Another Attempt at a SOC 931 Final

“Deindustrialization is not necessarily a symptom of the failure of a county’s manufacturing sector, or for that matter, of the economy as a whole.  On the contrary, deindustrialization is simply the natural outcome of the process of successful economic development and is, in general associated with rising living standards” (International Monetary Fund. Research Dept, 1997).

Matsumoto (1996) analyzed “the extent to which deindustrialization, particularly expansion in the service sector, has benefited the UK economy.”

One approach to studying globalization is to take a side for or against its benefit to society.  Cheru (2000) discusses both camps, “pro-globalization” and “resistance to globalization,” and forges a middle ground based upon the opportunities created by globalization that simultaneously avoid its negative consequences.  Cheru falls into a common trap when grouping results of globalization.  The author labels inequality, ecological degradation, deindustrialization, and poverty as “sliding backwards.”  Although many would likely agree, it is beyond the scope of this research to prove or disprove the elements of regression built into poverty, environmental harm, and inequalities that may arise from globalization.  However, it is necessary to look further at whether deindustrialization ought be grouped alongside those other “negative consequences” of globalization.

Deindustrialization Causes Poverty

Brady & Wallace (2001) explain the link between deindustrialization and poverty.  The authors “investigate how deindustrialization contributed to the county’s impoverishment, measured by the percentage of the population receiving Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). We find that the loss of manufacturing jobs, especially steel jobs, triggered a rise in AFDC recipiency rates. The growth in service jobs during the period does little to offset the negative impact of lost steel jobs. We further find that the deleterious impact of lost steel jobs on AFDC recipiency is greatest after 1980, the period of heaviest job loss in Lake County’s steel industry.”

“In its assumptions for domestic and international society alike, the liberal capitalist model rested upon a model of modernity that was in the end static: industrialized, increasingly homogeneous, and egalitarian societies would be the norm” (Halliday, 1999)

“The wave of current [plant] closures reveals a larger pattern of deindustrialization, a process of ‘widespread, systembatic disinvestment in the nation’s basic productive potential’” (Lustig, 1985).

Iversen & Cusack (2000) propose another dichotomy when examining the causes of the welfare state.  The authors ask if the causes stem from deindustrialization or globalization and argue that “increasing productivity, changing consumption patterns, and saturated demand for products from the traditional sectors of the economy are the main forces of change.”

Deindustrialization Causes Violence through Polarization

“Just as the modernity of the first half of the twentieth century produced Communism and Fascism, so that of the late twentieth century is as much in the gang warfare of Los Angeles as in the tranquillity of Sweden or Austria” (Halliday, 1999)

Bluestone (1983) reported that “despite the highest unemployment in 40 years and the loss of some of our greatest [American] cities, the stock market [was] on a bullish stampede.”

“Developed countries did not, over the longer run, produce more homogeneous or egalitarian societies: indeed the divisions within them, and most dramatically the social and ethnic divisions within the more developed societies themselves, were to grow wider and more violent” (Halliday, 1999).

The Effect of Deindustrialization on Education

“To understand urban schools, we must understand the urban setting, which is qualitatively different from suburban and rural settings in its concentration of capital, its governmental organizations, its growth ideology, and its social and spatial relationships” (Bettis, 1994).

The Effect of Deindustrialization on Gender

Kongar (2008) “investigates the impact of deindustrialization’s continuing shift in employment away from manufacturing to services on the US gender wage gap between 1990 and 2001. The study finds that the widening of the gender wage gap in the service sector caused a slowdown in the narrowing of the US gender wage gap. Within the service sector, two occupational elements affected the growing gender wage gap: women’s entry into traditionally male occupations characterized by high wages and high gender wage differentials that resulted in the relative increase in men’s wages compared to women’s wages in these occupations.”

Deindustrialization Upsets the Mental Tenor of the City

“Industrialization has given way to deindustrialization and to dramatic falls in the percentage of the population employed in manufacturing: if this posed problems for Marxists, it also yielded an employment and social pattern very different from that earlier envisaged by liberal theories” (Halliday, 1999).

Bettis (1994), in her discussion on the effects of deindustrialization on urban schools, explains that “ince the mid 1970′s, deindustrialization has played a major role in changing the urban landscape, the types of employment available to central city inhabitants, and the mental tenor of the city (Bluestone and Harrison, 1982; Castells, 1983; Harvey, 1985; Noyelle and Stanback, 1983).

Lustig (1985), brings up the “question about the relationship of large-scale enterpise to community. The question involves on one hand corporations employing a significant fraction of a community’s workforce, and on the other the community in its physical character as location and in its active character as workforce.”

Indiana

Wagner (1991) “As the American economy changes from manufacturing to service industries, millions of workers are suffering the effects of ‘deindustrialization.’ This article explores the impact of a plant closing and subsequent transition to a service based economy for more than 450 predominantly female textile workers. It suggests that many workers will suffer severe economic and social problems even after re-employment, but that these changes as well as the breakdown in community life once rooted in the mills of Ncw England tend to be “hidden” from view.”