interdependent exchanges and coalitions among them would replace the mechanical unity of shared values. But he increasingly realized that these are complementary dimensions: the need for value unity does not vanish, it merely changes form. This creates very fundamental problems to which I will return. There is a fairly wide consensus among sociologists about the course of development of community in the modern era. First there was the traditional form or gemeinschaft, held together by shared understandings and a sense of obligation (Bender 1978, 7). In such communities relationships are above all stable, with status orders justified in terms of eternal laws. The stability means also that relationships are close, often intimate, and that individuals become bound by affective links rather than by a perception of individual self-interest. This is essentially what Durkheim meant by mechanical solidarity.

Parsons {1971} formalized these distinctions in his four-function model, which underlies much of the discussion below.

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That type of community is then followed in the modern world by the impersonal relations of gesellschaft, structured by formal rules and contractual relations. Though some treatments see this as an absence of community, it in fact also requires a strong sense of moral unity and trust but of a different kind: it rests on a morality of individual initiative, integrity and rationality. Weber called this the Protestant Ethic, and Durkheim referred to it as the cult of the individual. Relations in such societies depend essentially on faith in a system a shared belief that things will work out if all people play their roles with consistency. Luhmann et al. (1979) called this systems trust, Zucker (1986) called it institutional, and Shapiro (1987) impersonal. The term civil society began to be used in the Enlightenment to distinguish social relations in large national systems from traditional gemeinschaft. This type of community opens up enormous new possibilities for human action: it provides the basis for complex societies of a large scale and great productive capacity, and also for individual mobility and choice beyond the limiting confines of the traditional groups and status orders.10 It has also created a frequent sense of unease. A major strand of sociology argued that, in Webers famous phrase, that the iron cage of depersonalized societal relations was both a basis of great power and an inescapable source of alienation, depersonalization, and loss of self. In the mid-20th century there was a widespread belief that we were entering an age of technocratic rationalism (Burnham 1941; Bell 1960; Reisman, Glazer, and Denney 1950). The labor movement, in its different forms, has drawn on these two categories of community. Craft unions were grounded in gemeinschaft orders, with strong traditional hierarchies and status roles, high stability, and small scope of relations . Industrial unions adapted to gesellschaft, creating solidarity on a much larger scale by focusing on the definition of the impersonal rules and contracts core to that kind of community. This contractual view of community accounts for a repeated research finding that has troubled many labor scholars: that members trust in unions (especially during the period of industrial union strength) varied together with, rather than in opposition to, confidence in management. The two institutions were generally viewed not as ultimate opponents but as parts of a single balanced system; when the system worked they both gained trust, when it didnt they both lost (Rose 1952; Purcell 1960; Jacob 1981). In the 19th century unions were just one type among a range of civil society actors, many mutualist in form, many forming strong national federations (Skocpol 2003). In the 20th century there was a general decline in many of these associations amid a rise of powerful formal, rationalized organizations large firms and the welfare state and the spreading reach of markets. Habermas (1985) calls this dynamic the colonization of the lifeworld. Unions were left for a time (along with political parties) as virtually the only strong representatives of civil society. This was the period when many sociologists particularly feared the loss of community and the takeover of all aspects of social life by contractual systems either bureaucratic organizations or markets. Even unions and parties were strongly buttressed by and dependent on support from the state.

Comment [CH8]: Add Hinton, MOntgomery

10

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What is happening to civil society? In the last half century something has happened that social scientists had not predicted: a series of powerful rebellions against this technocratic view of society. It began with the explosion of communal movements in the 1960s, generally antirationalist but also voluntarist and non-traditional. But the Tea Party and the movements of the religious right share an essential impulse with those seemingly very different movements: a loss of trust in large, impersonal systems and in technocratic leadership. The 60s movements generated many of the social-identity groups that I considered, twenty years ago, the core of the new civil society. But those groups have become relatively weaker, and to some extent lost in a cacophony of groups that share a rejection of the system, while differing radically on visions of the future. The key academic debate now about civil society is whether or not community is declining. Robert Putnam is the best-known representative of those who say it is, and that its a problem. Others counter that community is not declining but merely changing form. I think this can be clarified by starting from a formal three-part analysis of types of community that I have developed with Paul Adler in studies of large firms. The first two types, which we call traditionalistic and contractual, are developed from the gemeinschaft-gesellschaft distinction discussed above. The third, which we call collaborative, is based on evidence from business organizations that are high in trust but low in both traditional status and rule-based hierarchy (Adler and Heckscher 2011). These concepts, especially the third, need to be adapted in moving from the firm to the societal level. Putnams focus and that of many social-capital theorists is on the first type, gemeinschaft community: bowling leagues, especially those which were popular in the 1950s, fit in this category. When Putnam sees encouraging, though fragile, signs of revival of community, they tend to be traditionalistic or mechanical forms as in mega-churches, or the spurt of national unity after 9/11 (Putnam 2004; Putnam and Campbell 2010). His evidence is certainly consistent with a widespread feeling that this type of community is under siege. The decline of stable local relations, whether at the dinner table or in the bowling alleys, is one indicator; so is the decline of deference, documented across countries in the World Values Survey (Nevitte 1996); and also the sustained challenge to traditional social roles, especially those of gender and race. The widespread fundamentalist movements of recent decades again, extending far beyond our shores have resolved their rejection of modern systems through an intense attempt to revive traditional bonds, by reestablishing the authority of sacred texts and traditional status orders. Nevertheless, although these movements have gained attention and power from their intensity, there is no evidence of any overall shift to a more fundamentalist or religious view of society: religious activity has declined for generations, and recent surveys have not shown a change in the trend (Baldassarri 2008; Norris and Inglehart 2004) There are also strong survey data, especially from the GSS, that primary, strongtie social networks in general have been narrowing and fragmenting. The main analysis of these data finds: Discussion networks are smaller in 2004 than in 1985. The number of people saying there is no one with whom they discuss important matters nearly 32

tripled. The mean network size decreases by about a third. (McPherson, Smith-Lovin, and Brashears 2006, abstract). These strong networks, they find, are increasingly centered on family members. The other familiar type of community, the contractual (gesellschaft) form, has also declined sharply and widely in the past few decades that is, faith in large institutions has been undermined. In the US the overall index of confidence in institutions dropped by about 40% between the 1960s and 1970s and has stayed at roughly the same level since (Harris Interactive 2005)(see figure 1). Unions have certainly felt this decline, but they shouldnt take it personally: big businesses, government, and other large organizations have been hit by it in equal measure. Moreover, a similar deep and longlasting loss of confidence has been documented, at least for government, across the industrial democracies (Pharr, Putnam, and Dalton 2000; Dalton 2005). Thus the two historically most important bases for trust anchoring social relations the belief in tradition and local community, and the belief in formal systems and rule-based order have indeed demonstrably decreased. The debate then is: does this mean that people have withdrawn from community, into some sort of individual amoralism, or does it mean they are forming different kinds of communities? Here the evidence is less clear. On one hand, there is certainly a great deal of evidence of growing individualist values. Inglehart and Oyserman (2004) trace this theme in survey data across scores of country, in all the major strands of comparative value analysis (Schwartz 1994; Inglehart 2000; Hofstede 2001). On the other, there is also a great deal of evidence of sociability and joining. Wuthnows (1994) data show over 40% of the population participating in small voluntary groups. Others show high volunteerism in the US and elsewhere (Curtis, Baer, and Grabb 2001). The most careful analysis of the longitudinal data from the General Social Survey concludes that since the 1970s there has been only a modest shift, with a some people who were members of only one group losing that connection, but some increase in the number of people who were members of multiple types of groups (Baldassarri 2008). And such surveys have not caught up to one of the most important developments in civil society: the growth of the internet and especially of social media. This phenomenon is too new to have produced a great deal of research, but it is surely important for our purposes that today over 75 million people in the U.S. log in to Facebook on any given day (Facebook 2011). However you assess this activity, it is not indicative of a spread of isolated couch potatoes watching TV by themselves. The emergent structure of civil society: The friending model Thus we need to recognize that there are some kinds of widespread associational joining, yet also a general growth of individualism along with a rather strong rejection of the dominant institutions of society. Though existing surveys dont give us much help here, there are indications that the resolution lies in a movement from long-lasting membership in enduring groups to more temporary and contingent association. My hypothesis is that the move is not as many would claim from collectivism to individualism, but rather from group as definer of self to group as a vehicle for the expression and development of self. If this is true, it means that groups conceived in

Comment [JM9]: I understand what youre saying here. However, dont you make the opposite argument in your work with Adler? that gessellschaft, the market mode of coordination, is becoming more and more common, as gemenshaft has been declining? CH: No, were arguing that collaborative moves byond both gemeinschaft and gesellschaft. I understand the distinctions: There you were talking about the market mechanism. Here youre talking about faith in institutions. CH: Interesting point and complicated the ContractualBureaucratic form has clearly declined, but the Contractual-Market form is going in two directins: many losing faith, but a committed minority retreating to it in a fundamentalist way. Comment [JM10]: This might be a useful place to go into online communities not necessarily Facebook just yet, but online communities (e.g., the Well) in general. Comment [JM11]: There is a great deal of work on online communities. The question is how much to go into it, and where. A lot of this work took off from Anderson (1993), who described invisible communities, or communities of the mind. This book has nearly 24K citations, if I remember correctly. I have the Kindle version, and have read part but not all of it. ... Comment [JM12]: Not true. CH: theres a lot of commentary, but is there real research? (the conditions and consequences of social media use)? A wave of it is coming out now, but most pretty undercooked to my knowledge. But for the purposes of writing, we could say, too new to have produced much consensus from research Formatted: Font color: Gray-65%, Strikethrough Comment [JM13]: I think this is a powerful and new argument. Ive not yet come across something similar. CH: theres a good deal of grounding for this in classical theory, but its hard to nail down in research at least of the type we do. Lets think about it.

