The Production of Difference: Race and the Management of Labor in U.S. History

by David R. Roediger, Elizabeth D. Esch

In 1907, pioneering labor historian and economist John Commons argued that U.S. management had shown just one "symptom of originality," namely "playing one race against the other."

In this eye-opening book, David Roediger and Elizabeth Esch offer a radically new way of understanding the history of management in the United States, placing race, migration, and empire at the center of what has sometimes been narrowly seen as a search for efficiency and economy. Ranging from the antebellum period to the coming of the Great Depression, the book examines the extensive literature slave masters produced on how to manage and "develop" slaves; explores what was perhaps the greatest managerial feat in U.S. history, the building of the transcontinental railroad, which pitted Chinese and Irish work gangs against each other; and concludes by looking at how these strategies survive today in the management of hard, low-paying, dangerous jobs in agriculture, military support, and meatpacking. Roediger and Esch convey what slaves, immigrants, and all working people were up against as the objects of managerial control. Managers explicitly ranked racial groups, both in terms of
which labor they were best suited for and their relative value compared to others. The authors show how whites relied on such alleged racial knowledge to manage and believed that the "lesser races" could only benefit from their tutelage. These views wove together managerial strategies and white supremacy not only ideologically but practically, every day at workplaces. Even in factories governed by scientific management, the impulse to play races against each other, and to slot workers into jobs categorized by race, constituted powerful management tools used to enforce discipline, lower wages, keep workers on dangerous jobs, and undermine solidarity.

Painstakingly researched and brilliantly argued, The Production of Difference will revolutionize the history of labor race in the United States.

Genres: History, United States, Nonfiction, Race, Sociology, Labor

296 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2012

About the author

David Roediger teaches history and African American Studies at the University of Kansas. He was born in southern Illinois and educated in public schools in that state, with a B.S. in Ed from Northern Illinois University. He completed a doctorate in History at Northwestern in 1979. Roediger has taught labor and Southern history at Northwestern, University of Missouri, University of Minnesota, and University of Illinois. He has also worked as an editor of the Frederick Douglass Papers at Yale University. He has written on U.S. movements for a shorter working day, on labor and poetry, on the history of radicalism, and on the racial identities of white workers and of immigrants. The former chair of the editorial committee of the Charles H. Kerr Company, the world's oldest radical publisher, he has been active in the surrealist movement, labor support and anti-racist organizing.

Reviews

[Mike Zickar · Rating 5 out of 5]

An important and ambitious history of the use of race by business managers, covering the range from 1830 to 1924. Well-researched, this book's footnotes led me to many, many interesting sources.

[Eric Bottorff · Rating 3 out of 5]

Finished this wishing for more, as it feels like this is just touching the surface of an incredibly fruitful research and theoretical project. But Roediger and Esch certainly deserve enormous credit for opening up these questions and starting a project in such a singular fashion. We can only hope that those who follow do so with the same rigor and spirit.

[Leah Montange · Rating 4 out of 5]

-very readable
-production of difference at the point of production
-a little funny to take lowe's production of difference concept and apply it only to labor and production contexts
-US history is grim

[Priscilla · Rating 4 out of 5]

whiteness-as-management, and how the poor white man upheld the American race-based caste system as a means of shifting the binary away from poor-rich to black-white.

[Kåre · Rating 2 out of 5]

Detaljeret beskrivelse og dokumentation af, hvordan ledelse brugte race som ledelse. Viser bla dette gennem ledelseslitteraturen, som gav klare anvisninger på, hvilke racer, der kunne hvad. Ikke meget direkte nyt, men måske er dokumentationen ny (det skriver de på bagsiden).
jeg stopper s 137. For kedeligt