Carbon Bonds: Identity and the Politics of Industrial Change

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Abstract

I study how workers’ social networks shape behavioral responses to industrial stability and decline. Such networks can propagate both the benefits of stability and costs of decline, splitting workers within the same industry while expanding the set of individuals attuned to an industry’s fortunes. When a network has extensive exposure to a declining industry, its members should look to reconfigure their social and political ties to gird themselves against future shocks. In an analysis of the coal industry in the early twentieth century United States, I find that immigrants with broad network exposure to local mines were significantly less likely than others to politically assimilate in times of stability. When the industry contracted, these immigrants increasingly sought and acquired U.S. citizenship. These results hold for immigrants both in and outside the industry who belonged to the same network, underscoring the explanatory importance of social ties in moments of economic change.

Author

• Noah Zucker, Columbia University