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traditional terms as enduring associations will play a less important role as definers of civil society and as the basis for stakeholder relations. Evidence for this is not conclusive but comes from various levels and angles. At the level of general theory, this is a development explored at the start of the 20th century by Mead (1934) and Simmel (1964), conceptualizing the self as constructed from the intersection of multiple social relations. This is now a widespread theme of postmodern theories of identity (Leinberger and Tucker 1991; Somers 1994; Cinnirella 1998). Similarly, analysis of group memberships from the General Social Survey (Baldassarri 2008) shows that the widely-noted decline in group membership is actually centered in just three types of associations: fraternal societies, religious groups, and labor unions. The first two of these are particularly clear examples of traditionalist associations based on enduring relations Skocpol (2003) traces fraternal orders in the 19th century and bemoans their current fragmentation and professionalization. Labor unions are also strong-tie in the sense that membership is generally linked to enduring employment in firms. Other forms of association, including political, professional, and hobby, have not declined. Moreover, as McPherson et al. note, the surveys that lament the decline of community focus on strong ties but miss the weak-tie networks. And here we have less rigorous but nonetheless overwhelming evidence of a quantum increase. Quantitative: the 150 million active Facebook users in the U.S. have an average of 130 friends. Survey data from the Center for a Digital Future, using a definition of friendship that depends less on strong ties than the GSS and including internet relations, finds only 5% of the population lacking social connections, as opposed to the 23% found in the GSS (McPherson, Smith-Lovin, and Brashears 2006), and those ties did not decline between 2002 and 2007 (Hua Wang and Wellman 2010). Wellman, one of the most thorough students of the development of online relations, finds that even in the early 2000s the growth in this kind of connection was emerging as an important part of the online world across a wide swath of the society (Wellman 2004). . Wellman et al. (2003) call this type of community networked individualism. In contrast to both group and local solidarities, they find, internetmediated structures form rich and shifting patterns of both local and global ties. Similarly, Torrents and Ferraro (2010) identify a distinctive network form in the opensource software community of Debian, which they call cohesive small worlds: unlike common small-world models that combine strong-tie groups with a sparse number of weak-tie links, these communities are rich in both and rely far less on a few key bridgers. For the most recent evidence on the effects of the internet since the painful process of survey, analysis, and publication lags far behind the current revolution one has to rely on anecdote. Anyone with children will have many. I was particularly struck by one recent personal experience: On Christmas eve my children and several of their friends came back with us from church to our living room, opened their computers and iPhones, and started typing away. When I remarked on the lack of interaction, my daughter said, No, Raj and I are having a great conversation! Raj, mind you, was also sitting in the room. In other words, they were communicating seamlessly in various combinations, with each other in the same room and at the same time with friends in fardistant places. The tightness of a Christmas eve with family and friends had not 34
Comment [JM14]: There is, in fact, a great deal of research on the effects of the internet, including social media. I think group participation on Facebook evidences a kind of networked individualism, in the sense that engagement is either passive or (if it is participatory) transient, fleeting. People may quickly voice an opinion about an issue relevant to the groups theme and then move on. There is also a lot of research on Facebook as a vehicle for the expression of self how people manage their online identities, privacy, impression manage, and so on. This could possibly be brought in. Development of self is less clear. It has been linked to individual outcomes, however, such as finding jobs. People who are already interested in a certain political issue also use it for information about that issue.

vanished but mutated, opening in ways that could not have been imagined a year or two before dozens of people were in the conversation, but not all at once and not constrained by physical location. There is no satisfactory term in the literature for such a community, so I will adopt a term from Facebook: friending.11 The active verb removes friends from the context of concrete groups or communities, including identity groups, and opens it radically to active individual choice. This appears to be a dramatic leap in the pattern that Mead and Simmel were observing, and that Bellah et al. (1985, 251) saw in their qualitative cases: a rise in spontaneous community with the like-minded at the expense of enduring association of the different. Wuthnow (1994)s investigation of voluntary groups makes another important point. He found that most of these groups (religious and non-religious) emphasize unconditional support and impose very few obligations. They do not seek, in other words, to socialize their members into a common communal frame, but rather to increase individual well-being. This seems characteristic of the newer online communities as well. Critiques of the friending model of civil society Such associational relations violate the norms of familiar types of community. They generally (especially in online versions) do not ask or care about the traditional markers of social status race, gender, wealth, age. They are also far more tolerant than these gemeinschaft communities, which depend for internal trust on a rather tight social conformity (what Kanter (1977) memorably called homosocial reproduction.) On the other hand, they do not buy into the norms of contractual communities, either, especially the insistence on individual rationality and integrity. And they do not establish strong rules Roberts Rules of Order and formal processes are not in this style. Another key characteristic of this friending model is its ephemeral nature. People seek out supportive communities, whether for personal development or pursuit of a particular interest, and they can easily drop out. Those who value old models of civil society are extremely uncomfortable with all of this. Traditionalists naturally reject intensely and passionately the lack of a moral center. A considerable amount of the heat around the culture wars comes from this clash: partisans of friending association see the traditional visions as narrow and intolerant; partisans of traditional relations see friending as self-indulgent and chaotic. The friending model is also profoundly at odds with the kind of relations, community, and trust at the core of the labor movement. I have suggested that the industrial labor movement was the key civil society representative of the contractual model, contributing to general trust in the societal system by establishing stable rulebased relations. It appeals to a sense of fairness built on equal application of rules and reduction in personal or traditional managerial discretion. Its power is based on mass unity around broadly shared interests, whether identified through the Marxist lens of

Comment [JM15]: This example is a kind of spontaneous community with the likeminded but is it really in support of your hypothesis: group as a vehicle for the expression and development of self? CH: we will need to conceptualize stages within friending communities, from quite loose associations to tighter ones. There is a large literature on friendship that does treat it as an essential, though underexamined, vehicle for development of self. Most theory (eg, Freud) has focused on hierarchical / parental relations, but some have argued that siblings and friends are equally important. Comment [JM16]: I think that FB is much more than this. It does allow spontaneous community with the likeminded, but also much more. Research suggests that strengthens real worldcommunities, and also allows social capital to be maintained and used in a way that was never before possible. Im not sure how, where, whether to work this into the current papers structure. OK, this is really interesting. There is a lot of concern these days about fragmentation of community, so evidence on that point would be a valuable theme. Comment [JM17]: I see what youre getting at, but, again, do not think of FB in these terms. To me, FB allows enduring association of the somewhat similar. That is, it allows people to be linked who have numerous, overlapping dimensions of compatibility. Community emerges between people when certain interests categories are brought to the fore. Therefore, it allows sponatenous community concurrently with the enduring association of the somewhat similar. CH: again, this is an important thought; the connection to Bellah and such could be a theme Im not sure if we should draw this argument out. However, it is how I understand FB.

11

I am indebted to Paul Adler for this suggestion.

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class or more pragmatically in a balance-of-power frame. The fragmented, seemingly uncommitted world of current associational relations undermines the conditions required for large-scale struggles. If we look more closely at the friending model, we can see that some of these misgivings are not misplaced. The model is not purely new and unprecedented; it is an evolution of an old ideal, which has been particularly popular in America and the Tocquevillian tradition, of pure voluntarist webs of relations. Munch (1986) and others note some important weaknesses in this form, which can be summarized under the headings of fragmentation, inequality, and vicious circles. Fragmentation is an old and obvious problem, identified as faction in the Federalist Papers (Hamilton et al. 2008, no. 10), and also noted in more recent studies of free-association models (Fiss 1982; Fung, Wright, and Abers 2003): voluntary networks tend to break apart easily, as interests and coalitions shift. Less obvious is a second tendency, towards forming a center-periphery structure with high inequality, composed of a few winners and many losers. This dynamic was theorized long ago by Rosen (1981), has been reinforced by more recent network research (Hojman and Szeidl 2008), and has been documented in many particular cases. The film industry, for instance, has been suggested by a number as a model for a community form of organization (Powell 1990); but it turns out that large studios were an essential element in holding it together as their power has declined, a few stars have increasingly distanced themselves in compensation and reputation from the rest of the pack (Jones, Hesterly, and Borgatti 1997, 916 et pass). Or as one person we interviewed at McKinsey put it: If you are a strong performer with strong reputation people will approach you, will want you. The downside is that if things do not go well, you will find it more difficult to work in good projects and find clients. Low reputation brings lower reputation. [Interview by Carlos Martin] Finally, unconstrained networks are unstable because, without authoritative regulation of some kind, they are vulnerable to circular dynamics. These may be virtuous or vicious, but they have lives of their own and are essentially impossible to control from inside the system, leading to repeated bouts of associational inflation excessive trust and deflation excessive suspicion (Gambetta 1988; Thomas 1998; Spicer and Pyle 2003; Parsons 1963). Fighting the current: failures in the revival of civil society It is, in short, not difficult to be critical of current tendencies in civil society, whether because of its apparent lack of moral commitment or its inability to sustain collective action; and it is tempting to propose familiar solutions, such as some form of true value unity or a reinvigoration of mass or class consciousness. The problem is that neither type of solution shows any sign of success. >Critique of communitarianism Leaving aside true fundamentalist attempts to reimpose past value systems in all their concreteness, the most important set of proposals for introducing shared values into civil society are communitarians and others who argue for the power of value discourse (Etzioni 1993; Bellah 1967; Habermas 1994). This proposed alchemy has not succeeded, however, in persuading either the true traditionalists or those who are 36

