Sampling, Crowd-Sourcing & Reliability - Roscigno & Hodson 2004

[jamesallenevans]

Please pose a question here about: Roscigno, Vincent J. and Randy Hodson. 2004. “The Organizational and Social Foundations of Worker Resistance.” American Sociological Review 69(1): 14-39.

[lkcao]

Is there any other forms of combination other than those mentioned in table 5? The several categories of table 5 does not enumerate all the logical possibilities. Should we take this as a sampling bias, or should we take it as a fact that the unmentioned possibilities rarely exist in reality?

[di-Tong]

Roscigno & Hodson (2004) demonstrate a very interesting design (both in terms of the way ethnographic records are used and the combination of qualitative and quantitative elements) that skillfully addresses the limitation of previous studies. Yet the QCA method seems to operate on a logic totally contrary to the 'social theory mining' logic we discussed in the last class: QCA is constrained to a limited number of independent variables that are chosen based on hypothetical theoretical importance. What would a computational design for the same research question look like? Besides, as the authors have mentioned, ethnographic records data have huge limitation in generalizability. What are the other texts sources we could utilize to examine the organizational and social foundations of worker resistance? In addition, the way the key variables were measured seems a bit vague to me, especially for 'bureaucracy'. I wonder how could we develop a clear and reliable measurement for abstract concepts.

[ckoerner648]

The Qualitative Comparative Analysis that the authors deploy allows them to systematically examine more than 80 ethnographies–a method that allows them what “neither a large organizational survey nor a single ethnography can address alone” (Roscigno and Hodson p. 33). However, the authors do not make full use of the richness of the ethnographies. For variables in their model, such as “Workplace Conflict”, “Managerial Abuse”, and “Union Presence” they bring outside categories to the text and reduce variance on each dimension to an ordinal scale.

[toecn]

I see how the approach Roscigno & Hodson (2004) deploy is creative and resourceful, and I appreciate the methodological questions it poses. However, I remain doubtful about the method’s advantages. Why would we want to simplify an ethnography into a simple set of codes? Ethnographies are rich in their depth and used together they do not seem to provide a representative account. Ethnographic researchers select the cases for a plethora of reasons that would bias a sample, or they might be motivated for similar theoretical reasons that would also bias the sample. Is this a better approach than others for the question at hand? Wouldn’t a well carried representative survey serve the purpose better?

[Lizfeng]

In the paper, the author demonstrates that the combination of conflict and union presence culminates in strike action. They attribute this to a greater labor union and strike legitimacy. I noticed that the ethnography that looks into are quite different in years, from 1950s to 1990s. I am wondering whether the time will influence their inferential result?

[yaoxishi]

The Qualitative Comparative Analysis approach demonstrated in the article is very interesting, while I am wondering that how the authors define and measure the variables in this research and how could we develop a clear and reliable measurement for abstract concepts.