Abstract

This article is concerned with the crisis in U. S. labor studies. It argues that the anti-institutionalist thrust of labor studies since the late 1960s has fragmented the field and that recent attempts to find a new synthesis have failed because certain theoretical premises of the anti-institutionalist trend have gone unrecognized. The article identifies the essentially Weberian premises of the "new" labor history and argues that those influences have carried over into labor process studies. Recent work in class analysis is proposed as a framework capable of unifying the field.