Comment [JM18]: Perhaps after this paragraph we can review literature on Facebook shortcomings. Many of these shortcomings parallel your arguments above: Group interest on FB is passing, rather than stable. It is also passive and nonparticipatory. Seldom do interests solidify around an issue and lead to real-world collective action. Even if people do participate actively for a shortwhile, their interests shift, and group membership falls off. Interests continually shift over time. It is for these reasons that, save for a few successful publicity campaigns, they have done little to mobilize energy toward common goals. CH: great

suspicious of the conformist and hierarchical tendencies of traditional communities (Phillips 1993). More important, the record of practical success is almost nil. For example Bellah et al in Habits of the Heart, after rejecting most actual forms of civil society organizations, place their hopes in the end on the Institute for the Study of Civic Values in Philadelphia. This is a very thin reed: whatever ones reactions to their statement of mission and values (which leans heavily on the Preamble to the Constitution), there is no record of significant accomplishment lots of meetings, certainly some small successes, but 25 years they have not moved beyond this scope. Another example in this vein that I have found particularly interesting is here in Boston, called the Public Conversations Project, which facilitates public discussions on controversial issues. Their own assessment of a six-year set of secret discussions among leaders of pro- and anti-abortion organizations is 1) no ones mind was changed; 2) respect and civility grew; 3) but considerable tension remained (Public Conversations Project, 2001). This is not a recipe for transformative change. The best overview of such efforts at value discourse (Ryfe, 2005) concludes that the obstacles to this kind of deliberation are very large and successes are rare. As for a revival of mass labor consciousness: again, there is virtually no evidence of sustained success from all efforts of the last few decades, from the Organizing Institute to flashes of militancy at Pittston and elsewhere: they have not uncapped a suppressed wellspring of solidarity. Eric Olin Wright, the premier scholar of class, has come to agree that broad class polarities have been declining rather than widening. Instead, he has found a trajectory of change within developed capitalist societies towards an expansion, rather than a decline, of contradictory locations within class relations. (Wright 1997, 66) In other words, the actual structure of civil society, congruent with the economic base, is moving towards greater diversity, more voluntary association, more focus on groups contribution to individual development. Efforts to run against this current are not making much progress. Going with the flow: Bringing out the strengths of the friending model Another analytic approach, rather than trying to find opportunities for the revival of older forms of civil society relations, explores the developmental course of the emergent one. The theoretical premise is that emergent social forms tend to take shape first through action, before formulating clear orienting norms and values; but that one can often infer by looking at actual practice the unarticulated norms behind them. From this perspective it is possible to anticipate in outline a development of civil society action that strengthens rather than fighting the friending model. A version that has been particularly well-studied, and that has advanced rather far in actual accomplishments, is open-source software development. It is based on a communal model with strong emphasis on voluntariness and acceptance of temporary and shifting relations; yet it has managed to compete with some of the most powerful corporations in producing and maintaining highly complex programs like Firefox or the Linux operating system. This is, in other words, an example of effective organization of a voluntaristic, friending set of relations.

Comment [CH19]: This is a core statement (if we follow the civil society route) that needs more work.

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It turns out on closer inspection that open-source, for all its voluntariness, is strongly structured socially, with values often debated in the community and enforced through peer pressure. The motivational base does rest in large on a key component I have identified as characteristic of friending communities: a prioritization of individual development that is, people contribute to these communities largely for the learning opportunities and the chance to develop their personal skills and reputations. But there is also, becoming more clear over time, a set of normative and moral constraints. As in any social system, individuals must to some extent conform to the society; but these constraints are quite different in nature from those of traditional or contractual societies. At least four aspects of this social system are worth underlining, though they are far from complete.
1)

The moral obligations center on contribution. Mere status based on credentials, office, education, social class, gender, race, or other traditional or technical criteria is strongly devalued; what is valued instead is demonstrated ability to contribute to the work of the community, including openness, willingness to help others, and sharing credit. Those who violate these obligations are strongly condemned. There are strong processes based on standardizing interfaces among modularized units of code. The systems develop reputation verification to an unprecedented degree: extremely elaborate mechanisms gather information on contribution and are used in distributed ways to build collaborative linkages. Rather than shared interests , they are oriented to shared purposes or causes more general than concrete goals, more practically-focused than values. Mozilla, for example, calls itself a project with the purpose of maintaining an open web, and conceives of a web of projects within that, including the browser but also many spontaneous user efforts.12

Comment [CH20]: Deal with civility values

2) 3)

4)

With development open-source communities also become increasingly integrated with mechanisms of economic exchange and governance. A very interesting debate is under way within this community on the nature of property, with potentially deep implications for the future of capitalism (Lessig 1999; Klang 2005); for the moment a symbiosis is growing between open-source contributors and distributors who gain profit largely from maintenance and service (Dahlander and Magnusson 2005). In governance there are ongoing debate about how to handle trolls and other violators of norms, and to how to prevent forking (splitting of code by people who want to go their own way) (Metiu and Kogut 2001). Creative solutions, consistent with the basic principles of open community and the value of contribution, are constantly being developed. These emergent characteristics of open source community are aligned with, though not identical to, those that Adler and I have proposed for collaborative
12

This set of characteristics is constructed from a large literature. Though no small set of references captures these dimensions, I would recommend {Langlois & Garzarelli, 2008; Crocker, 2009; Lakhani & von Hippel, 2003; Strmer & Myrach, 2006}; and in general the papers at opensource.mit.edu/online_papers.php.

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community for the firm level: values focused on contribution; interdependent process management; matrixed structures of authority; and rewards based on peer assessments of contribution (Heckscher and Adler 2006). Open-source emerges in the arena of free association rather than within firms, so these aspects of the group are in effect less constrained versions of the basis for collaboration found in effective companies. They also appear to capture a normative order (and a set of structures) that reflect the complexity and openness of the friending model of relations and can therefore, with some further generalization, serve as a basis for it. Most important, they form a real, observable basis for a public and collective version of what is often seen as a purely individualist, selfindulgent form of society.

Practical implications: The Freelancers Union13

To return to the impetus for this discussion of civil society: What do current trends in civil society tell us about the potential future of employment representation? With support for current models of unionism declining in every measure (Pew Research Center 2010), is there a way to draw on the emergent forms of solidarity and collective action? This has become a practical problem for the Freelancers Union, an association of independent workers based in New York City but with an increasing scope nationwide, which has sometimes drawn attention as a new form of unionism (Kelly and Tramontano 2005; Greenhouse 2007). Rather than drawing on either traditional craft communities or on the contractual communities of firm employees, the FU is based on the loose category of independent workers. Its members are outside the normal corporate hierarchy, some by choice and some not. They do not form a unified and selfaware group; freelancers rarely interact with each other and do not strongly identify with the category. Objectively they can be said to share many interests. FU has aimed at addressing the most salient ones, especially (so far) health care. To deal with it the organization has established an insurance company which is wholly owned by a membership association and therefore highly responsive to the needs of members; it is also unique in establishing a risk record for freelancers and thus being able to offer them much lower rates than the rest of the market. A similar model is being developed for retirement and other benefits. In the last ten years Freelancers Union has grown to over 140,000 members, has achieved financial self-sufficiency, has become a significant political player in New York, and is positioned for an important role in the health care reforms. In many respects the organization has so far followed an increasingly common model among civil society organizations (hereafter CSOs), one which might be called the AARP model: it has built a strong professional staff (over 60 people at this writing), providing services for a farflung membership and catering primarily to individual interests. Many members see merely the organization as a source of benefits and services and have little or no contact with it beyond that.

Comment [CH21]: How many?

13

Some pieces of the following section have been pulled from {Heckscher, Horowitz, & Erickson, 2010}.

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It has shown an ability again, common among successful AARP-type organizations to gather subsets of members for political action around specific campaigns. It has been quite successful in mobilizing members for town meetings and rallies at City Hall; it can reliably turn out a few hundred members for such events, which is considered high effectiveness in the local political world and has given it considerable visibility: the mayor of New York and the speaker of the state assembly answer phone calls. This has paid off in some legislative successes, including bills in the New York State legislature to penalize those who fail to pay freelancers, and changes in tax provisions that disadvantaged non-employees. The organization has also gained significant visibility in the debates over health care in Washington. Its relation to members is also typical of the type. Much member activity has been around service complaints. The Freelancers Insurance Company, like all others, has had to raise rates over the last few years, and in its transition to managing its own company it had a temporary breakdown in handling service calls. A small handful of members took to the internet to complain vociferously about these problems and briefly got national attention, including an article in the New York Times. In order to meet regulatory requirements for the insurance company, FU elected its first board member representative in 2009. There was concern that those who would have most energy in running for office would be the most negative members, which could have a destructive effect on board processes. The permanent staff were also concerned that members would not understand the complex issues of a large association and of insurance regulation. In the end the process was successful and the elected representative has been constructive in linking to members; but there is still no clear vision about how far member governance should be pushed. These characteristics professional staff, weakly connected membership, interest-focused lobbying define most CSOs today (Land 2009). In effect, they solve the civil society problem by drawing minimally on its resources. Not much trust is needed between members and the organization, aside from basic trust in competence and integrity. Thus most people who buy Freelancers Insurance Company products do so because they are significantly cheaper than anything available on the market. This advantage has something to do with community, but only to a little bit. The FU can improve its products and prices because it has been focused for years on the freelancer community and thus knows more about it its demographics, its needs, its health care record than any private company. But the basic pitch to purchasers of the policies is around benefits, not solidarity. Yet it is also clear that there is something a bit more some sense of communal connection that is already a valuable resource for the work of the organization. For example, when members had to make an opt-in choice to join the new independent company, over 95% made the switch much higher than the rate expected by industry specialists accustomed to standard commercial processes. A sense of loyalty felt by members seems to have contributed to this high conversion rate. A few members who adopted a purely economic logic complained bitterly about prices and service, as they might with any commercial insurance company; but comments on the members discussion board indicated that many made the conversion in part because they felt a commitment to the identity of freelancers and to this organization that represented

Comment [CH22]: check

Comment [CH23]: Can add the Skocpol argument

Comment [CH24]: Can we find actual quotes from these comments?

