John S. Ahlquist is the Lyons Family Faculty Scholar and associate professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Margaret Levi is the Jere L. Bacharach Professor of International Studies at the University of Washington and Foundational Chair in Politics at the University of Sydney’s United States Studies Centre.

In the Interest of Others

ORGANIZATIONS AND SOCIAL ACTIVISM

By John S. Ahlquist, Margaret Levi

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2013 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-15856-3

Contents

List of Figures……………………………………………………ixList of Tables…………………………………………………….xiAcknowledgments……………………………………………………xiiiChapter 1: Beyond Economism…………………………………………1Chapter 2: Building an Encompassing Community of Fate and Winning Consent..22Chapter 3: Pork, Perks, and Predation………………………………..53Chapter 4: An Injury to Anyone Is an Injury to All…………………….79Chapter 5: Managing Heterogeneity……………………………………120Chapter 6: Provoking Preferences…………………………………….155Chapter 7: Political Attitudes and Behavior among ILWU Members………….185Chapter 8: Signaling Solidarity?…………………………………….230Chapter 9: Conclusions and Implications………………………………261Bibliography………………………………………………………279Index…………………………………………………………….303

CHAPTER 1

Beyond Economism

Workers flood the streets to protest government policy. They shut downbusinesses and public offices. This describes moments in nineteenth-centuryAmerica; it certainly captures recent events in parts of Europe,Asia, and the American Midwest. While all unions are involved in politicsto some degree, large-scale political strikes are rare in the contemporaryAnglo-Saxon democracies, and rarer still is the use of industrial action forpolitical ends. Variation in the size, form, and goals of political mobilizationis the subject of countless studies. The most interesting tend to focuson the collective actions of those who are marginalized—be they AfricanAmericans in the United States or peasant farmers in China—or those engagedin out-and-out rebellion or revolution against the state. This bookraises a somewhat different puzzle.

We ask why some organizations move beyond the particular and particularizedgrievances that are the raison d’être of the organization andengage in political actions, especially those that have little or nothing todo with members’ reasons for belonging. For example, in the late 1930s,dockworker unions in Australia and on the West Coast of the UnitedStates refused to load scrap iron bound for Japan, in protest against theJapanese invasion of Manchuria. These unions continue to periodicallyengage in work stoppages or boycotts in opposition to national foreignpolicy or to assist in freedom struggles overseas.

We explore the variation in organizational norms, governance arrangements,and social networks that produce systematic differences inaggregate behavior. We also explain why members go along. Left-winglongshore union members give up time and money to fight on behalfof social justice causes from which they can expect no material return.Parishioners of churches throughout the United States risk jail to shelterasylum seekers. Altruism is common enough, and so are volunteering,political commitment, and unselfish service to others. Yet, we know thatthere are environments that evoke such behavior and those that depressit. Why and how do some organizations produce membership willingnessto self-sacrifice on behalf of a wide range of political and social justiceissues? In some instances, the answer may be simple: self-selection. Thosewho want to act on behalf of others join the church or the interest groupor the activist organization that encourages, indeed advertises, such behavior.The more interesting cases are those in which individuals join forone reason but come to pursue goals they may not have considered previously.Membership changes them. It shapes their identity and choices.

Part of the answer lies in how an organization defines its communityof fate (Levi and Olson 2000), those with whom individuals come toperceive their own interests as bound and with whom they are willing toact in solidarity. This term is more than a rhetorical flourish. It embodiestwo distinct but interrelated concepts. The community identifies thosewhose situations organizational members see as distinct possibilities forthemselves. An individual looks at others and imagines “there, but forthe grace of God, go I.” But more than simple human recognition is theentwining of fate. The community of fate identifies those the organizationalmembers perceive as engaged in similar struggles for similar goals.Organizational members view their welfare as bound up with that of thecommunity. It is a short jump to see how defining a community of fatehas strong implications for the organization’s scope of legitimate action.The community of fate may encompass only members of the organization,in which case its actions will be narrow and exclusively self-serving.But the community of fate could encompass unknown others for whomthe members feel responsibility. These external others need not recognizeor even know about the organization.

A community of fate requires recognition of common goals and enemies,and it is strengthened by interdependence. Social interactions, education,and the transmission of credible information by leadership shapecommon beliefs about what actions are possible for the organization andits members. Perceived interdependence is a function of immediate social,work, and residential networks, but it can also result from learning aboutdistant events and connecting them to local possibilities.

