Linking Macro and Micro Levels: Bringing the Workers Back into the Sociology of Work

Simpson describes the evolution of industrial sociology from a field devoted to the study of work groups within organizations in the 1930s-1950s to one focused on a diverse set of macrostructural forces in the 1970s-1980s. Accompanying this transformation are a shift away from a view of workers as actors and less attention being paid to the ways that structures affect workers. Nevertheless recent studies of the labor process labor markets and earnings determination have increasingly focused on workers actions and on links between macro and micro levels. (authors)