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them. The organization tried to strengthen this solidarity through very strong and proactive interaction with members and was able to come through this dispute with the sense of solidarity and commitment largely intact. The question now is: Can this solidarity be further developed? And can the FU draw on it as a basis for collective action for pressure on bad employers, building a new social safety net, or limiting inequalities? I would suggest several possible models for a stronger freelancer-based collective organization. 1. FU as a mass movement? One option would be to return to model of mass solidarity by mobilizing in opposition to employer downsizings, globalization, and other sources of employment instability. This was in fact the FUs orientation at the very beginning of its life, in 1995, but was quickly rejected. The feeling then, as now, was that members would not rally to such a confrontational approach. Many groups have of course tried something more like this, including labor unions and some anti-globalization efforts. There have been, in Michael Manns (1973) evocative term, some explosions of consciousness brief flareups of oppositional unity in Seattle and elsewhere, but these have failed to build sustained solidarity. The renaming of the organization in 2007 from the Working Today to the far less neutral Freelancers Union might be seen as an attempt to draw on this form of solidarity. The adoption of the union label reflected the values of many of the organization leaders, but was also found in field-testing to be popular with members conjuring images of a proud and unified group rather than a mere loose association. But some members, and an unknown number of potential numbers, are uncomfortable with these connotations. The current membership liaisons believe that it is on the whole more negative than positive for future growth. 2. FU as a federation? Another effort has been to build capacity as a federative hub linking smaller, more focused organizations. Thus it has built a web of affiliates of various types some with professional foci, such as the Translators and Interpreters Guild and the World Wide Web Artists Consortium, some based more on social identities, such as Girl Geeks. The intention has been to have them dock onto Freelancers Union health insurance offerings, other products and services, lobbying activities, and communication networks. The implicit theory behind this initiative is a model of civil society built on stable identity-based communities, similar to the one I proposed in the 80s. The hope is that members would feel strongly and stably connected to these and participate actively in them; and that the larger body would federate these solidarities and draw on them for particular purposes. The experience of FU, however, has been disappointing: most of these groups have turned out to be very weakly organized and to have little ability to motivate their own members. They rarely proved to be useful partners or intermediaries. This experience is more in line with the friending image of civil society

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than with the identity-based solidarity view: existing freelancer-based groups have taken relatively ephemeral and shifting forms rather than creating stable communities. 3. Mutualism? An alternative vision of communal solidarity is mutualism, defined by extensive ongoing interchanges among members of the group. In the 19th century, in the US and in many European countries, there was an extensive development of mutualist networks evidenced in producer and consumer coops and mutual savings agencies, and some leaders of the labor movement, such as Sidney Hillman, went far in incorporating these approaches. There has been a good deal of enthusiasm in recent months within the Freelancers Union for this idea. The initial attraction is that mutualism appears to provide a way around the current withering of support for the state, without falling into naked market capitalism. In an association people can provide support and help for each other without depending on political programs. In practice, this might mean building a new safety net from such reciprocal relations; or providing the infrastructure for members to conduct exchanges with each other, or on which they could connect to create projects a communal version of the kind of internal project databases that are being developed by many firms. Here the FU has very little actual experience to go on, and that little is inconclusive. There has been an initial experiment with an online agora in which members can trade or barter services massage therapy for child care, web page design for public relations advice; it has not taken off very rapidly. Outside the FU, on the other hand, the notion of building platforms for collaborative projects is rapidly being adopted by web-based systems from Facebook to Salesforce.com. The theoretical standpoint, however, suggests a problem: mutualism conceptually relies almost exclusively on reciprocal exchange and not at all on unified identity. It is in this sense exactly what Durkheim found lacking in his initial conception of organic solidarity: it has no value-based vision or sense of moral obligation. It is therefore likely to be vulnerable to the kinds of weaknesses identified by Durkheim anomie, or lack of clarity in norms and obligations and also to the dynamics of inequality and fragmentation discussed earlier in relation to purely voluntarist systems. Looking widely for experiences of mutualism, there are reasons to give weight to these theoretical objections. The places in which it has worked most effectively are regions with powerful existing identities, notably Emilia-Romagna in Italy, or as part of movements like the Amalgamated Clothing Workers with strong socialist visions. Where it has tried to operate on its own, as it were, without the guiding force of an existing unifyingied moral community vision, it has proved weak. Proudhons (1927) initial attempts in the 19th century drifted towards a kind of fascism; Tony Blairs attraction to a new mutualism wandered into a fuzzy and anomic brand of politics that seems to have left no real community of believers. 4. Purposive solidarity? This leaves no directly relevant model to build on, and therefore requires drawing more tenuous inferences from theoretical reasoning and analogies. The

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evidence and experience we have supports Durkheims basic point that complex solidarity requires both an integration of differences through reciprocal obligations, and a definition of shared moral vision and responsibility. The examination of the most successful forms of solidarity today, in open source projects and the like, suggests a set of emergent processes and values built on collaborative purpose. These build from the basic characteristics of the friending community the emphasis on individual development, on free association, on constructed identities but brings out more explicitly the latent norms and values that are required for such communities Extending this to the Freelancers Union and to similar associations, I would suggest that a plausible way to draw on the forms of solidarity latent in civil society today would be to do three things simultaneously:

To develop integrative mechanisms of a mutualist kind, especially through platforms for collaboration that is, creating ways ease spontaneous combinations of people for complex projects without creating bureaucratic hierarchies. To articulate and reinforce a set of values around collaboration, including openness, helpfulness, sharing the wealth, and rewarding contribution. To define a purpose or set of purposes that would excite the members. In general terms, this would presumably have to do with making the world more hospitable to freelancers moving from a society in which successful careers were defined by movement up corporate ladders, to one which both supports and values careers that cross boundaries.

Again I would use the Mozilla Project as a plausible analogy. It defines its mission or cause, very simply: To guard the open nature of the internet. Within that it creates a set of projects guided by this overall purpose, from the web browser to regulatory lobbying efforts to the generation and maintenance of standards. And it creates a set of platforms on which members can freely come together to work on these projects, or to help each other in whatever way they think best. Their new effort, Mozilla Drumbeat, so perfectly fits this set of theoretical needs that it is worth quoting at some length from their web site. First a statement of purpose: Mozilla Drumbeat is about keeping the web open. We want to spark a movement. We want to keep the web open for the next 100 years. The first step: inviting you to do and make things that help the web. That's what Drumbeat is practical projects and local events that gather smart, creative people around big ideas, solving problems and building the open web. complete with dangers to be overcome and opponents to be battled: But we can't take the freedom of the web for granted. There are many who would neuter or control the web we have built. Imagine an internet filled with devices you can't tinker with and walled gardens. What's at risk? Access. Privacy. The freedom to create and innovate.

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Then an emphasis on voluntarism, openness, flexibility, diversity: Drumbeat is your chance to keep the web open and free. Drumbeat is for anyone who wants to lend their skills and creativity to the cause of keeping the internet open. Its a chance to for everyone not just software developers and testers to get involved. Who? Teachers. Lawyers. Artists. Accountants. Plumbers. Web Developers. Anyone who uses and cares about the internet. And finally, a platform for the formation of voluntary projects around the purpose, with only the gentlest coordination from a central authority and set of resources: You can get involved online or face-to-face. With Drumbeat, we've planted a flag. A place to gather. A place for you to find collaborators. You can start a project, or join one that's already rolling. If your project gets traction, we'll shout from the top of the mountain so everyone knows about it. And we'll even fund a handful of the very best projects. You can also attend or start an event in your city. Events offer a place to work on projects with neighbors, and a chance to paint a picture of what you want the open web to look like in 100 years. (Mozilla Foundation 2010) This is certainly an appeal to solidarity, with emotion and a sense of collective action, yet of an unfamiliar kind.. It does not appeal to traditional roles, or indeed to roles at all it stresses that it is open equally to all and cares only about what people contribute to the mission. Nor does it call to mass action based on shared interests: though it identifies dangers and opponents, it asks people to take tasks into their own hands rather than following a program. Nor does it appeal to social identities: this is not about blacks or gays or any existing social group. Instead it focuses on a purpose and offers a platform for ephemeral friending associations to work on pieces or modules of it. It is not hard to imagine how this approach might apply to the Freelancers Union. In focus groups, members and potential members often become excited by a positive vision of freelancing. Member groups, who sometimes lament that freelancer is too often taken simply to mean that you are unemployed, are enthusiastic about the possibility of expressing pride in the status rather than defensiveness. Students to whom I have presented these alternative visions over the last ten years have consistently been enthusiastic about the idea of building a world in which freelancing opportunities and choice are validated and supported, and prefer it to the ideal of strengthening contractual security in corporate hierarchies. Thus it is not a big stretch to imagine a project defined in terms of building of a world hospitable to freelancers, providing various supports for people in flexible and mobile careers from health care to lifelong education to financial advice to communal warmth; and then the creation of a web platform, similar to Drumbeat, on which members could create their own mutual projects as well as contributing to the overall purpose of building this vision.