Organizations successful at encouraging costly actions that transcendnarrow self-interest are worthy of note in their own right. They also offerinsight into the processes that foster aggregate behavior and, possibly,changes in beliefs and preferences. An extensive literature exists on thefactors affecting individual choice and the aggregation of individual preferencesinto collective outcomes. We build on that scholarship to understandthe factors that encourage individuals to act in ways they may nothave considered, let alone gone along with, prior to their engagement ina particular organization.

In attempting to explain the conditions under which organizationalmembership transforms individual action, altering aggregate behavior,we reframe the question that motivated Lenin in What Is to Be Done?(1963 [1902]). Lenin wanted workers to think beyond their own immediateneeds, to imagine a society in which a different life was possible,and then to engage in revolution to achieve it. Workers are relativelyeasily persuaded to fight for improvements in wages, hours, and workingconditions. For Lenin, such goals constitute “economism,” a focus on thenarrow economic interests bound up in the job. He wanted to transformthe preferences, beliefs, and actions of the working class. His aim was tocreate class-conscious workers who understood their fate as bound upwith each other across occupations and even borders, workers who realizedtheir struggle had to be over far more than their working conditionsand pay. Lenin held that only in this way could the proletariat becomevictorious, significantly improving their material well-being while alsoachieving a more equitable society.

Lenin proposed political education as the way to inspire workers. Headvocated a workers’ newspaper to convey information, and he encouragedother socialization processes to make workers aware of and sensitiveto the salience of political projects near and dear to the revolutionaries’hearts. His strategy, developed within an authoritarian and repressivecontext, also included the organization of the revolutionaries into cells,with very few individuals knowing each other. He was eager to preventthe regime from locating and jailing the Communist Party activists.

Predating Lenin and operating within a democratic framework, FrederickEngels argued that ballots might transform capitalism into socialism.However, confidence in electoral victories stumbled on the very problemLenin identified: workers were more committed to achieving immediatematerial benefits than long-term changes that might come at a significantprice (Przeworski 1985). The empirical reality is that middle-classand well-off proletariat voters reveal little interest in overturning the economicsystem (Przeworski and Sprague 1986; Ziblatt 2014).

Mobilizing the proletariat to engage in revolution is not what is atissue for us in this book, but we do care about the conditions that changeindividual beliefs and actions. While we can dismiss Lenin’s model ofrevolution, we cannot so easily dismiss the central question he raises:What motivates members of organizations developed to serve the interestsof their membership to choose to engage in actions on behalf of alarger whole? Nor can we easily dismiss some of Lenin’s insights, namelythe critical role of leadership, education, and information. Our researchreinforces the importance of these factors in empowering members to actin ways they may not previously have thought viable.

Some scholars focus on structural factors and political opportunitiesthat make it more or less likely for a group to act and to act in a certainway. The principal contemporary exemplar of this analytic tradition isthe resource mobilization literature (Lipsky 1968; Tilly 1978; Zald andMcCarthy 1979; Tarrow 1994) and its more recent contentious politicsvariant (McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly 2001). While our approach sharesmuch in common with the contentious politics perspective, our focus ismore squarely on the micro-foundations of behavior and the strategicinteractions between the leaders and followers and among the followersthemselves. Consistent with recent work by Bueno de Mesquita (2010),we claim that leaders need to convince followers that they can succeed,which in turn requires a demonstration that enough others share theleaders’ sentiments about appropriate actions and are willing to act whennecessary.

One way to think about this set of issues, of course, is through modelsof collective action, particularly those that suggest the various dilemmasthat exist for those deciding whether to cooperate or contribute(see, e.g., Lichbach 1995, 1997). Mancur Olson (1965), James Q. Wilson(1973), and many others emphasize selective incentives, largely materialbut also solidary and ideological. Selective incentives certainly playa role in accounting for certain kinds of contributions; indeed, Olsondiscussed union dues–paying as a primary example of how selective incentiveswork in practice. Others emphasized leadership as a means forproviding and targeting selective incentives (Frohlich, Oppenheimer, andYoung 1971). What selective incentives cannot adequately explain is howencompassing communities of fate are or how governance and normsinfluence group choice. Rational choice models, particularly the new economicinstitutionalism (North 1990; Ostrom 1990), get us a little furtherby considering how rules constrain or facilitate behavior. Behavioral economicsprovides even more clues with its focus on social preferences, suchas ethical commitments and altruism. Considerations of when prosocialpreferences are crowded out by material incentives (Bowles and Polanía-Reyes2011) and the extent to which social context influences this process(Fehr and Hoff 2011) are related to the issues we raise here.