Comment [JM25]: Perhaps put a second example after this: openideo CH yes

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The freelance world is clearly a dangerous and difficult one for most people at present. Making it safe for those in it, whether by choice or not, is as large a challenge as making corporate employment safe for workers in the 1930s. This purpose and approach does, however, have the advantage of drawing on the types of civil society relations that have been rapidly growing and evolving in the last few decades, rather than trying to recreate ones that, by all the research and evidence, have been in decline for at least that amount of time.

Conclusion
Mark Twain said, There is something worse than ignorance, and that's knowing what ain't so. An implicit theory of solidarity underlies many labor analyses and strategies; that theory is increasingly looking wrong. It states that solidarity develops when workers are oppressed on a large scale Start from Castells thesis about unions The three major types of civil society I have sketched the traditionalistic, the contractual, and the emergent friending model operate on sharply different norms and values and create deep gulfs in understanding. Traditionalists are fighting at the moment with enormous intensity, in the Tea Party movement and the evangelical churches, to reestablish the basis of community with which they are comfortable: one with sex roles and family patterns ordained by the deity and small businesses and towns as imagined from a century and a half ago. The labor movement has, for the most part, taken its stand on rebuilding contractual balance with large employers. My view is that both of these strategies are on the losing side of history. At the material base, both the traditionalistic movements and the contractual ones are inconsistent with the development of capitalism, and particularly with the growing power of distributed production in value-chain and alliance-based structures. In the social sphere, both of them are out of touch with the rapidly-growing forms of community that incorporate the strengthened individualism of late capitalism into patterns of sociability, facilitated by the ongoing leap in communications technologies. Identity communities built on race, gender, and other social categories, focused on the achievement of rights, have been the focus of hope for many progressives. They have had an enormous impact on our society and continue to be significant actors. But they have not proved to be the foundation of a new structure of civil society that could reliably represent values and concerns beyond those of utility and economic growth. Instead, the most vital and rapidly-growing communities have turned out to take a friending form, characterized by rich but fluid patterns of interactions, with people forming and breaking group ties in their search for continued development. This can easily be seen as the antithesis of solidarity. Most unions continue to see it as a temporary, immature type of collective action which must be brought back into the more developed categories familiar from years of labor action. The few that have tried to grasp it and build on the emergent youth communities, as for instance the SEIUs MyLife effort, have had little success. It is nevertheless vital, I think, to understand the dynamics and potential of this kind of solidarity. Those who view it through the lens of traditionalistic or contractual

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conceptions of community tend to see Facebook and its ilk as a triumph of undisciplined individualism, and early versions of it do have that quality. But they also have in nascent form a set of structuring systems and norms that can be the basis for a stronger form of community that builds on the essential qualities of friending networks. The strongest forms meet the essential requirements for coherent community and action, but through unfamiliar mechanisms. These general requirements for community, as Durkheim suggested, are a set of unifying values and a set of shared norms governing interdependent relationships. In the more developed friending communities, these requirements are met by values emphasizing openness and contribution, and interactive platforms that encourage organization around projects. In addition, something cause These unfamiliar patterns of relation and expectation are likely to be the grounding for the expression of collective ideals long into the future.

---

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Figure 1 Confidence in institutions

Based on data from (Harris Interactive 2005)

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Appendix: a note on the theoretical frame

Some treatments, including Toennies own, see gesellschaft as an absence of community. Adler and I have argued that this is a mistake: a formal contractual order, whether market of bureaucracy, is also communal in the sense of relying strong nonrational values, norms, and a sense of trust. Weber stressed the significance of the Protestant Ethic; Durkheim explored the normative non-contractual elements of contract and the cult of individualism. Relations in gesellschaft societies moreover depend essentially on faith in a system a shared belief that things will work out if all people play their roles with consistency. Luhmann et al. (1979) called this systems trust, Zucker (1986) called it institutional, and Shapiro (1987) impersonal.

The analysis in this paper is based on a theoretical framework with two foundation stones: Parsons formalization of the tradition of classical sociology in the four-function paradigm, and a stage-developmental view of systems evolution. Analysis of any social system, in this view, has to consider both the interrelations of its various parts to each other and the whole, and their location in terms of developmental pressures towards increasing complexity and adaptability. The analysis above views civil society in terms of two of Parsons four functions: the integrative and pattern-maintenance. And it sees civil society as evolving through three broad categories of complexity and historical development: the traditionalistic, the contractual, and the purposive, with the friending model being an early, incomplete form of the latter. Each of these stages has different forms of integrative and patternmaintenance institutions, and each depends on different forms of economic and political structures. The purposive form is new and undeveloped, so I have stayed relatively close to the experience of the Freelancers Union and open-source software projects. The Parsonian paradigm remains in my view the most comprehensive and rigorous analytic frame for understanding complex systems and historical developments over long time frames (for more, see (Heckscher 2009)). The categories of social systems can be stated fairly simply. Many authors have suggested that society is composed of markets and hierarchies; a smaller but still substantial set has added a third category of communities. Parsons accepts the first two and follows Durkheim in dividing communities into two basic component: the web of relations linking diverse subgroups and roles through reciprocity; and the set of moral or value constraints imposed on all members: Social life comes from a double source, the likeness of consciences and the division of social labor. (Durkheim 1893, 226) Thus there are four social domains, as it were: the economy (focused on money and markets, with a logic of utility), the polity (focused on hierarchies of binding power, with a logic of effectiveness), the integrative sphere of community (focused on associational relations of mutuality and influencereciprocity, with a logic of solidarity),

and the value sphere (focused on socialization and commitments, with a logic of integrity). All four of these exist in any system. They need each other, but they also conflict. The political system, for instance, needs revenues (taxes) from the economic, and the economic system needs regulations enforced by the polity to maintain stable markets; but they will both be constantly at each others throats about how much regulation and how much taxes, because their internal logics are essentially different. In a coherent system the four social domains nevertheless work together, and motives flow from all four logics; in a less well-ordered system they may pull against each other. So, for example, if I trust my letter carrier to bring me my social security check and not steal it, it is for many reasons: in part because he is being paid to do so; in part because I am confident that if he doesnt he will to be arrested and put in jail; in part because such theft would be seen by his peers as shameful and would lead to ostracism and damage to his reputation; and in part because I believe that he probably has, as a good member of my community, internalized values that would make him feel guilty if he committed such an offense. In normal times these all work together and it is impossible to separate the motives. But it is quite possible, and has happened in some nations, that the incentives the pay may become so low or irregular that it is no longer effective, and that the state so weak that he is not likely to get caught. Then one would have to rely on the peer group has corruption become accepted among letter carriers in general? and the conscience based on socialization. They might pull in different directions: the incentives might encourage corruption, the peer group might put pressure on those who are not corrupt for breaking the group norms, yet some letter carriers would hold out for reasons of conscience. At that point trust is dicey and the system is fragile. This systems frame does not in any way imply that everything will be empirically harmonious and stable; in fact it provides very good tools for tracing the consequences of various changes in parts of the system or of strains between them. Adding a developmental model further systematizes the change process, viewing it not as a set of random strains but as a coherent move towards increased complexity (or rather, as Darwin saw, increased complexity is a result of selection from random fluctuations). Such a view has been developed by Piaget in cognitive psychology (Piaget and Inhelder 1999), and by various complexity theorists (Khalil 1996; Comfort 1997). Parsons has a version as well, starting with differentiation, which leads in turn to challenges of inclusion, value generalization, and adaptive upgrading. In all these models, stages begin with relatively simple action-centered forms before developing stable institutions. I combine two of Parsons domains under community norms and values, or the relational web and shared definitions of moral obligation14 just to follow common usage: there are no widely-used terms distinguishing the two. In traditionalistic or gemeinschaft communities there is not that much practical difference between them,

14

The term civil society is similar to but less constrained than the word community: the latter is too strongly associated with a close, familial pattern of relations, while civil society can more obviously take many forms.

Formatted: Footnote Text

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either: status obligations are defined directly by the value sphere, represented by the church. It is in more complex, contractual societies that there begins to be a real differentiation of roles from values: roles become more complex and changing, and processes of justification and legitimation are needed to judge whether roles and contracts fit within the overall values of a society. At that point the term civil society becomes useful (and began to be used) to distinguish the integrative dimension of community as opposed to the value dimension. The theoretical frame then leads us to look for different kinds of community in a hierarchy of complexity, each with its own norms and values, and interacting with distinct systems of authority and economic production. Adler and I, building from Weber and Durkheim, have defined three basic kinds in this sense. Traditionalistic community or civil society is one in which relations are based primarily on ascribed statuses and are long-term and inflexible; trust breaks down as soon as these statuses are violated. Contractual community or civil society is close to the original formulation of organic solidarity: trust is based on reciprocal exchanges among roles within a rulebased system. Thus individuals can break with the obligations of their statuses, and roles can change, without everything falling apart as long as faith in the integrity of the role-system overall remains strong. The third kind, we have suggested, is the organic form that Durkheim was searching for but could not fully nail down at his historical moment one that includes a new value-formulation as well as reciprocal interdependence. It can be glimpsed within corporations in developed systems of collaborative trust. Thus within the firm we can trace three stages with distinctive institutions in all four of Parsons social domains:
Stages of community in firms Traditionalistic Contractual Collaborative Loyalty to a concrete Commitment to Ethic of contribution: firm integrity, ruleopenness, consistency, and collaboration, focus individual on collective purpose performance Diffuse status Role obligations Process norms obligations Status-based Bureaucratic Matrix hierarchies hierarchy (multidimensional hierarchies Based on level in the Based on individual Based on contribution status hierarchy performance to the collective Focused on smallFocused on mass mission scale production production Focused on solutions for customers

Values

Norms Authority structures

Economic utilities

My analysis of civil society here builds on this; but civil society is not the firm, so there are some differences. Moreover, the classic sociological frame is not a deductive one: it does not assume that peoples actions are determined by some formal schema. (Parsons and his predecessors would entirely agree with Marxs dictum: Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please.) So analysis cannot simply proceed top-down from the theoretical paradigm; it is a matter of looking at actual

50

practices with the lens of the paradigm to see how what their consequences and constraints are likely to be. Thus I have looked for empirical experiences, in open-source communities and the Freelancers Union and elsewhere, and considered how those changes are likely to affect existing institutions of authority, solidarity, etc.; and what forms of these institutions are likely to emerge around the practices as they develop further. What I have called the friending form of civil society is in this analysis an early version of something like collaborative community at the societal level: a version that has advanced a good deal in practice but has not yet developed clear institutions accepted norms, values, authority systems, or economic base. My discussion of open source above is an attempt to infer the norms and values that characterize the best forms of this practice. There is also a considerable literature (that I do not go into here) on debates about the nature of authority and economic production within an open-source world.

Values

Norms and relational patterns

Authority structures

Economic production & rewards

Stages of community at the societal level (preliminary and tentative) Traditionalistic Contractual Friending Loyalty to a concrete Commitment to Ethic of contribution: social order rationality-legal values openness, and individual collaboration, focus performance on collective purpose Individual development and learning Diffuse status Role obligations Modular projects15 obligations Restitutive law Peer reputational Punitive (repressive) mechanisms16 law Patrimonialism Bureaucratic Positions based on hierarchy influence Democratic authority structures and leadership17 Status-based rents Based on individual Rewards on Focused on smallperformance contribution to the scale production Focused on mass communal work production Synergy of commercial products from open-source knowledge base

Comment [CH26]: Except that I think the friending form is a broader category than the more purposive version relevant for collective action

---

15 16

See (Langlois and Garzarelli 2008) See (Franck and Jungwirth 2003; Heylighen 2006) 17 Suggested by (OMahony and Ferraro 2007)

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52

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CUTS Normal solidarity (later became community)

Within that most general definition are two key types. Normal solidarity is the web of relations and obligations that emerges from real groups that structure their relations over time. The workplace has been one major arena of such normal solidarity. Ideological solidarity is oriented to an ideal: the glue of commitment is a consistent theory, sometimes as voiced by a charismatic leader. Marxism has often been the theory behind ideological solidarity in the labor movement. Although ideological solidarity can be very powerful, it is not sustainable on its own: it generates what Mann {{1973}} called explosions of consciousness but not sustainable institutions. Ideological solidarity may erupt from a normal group under pressure, turning it rather abruptly into a crowd that sets aside its normal internal roles and relations, welding into a unified mass pressing for a single vision. It may also cut across and unite multiple groups who normally have little to do with each other. But to sustain itself, movement solidarity must routinize by developing the denser web of interactivity, with differentiated roles and relations, characteristic of the normal type. A working proposition, though slightly oversimplified, is that a movement of labor cannot succeed without drawing on normal solidarities the understandings and commitments generated by everyday interactions. The strongest labor organizations, lasting through centuries, have been those in which normal solidarity and labor solidarity are virtually indistinguishable. This is is the case for many crafts, especially the ancient ones with roots in guilds: their normal way of life and position in their community is intimately tied to their work. Such groups have not only endured for centuries but provided leadership for many broader movements, including general strikes, as industrial unionism began to expand. Industrial unions, from the 1830s on, arose out of a somewhat thinner type but nonetheless real form of normal solidarity: that experienced on the shopfloor of the rapidly-growing factories.

technocratic rationalism
In the mid-20th century there was a widespread belief that we were entering an age of technocratic rationalism (Burnham 1941; Bell 1960; Reisman, Glazer, and Denney 1950). But this view turned out to be one-sided: the rise of formal bureaucratic orientations did not replace other forms of solidarity, but rather existed alongside them in mutual dependence. Barnard <> and Drucker <> showed that informal organization continued to be essential to the management of large corporations even as their bureaucratic mechanisms grew more solid. ====

solidarity, Durkheim, civil society

Solidarity in this view is a structured pattern of mutual obligations. It contrasts both to immediate self-interest based in markets and to hierarchical control based in formal organizations. This is consistent with Durkheims treatment of solidarity and with many recent treatments based on a tripartite analysis in terms of market, hierarchy, and community (Bradach and Eccles 1989; Powell 1990; Adler 2001). Labor solidarity is based to a considerable extent on workplace relations, but not exclusively: it is affected all relations which shape workers identities, including those not contained within the workplace. In part this is because they are most effective when they appeal to the whole worker, fitting into integrated identities, and in part because they are most effective when they also draw support from people who are not actually members. Thus the nature of the societal community, or what is generally called civil society, has a strong impact. In historical perspective, labor appears at each phase as one of a larger category of similar institutions. At periods of major change it is often possible to see the outlines of directions for labor solidarity in developments in other parts of the society. I will use civil society to refer to the more differentiated type of community characteristic of modernity. I also follow Durkheims (1893) main analytic distinction between two aspects of community: that based on similarity and that based on interdependence. The first, mechanical form is built on shared values, and the second, organic form on the interdependence of roles. A community centered primarily on shared values and is rigid and limited; the trend of social evolution is to increase the social differentiation of labor and organic solidarity.18 Durkheim initially believed that the organic aspect of community the proliferation of a web of voluntary associations and the interdependent exchanges and coalitions among them would replace the mechanical unity of shared values. But he increasingly realized that these are complementary dimensions: the need for value unity does not vanish, it merely changes form. In other words, any community, especially one that is relatively complex and extensive, requires both a rich set of reciprocal relations and associatoins, and a unifying set of values binding on all members. This creates very fundamental problems to which I will return. There is a fairly wide consensus among sociologists about the course of development of community in the modern era.

18

Parsons {1971} formalized these distinctions in his four-function model, which underlies much of the discussion below.

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The stability means also that relationships are close, often intimate, and that individuals become bound by affective links rather than by a perception of individual self-interest. This is essentially what Durkheim meant by mechanical solidarity. That type of community is then followed in the modern world by This type of community opened up enormous new possibilities for human action: it provided the basis for complex societies of a large scale and great productive capacity, and also for individual mobility and choice beyond the limiting confines of the traditional groups and status orders.19 It has also created a frequent sense of unease. A major strand of sociology argued that, in Webers famous phrase, that the iron cage of depersonalized societal relations was both a basis of great power and an inescapable source of alienation, depersonalization, and loss of self. In the mid-20th century there was a widespread belief that we were entering an age of technocratic rationalism (Burnham 1941; Bell 1960; Reisman, Glazer, and Denney 1950). The labor movement, in its different forms, has drawn on these two categories of community. Craft unions were grounded in gemeinschaft orders, with strong traditional hierarchies and status roles, high stability, and small scope of relations (Hinton 1973; Montgomery 1980). Industrial unions adapted to gesellschaft, creating solidarity on a much larger scale by focusing on the definition of the impersonal rules and contracts core to that kind of community. This contractual view of community accounts for a repeated research finding that has troubled many labor scholars: that members trust in unions (especially during the period of industrial union strength) varied together with, rather than in opposition to, confidence in management. The two institutions were generally viewed not as ultimate opponents but as parts of a single balanced system; when the system worked they both gained trust, when it didnt they both lost (Rose 1952; Purcell 1960; Jacob 1981). The organic aspect is the web of voluntary associations, the kind of thing Tocqueville admired about the America he visited before the Civil War. The term civil society began to be used in the Enlightenment to distinguish this sort of voluntary social relations, embedded within large national systems but somewhat independent of them, from the more closed and rigid forms of traditional gemeinschaft. In the 19th century unions were just one type among a range of civil society actors, many mutualist in form, many forming strong national federations (Skocpol 2003). In the 20th century there was a general decline in many of these associations amid a rise of powerful formal, rationalized organizations large firms and the welfare state and the spreading reach of markets. Habermas (1985) calls this dynamic the
19

I am radically compressing here a lengthy analysis which I have elaborated elsewhere (with Paul Adler) (Adler and Heckscher 2006; Adler, Kwon, and Heckscher 2008). Its worth underlining in a footnote, though, that there we differ from some widespread views. Many people see community as possible only in the traditionalistic gemeinschaft form. This leads to all kinds of conceptual and practical confusions. We argue instead that the traditionalistic is one form of community, with characteristic values and normative patterns; that contractual community is another form, with a different set of values and norms; and that those do not exhaust the possibilities.