Our question and approach also have much in common with thelarge sociological literature on group mobilization and collective action.Though we build on several insights in this literature, we differ in thatour concern is not so much with cooperation in discrete, well-defined activities.Rather, we emphasize how groups already recognizing a mutualinterest come to expand their scope of action to act on behalf of thoseoutside the group. That is, we make endogenous the projects a group iswilling to undertake. A central issue here—one that is less explored in thesociological literature—is how such commitments can be maintained andreproduced through time in the context of formal organizations.

Our approach is to identify the aggregate behaviors that result frominteractions between leaders and followers, as mediated by organizationalinstitutions. Although we rely on both game theory and economicmodels, ours is a highly contextual account emphasizing the beliefs ofthe leaders, the settings they create as well as inherit, and the beliefs,networks, and responses of the members. Unlike most of the work in theliteratures from which we primarily draw, we do not presume that individualsalready have clear preferences. We are open to the possibility thatpreferences change as a consequence of membership. At the least, preferencesare clarified and, possibly, reordered as members come to believethat certain goals are actionable and potentially achievable.

Our Argument

We explore our puzzle in the context of labor unions, focusing on variationin unions’ use of industrial power for political ends. A union’s bargainingpower ultimately lies in the members’ ability to coordinate inwithholding labor from employers. Most unions maintain some contactwith politicians and political authorities. Nevertheless there is variationacross unions in both the extent of political mobilization and their industrialsuccess. Most unions, not surprisingly, strike rarely and then only topromote the wages, hours, benefits, job security, and working conditionsof members, or even specific subsets of members (Golden 1997). Manyunions also lobby for protective legislation or forms of social insurancefrom which they will benefit. At the extreme end of both continua areunions that use their industrial power in the service of political ends havingvirtually nothing to do with their own conditions. They do not giveup their social movement energy as Michels (1962 [1919]) predicted ordisplace their goals as Merton (1968 [1957]) observed.

But why do they behave this way and how do they sustain it? To statethe main thesis of the first part of the book: sustained political mobilizationrequires an ideologically motivated founding leadership cohortwho devises organizational rules that facilitate both industrial successand coordinated expectations about the leaders’ political objectives. Theresult is contingent consent (Levi 1997): members will willingly, sometimesenthusiastically, go along with leadership demands as long as theyare convinced that they are receiving the material benefits the organizationpromised them upon joining, that the leadership is accountable, andthat enough other members are also going along. In the second half ofthe book, we explore the claim that members come to hold the belief(or at least act consistently with the belief) that their fate is intertwinednot only with their associates in the organization but also with a largerpopulation; by helping others, they are helping themselves. This may alsorequire them to focus on long-term goals in addition to immediate aims.Interactions among the members, the capacity to challenge leadership argumentsand demands, and attachments to the organizational traditionsare the factors that produce both contingent consent with leadership anda more encompassing community of fate.

Figure 1.1 outlines schematically the first part of our argument, identifyingthe major actors, variables, and outcomes that we discuss in subsequentchapters. We begin at a moment of organizational founding orcrisis. At such times a leader who devises tactical solutions to the threatsconfronting the organization has an outsized opportunity to design subsequentorganizational governance institutions, defined as the formalrules and informal norms that delineate how decisions are taken, how theorganization will respond to future events, and how and on what basisorganizational members should evaluate the actions of leaders. But thereis no guarantee that effective leaders will emerge. A persuasive leadercould arise and drive the organization off a cliff with the wrong policiesor weak governance institutions. Or perhaps the challenges facing the organizationare simply insoluble. In these cases, the organization will fail.

All the leaders we investigate are asking members to act on behalfof material interests, but some are also asking members to act on behalfof political or ethical goals that have little or nothing to do withthe reasons for joining the voluntary organization. Variation in leaders’political commitments is not the object of explanation here; we take theleaders’ preferences as exogenous. Our explanation emphasizes the processesby which leadership earns the confidence of members and thensucceeds in persuading them to act on behalf of goals the leadership arguesare important. The leader attempts to convince members that theirown fate hinges on achievement of ends that serve external others aswell as themselves. Successful leaders effect their ends through a four-stepprocess: (1) achievement of the economic goals of the union; (2) the announcementof principles the leaders pledge to uphold; (3) the creationof governance arrangements that allow leadership and members to effectivelycoordinate; and (4) processes and institutions that either induceconsensual maintenance of the principles or compel members to act asif they consent. Numbers 2, 3, and 4 on this list are components of theorganizational governance institutions.
(Continues…)Excerpted from In the Interest of Others by John S. Ahlquist, Margaret Levi. Copyright © 2013 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.