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colonization of the lifeworld. Unions were left for a time (along with political parties) as virtually the only strong representatives of civil society. This was the period when many sociologists particularly feared the loss of community and the takeover of all aspects of social life by contractual systems either bureaucratic organizations or markets. Even unions and parties were strongly buttressed by and dependent on support from the state.

history of community and labor institutions

These correspond with a widespread view among sociologists about the major changes in civil society from the early 1800s to the 1960s. They divide the period into two successive types, roughly captured by the old sociological terms gemeinschaft and gesellschaft. First there was the traditional form or gemeinschaft, held together by what we now call strong ties, close and personal. In such communities relationships are above all stable, with status orders justified in terms of eternal laws. The stability means also that relationships are close, often intimate, and that individuals become bound by affective links rather than by a perception of individual self-interest. This is essentially what Durkheim meant by mechanical solidarity. That type of community is then followed in the modern world by the impersonal relations of gesellschaft, structured by formal rules and contractual relations. Relations in such societies depend essentially on faith in a system a shared belief that things will work out if all people play their roles with consistency. Luhmann et al. (1979) called this systems trust, Zucker (1986) called it institutional, and Shapiro (1987) impersonal. The term civil society began to be used in the Enlightenment to distinguish social relations in large national systems from traditional gemeinschaft. This type of community opens up enormous new possibilities for human action: it provides the basis for complex societies of a large scale and great productive capacity, and also for individual mobility and choice beyond the limiting confines of the traditional groups and status orders.20 It has also created a frequent sense of unease. A major strand of sociology argued that, in Webers famous phrase, that the iron cage of depersonalized societal relations was both a basis of great power and an inescapable source of alienation, depersonalization, and loss of self. The high gemeinschaft period corresponded in the labor field with the period of guild unionism, where worker organizations were predominantly small, stable,

20

I am radically compressing here a lengthy analysis which I have elaborated elsewhere (with Paul Adler) (Adler and Heckscher 2006; Adler, Kwon, and Heckscher 2008). Its worth underlining in a footnote, though, that there we differ from some widespread views. Many people see community as possible only in the traditionalistic gemeinschaft form. This leads to all kinds of conceptual and practical confusions. We argue instead that the traditionalistic is one form of community, with characteristic values and normative patterns; that contractual community is another form, with a different set of values and norms; and that those do not exhaust the possibilities.

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personal, and traditionalistic in orientation. In the 19th century as the industrial economy began to disrupt these relations, unions evolved into a more self-conscious form and in effect became one among many fraternal societies spreading in that period <Skocpol>: these retained the base of craft unionism but gradually added a federated structure at the national level the American Federation of Labor being the first one to achieve lasting success. The growing dominance of large corporations in the first decades of the twentieth century weakened all such associations. In the society as a whole, as Weber had predicted {Gerth and Mills 1946, p 228>}, bureaucratic organization proved superior to every form of communal action, and gesellschaft-type relationships became the norm. Over time many of the strong fraternal societies faded {Michels, Skocpol}. The AFL, directly in the crosshairs of the new corporate leaders, was decimated by the 1920s. Holding to its orientation of craft solidarity, it failed to incorporate the rapidly-growing ranks of unskilled workers indeed, union leaders of the time were suspicious of this new force, fearing that it was too undisciplined to take on the battle against owners. From the early 1900s on, as corporate and government bureaucracies grew and farms declined, the class-based revolutionary movements were gradually replaced by ones that were industry- or workplace-based and generally without the broad ideological agendas of prior eras. These had solidarity that was more grounded in both relationships and ideological legitimacy. In relational terms, they were sustained in the daily interactions of large workplaces in the growing production bureaucracies, as large national companies like Ford and General Motors linked multiple large workplaces across wide geographies. In ideological terms, they drew on on an increasingly widelyaccepted conception of a balance of power, which accorded a legitimate place to management but saw a need for a counterbalance to prevent abuses. This combination sustained lengthy and coordinated actions such as the large-scale strikes in the steel and auto industries in the 1940s and 50s. These bases of industrial solidarity were, however, much elss elaborated than those of craft solidarity, and the new form was therefore more dependent from the start on formal organization which unlike most craft structures was quite distinct from the daily interactions of the members. Industrial unions built large bureaucracies themselves to counter the management structures, and they depended heavily on the support of the rapidly-rising bureaucratic power of government. Solidarity, in industrial unions, became only one piece of the power equation: neither formal organization nor member activism alone was sufficient to sustain the balance of power with large corporations. Unions had to learn to manage the tension between these poles, encouraging member activism at critical moments without allowing it to undermine the consistency of the ongoing organization. ====

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Intro draft
Labor solidarity does not emerge from a void: it draws on, and organizes, a larger set of social relations. In some cases solidarity has come from a sense of class unity, of opposition between the masses of workers and the managerial or wealthy classes; in others it has been based in a desire to maintain the traditions of craft communities; in still others it is more driven by the community within single firms. Labor organizers necessarily start from a deep understanding of these communal relationships in order to connect them to collective action and organizational commitment. This essay therefore starts with the question, What is happening to the sense of community in the society at large? Almost all observers agree that something big is happening, but they disagree intensely over what it is. Many simply see a long-term, across-the-board decline in communal feeling; but others see the emergence of new types of civil society and community. If the first is correct, it is hard to see how labor solidarity can buck the larger trend; if it is the latter, it means that unions have to rethink how they build member commitment. I will in particular look at hypotheses that social relations are in general becoming more diverse and deliberate, rather than being grounded in long-term and stable social statuses. If that is correct, then solidarity should be thought of not in the singular but in the plural, and as temporary rather than permanent; and unions need to develop organizing strategies to match.

misc first draft

Labor solidarity generally emerges in conjunction with larger redefinitions of relations and movements for social change. For example, the industrial union movement of a century ago arose in part in response to the breakdown of traditional relations in both factories and fields; it was based in the new relations among workers developed in large workplaces mixing diverse skills, but it also was shaped by other societal movements ranging from Marxism to womens suffrage. Labor organizing today is clearly hampered by the trend to decentralization of workplaces, which has loosened the communal bonds linking employees of a common firm and has made it harder to mobilize a broad sense of class outrage against the bosses. Many proposals for labor organizing today are looking for new bases. Much community organizing has aimed to mobilize ethnic and racial solidarity bases in concentrated geographies. the move is not as many would claim from collectivism to individualism, but rather from group as definer of self to group as a vehicle for the expression and development of self. If this is true, it means that groups conceived in traditional terms

Formatted: Highlight Comment [JM27]: I think this is a powerful and new argument. Ive not yet come across something similar. CH: theres a good deal of grounding for this in classical theory, but its hard to nail down in research at least of the type we do. Lets think about it.

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as enduring associations will play a less important role as definers of civil society and as the basis for stakeholder relations. For the most recent evidence on the effects of the internet since the painful process of survey, analysis, and publication lags far behind the current revolution one has to rely on anecdote. Anyone with children will have many. I was particularly struck by one recent personal experience: On Christmas eve my children and several of their friends came back with us from church to our living room, opened their computers and iPhones, and started typing away. When I remarked on the lack of interaction, my daughter said, No, Raj and I are having a great conversation! Raj, mind you, was also sitting in the room. In other words, they were communicating seamlessly in various combinations, with each other in the same room and at the same time with friends in fardistant places. The tightness of a Christmas eve with family and friends had not vanished but mutated, opening in ways that could not have been imagined a year or two before dozens of people were in the conversation, but not all at once and not constrained by physical location. There is no satisfactory term in the literature for such a community, so I will adopt a term from Facebook: friending.21 The active verb removes friends from the context of concrete groups or communities, including identity groups, and opens it radically to active individual choice. This appears to be a dramatic leap in the pattern that Mead and Simmel were observing, and that Bellah et al. (1985, 251) saw in their qualitative cases: a rise in spontaneous community with the like-minded at the expense of enduring association of the different. Wuthnow (1994)s investigation of voluntary groups makes another important point. He found that most of these groups (religious and non-religious) emphasize unconditional support and impose very few obligations problem here: thats not solidarity by my def. SO friending is not a form of solidarity, but the equivalent of gemein-gesell. . They do not seek, in other words, to socialize their members into a common communal frame, but rather to increase individual well-being. This seems characteristic of the newer online communities as well. The concept offriendhas a fraught history in modern thought. Calvin, who was for Weber the originator and archetype of the Protestant ethic, believed that friendship was a distraction from the proper focus on the deity and thus essentially a temptation to evil. In the last half century something has happened that social scientists had not predicted: a series of powerful rebellions against this technocratic view of society. It began with the explosion of communal movements in the 1960s, generally antirationalist but also voluntarist and non-traditional. But the Tea Party and the movements of the religious right share an essential impulse with those seemingly very

Comment [JM28]: There is, in fact, a great deal of research on the effects of the internet, including social media. I think group participation on Facebook evidences a kind of networked individualism, in the sense that engagement is either passive or (if it is participatory) transient, fleeting. People may quickly voice an opinion about an issue relevant to the groups theme and then move on. There is also a lot of research on Facebook as a vehicle for the expression of self how people manage their online ... Comment [JM29]: This example is a kind of spontaneous community with the likeminded but is it really in support of your hypothesis: group as a vehicle for the expression and development of self? CH: we will need to conceptualize stages within friending communities, from quite loose associations to tighter ones. There is a large literature on friendship that does treat it as an essential, though underexamined, vehicle for development of self. Most theory (eg, Freud) has focused on hierarchical / parental relations, but some have ... Comment [JM30]: I think that FB is much more than this. It does allow spontaneous community with the likeminded, but also much more. Research suggests that strengthens real worldcommunities, and also allows social capital to be maintained and used in a way that was never before possible. Im not sure how, where, whether to work this into the current papers structure. OK, this is really interesting. There is a lot of concern these days about fragmentation of community, so evidence on that point would be a valuable theme. Comment [JM31]: I see what youre getting at, but, again, do not think of FB in these terms. To me, FB allows enduring association of the somewhat similar. That is, it allows people to be linked who have numerous, overlapping dimensions of compatibility. Community emerges between people when certain interests categories are brought to the fore. Therefore, it allows sponatenous community concurrently with the enduring association of the somewhat similar. CH: again, this is an important thought; the connection to Bellah and such could be a theme ...

21

I am indebted to Paul Adler for this suggestion.

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different movements: a loss of trust in large, impersonal systems and in technocratic leadership. The 60s movements generated many of the social-identity groups that I considered, twenty years ago, the core of the new civil society. But those groups have become relatively weaker, and to some extent lost in a cacophony of groups that share a rejection of the system, while differing radically on visions of the future. The key academic debate now about civil society is whether or not community is declining. Robert Putnam is the best-known representative of those who say it is, and that its a problem. Others counter that community is not declining but merely changing form. I think this can be clarified by starting from a formal three-part analysis of types of community that I have developed with Paul Adler in studies of large firms. The first two types, which we call traditionalistic and contractual, are developed from the gemeinschaft-gesellschaft distinction discussed above. The third, which we call collaborative, is based on evidence from business organizations that are high in trust but low in both traditional status and rule-based hierarchy (Adler and Heckscher 2011). These concepts, especially the third, need to be adapted in moving from the firm to the societal level. ====

NSMs, first crack

Racial and ethnic NSMs have very solid relational bases, with strong autonomous institutions, like Black or Latino churches, and their members relate most to others within the group. NSMs of gender, sexual orientation, by contrast, relate strongly and regularly to non-members and have few organized independent institutions. It has taken considerable and ongoing effort to create a fuller sense of identity in these groups. These were the movements that created the techniques of consciousness raising groups in the 60s. Then there are New Social Movements that seek to create deliberate new identities. Most disabled people, for instance, did not see themselves as part of a community of disabled; that consciousness needed to be created. The ideological or value base for these movements starts from the claim to rights, which is widely consensual in Western political culture. It is distinct from the balance-of-power type of ideology typical of the labor movement and motivates distinct behaviors: rather than They draw on an ideology of rights, though it is rather mixed and not wellarticulated: it includes both a claim to general human rights attached to individuals, which has a long tradition in Western political philosophy; and a newer claim to collective rights, a right to the advancement of distinct communities with their own The civil rights and gender rig

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 Created NSMs, generally more recent, have created new relations and sense of identity from formerly scattered individuals. OUTLINE Distinct types: Civil rights: stable, collective, Relations of common social status, pride Ideology of rights Self-development Relations of mutual understanding Ideology of self-development Hopes for civil rights type Basis for community unionism, social movement unionism, etc Coalitions; SEIU But have not worked successfully: Labile identities: Gamson, etc The self-development type: Wuthnow, etc Relations and ideologies the basis of friending solidarity ====

interactive identity
The focus on self-development and self-expression within a communal frame is particularly striking and novel. Self-expression has been a part of the modern ethos at least since the Renaissance, but typically associated with the lonely genius concerned only with a muse. The classic idea of identity in the Enlightenment era was one of authenticity or integrity discovering ones true self and staying consistent with it no matter what the outside world might say. The friending model is more subtle, involving cotinual discovery and construction of personal identity through interaction with others. ====

Comment [JM32]: Perhaps after this paragraph we can review literature on Facebook shortcomings. Many of these shortcomings parallel your arguments above: Group interest on FB is passing, rather than stable. It is also passive and nonparticipatory. Seldom do interests solidify around an issue and lead to real-world collective action. Even if people do participate actively for a shortwhile, their interests shift, and group membership falls off. Interests continually shift over time. It is for these reasons that, save for a few successful publicity campaigns, they have done little to mobilize energy toward common goals. CH: great

critique of associational / friending model

If we look more closely at the friending model, we can see that some of these misgivings are not misplaced. The model is not purely new and unprecedented; it is an evolution of an old ideal, which has been particularly popular in America and the Tocquevillian tradition, of pure voluntarist webs of relations. Munch (1986) and others note some important weaknesses in this form, which can be summarized under the headings of fragmentation, inequality, and vicious circles.

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Fragmentation is an old and obvious problem, identified as faction in the Federalist Papers (Hamilton et al. 2008, no. 10), and also noted in more recent studies of free-association models (Fiss 1982; Fung, Wright, and Abers 2003): voluntary networks tend to break apart easily, as interests and coalitions shift. Less obvious is a second tendency, towards forming a center-periphery structure with high inequality, composed of a few winners and many losers. This dynamic was theorized long ago by Rosen (1981), has been reinforced by more recent network research (Hojman and Szeidl 2008), and has been documented in many particular cases. The film industry, for instance, has been suggested by a number as a model for a community form of organization (Powell 1990); but it turns out that large studios were an essential element in holding it together as their power has declined, a few stars have increasingly distanced themselves in compensation and reputation from the rest of the pack (Jones, Hesterly, and Borgatti 1997, 916 et pass). Or as one person we interviewed at McKinsey put it: If you are a strong performer with strong reputation people will approach you, will want you. The downside is that if things do not go well, you will find it more difficult to work in good projects and find clients. Low reputation brings lower reputation. [Interview by Carlos Martin] Finally, unconstrained networks are unstable because, without authoritative regulation of some kind, they are vulnerable to circular dynamics. These may be virtuous or vicious, but they have lives of their own and are essentially impossible to control from inside the system, leading to repeated bouts of associational inflation excessive trust and deflation excessive suspicion (Gambetta 1988; Thomas 1998; Spicer and Pyle 2003; Parsons 1963). ====

Relational vs value-cmmitment solidarity

Solidarity may be based primarily on one or the other of these, or on a combination. Solidarity based primarily on relationships requires membership, formal or informal, in an actual group (Fireman and Gamson 1979). It is often long-lasting and resilient, and can be mobilized effectively by communally-based leaders, but it is relatively narrow in scope. Solidarity can also develop in the absence of actual social ties, through the activation of value-commitments (Minkoff 1997). This form can extend more widely passion for a cause can draw people into actions with others whom they do not know but it is harder to manage and more prone to splits and factions. Movements of this type usually depend on charismatic leadership, with all its vagaries. However, these two bases of the sense of obligation can operate in tandem, and indeed are strongest when they do. People may support groups who are engaged in causes they care about, such as civil rights, but they are much more likely to do so if they know some of the members personally, and even more so if they are actual members of the group. ====

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Research methods for relations and comitments

But the other motivational bases can in principle be analyzed as well. Relations have been examined objectively through techniques of network mapping; the actual norms that govern these relations, the basis of feelings of obligation, are usually studied through surveys and qualitative interviews. Value-commitments are most objectively viewed through the formal statements of leading moral institutions; surveys and interviews are also relevant here. This paper will rely on secondary analyses of these issues, and will focus most on patterns of relations and value-commitments. ====

Friending a form of community, not solidarity

Friending is not a form of solidarity as we have defined it, because it is not necessarily oriented to collective action and may involve very weak obligations. It is, rather, a form of community, equivalent to traditionalistic and contractual, which can be the underlying basis for solidary action. ====

augustine and friendship

Augustine saw amicable desire for anothers good as often making us sin against God so as not to turn a friend against us. {First Meanings in Genesis, 11.59}. ====

paradox: opening vs discipline and secrecy

For collective action, the essential dilemma is the same as for commercial products: opening creates the risk of losing control; but closing reduces the scope of engagement and innovation. Thus for Egyptian activists before the Arab Spring revolt, the use of Facebook enabled not only education but also the facilitation and coordination of a large number of swift actions that could not have been carried out without the platform, but it also created the danger that the authorities would listen in. As with corporate strategists, movement organizers need to learn to assess the potential benefits of throwing open the doors benefits that are unfamiliar to the mindset of disciplined mass action.

Outlines
OUTLINE

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Nevertheless out of these friending communities have emerged some collective actions that evince a form of solidarity (friending?) Obama, Egypt, Kony, etc Friending solidarity: Like the solidarity of friends: rather labile, emotional, shifting; focused on getting it cultural frames Projects: open source Further development Collective action: swarming Campaigns: Platforms with a purpose Labor Swarming as a tactic Hypothesis: Not just uses of social media to mobilize around labor goals rather, opening platforms for people to create own projects

--(Mackenzie 1973) (aristocracy of labor) OUTLINE Need for national organizations purposes: Minkoff Platforms Interoperability, tools, reputations; org alliances Facebook works ((Anon. 2011; Tufekci and Wilson 2012)), but new platforms can provide anonymity, focus, task-centered layout Levels: Social media (Facebook) Project platforms (causes.com, world mind network (www.networkingprojects.org)) Project sites: Liverpool dockers (Carter et al. 2003), living wage (Biddix and Park 2008) Swarms Coordination, information,

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