Dan Clawson, who served as RC44’s Vice President from 2006 to 2010, died suddenly on May 7, 2019 of a heart attack. He was a prolific labor sociologist, and a brilliant, tireless organizer with an unwavering commitment to social justice. He came of age in the late 1960s and was indelibly marked by the New Left. Dedication to participatory democracy, feminism, and progressive politics permeated his scholarship, his activism, as well as his personal conduct over the years. He had truly extraordinary leadership abilities, and yet was utterly unpretentious – a rare soul who never craved personal recognition. Dan had a habit of creating new organizations, even if he was reluctant to take credit for doing so. He was a founding member of the American Sociological Association’s section on Labor and Labor Movements, which he went on to chair in 2004-05. Earlier, he had helped to create Scholars, Artists and Writers for Social Justice, a group whose mission was to strengthen ties between intellectuals and the labor movement; he served as its national chair in 1998-99. He also was a founder of the Public Higher Education Network of Massachusetts and of a progressive caucus in the Massachusetts teachers’ union. Dan had wide-ranging intellectual interests and published a rich body of rigorous, first-class scholarship. The research questions he chose to pursue were not narrow ones of interest only to specialists; instead he consistently aimed to illuminate critical political and social issues. He is best known for his extensive research on labor, especially his 1980 book Bureaucracy and the Labor Process and his 2003 The Next Upsurge. But there was much more. He was an early analyst of what we now call “money in politics,” coauthoring Money Talks (1992), a study of corporate Political Action Committees, and Dollars and Votes (1998). More recently he wrote about the transformation of higher education, especially the growth of contingent faculty, including a 2011 coauthored book, The Future of Higher Education. He also contributed to scholarship on work-family issues, coauthoring a pathbreaking book, Unequal Time (2014), one of the few studies in this field that seriously engages class inequality (as well as gender) and the role of labor unions. He published many articles on all these topics as well, in both academic journals and more popular outlets. Dan did more than his share of editorial work, most notably serving as editor of Contemporary Sociology from 1995-97, as co-editor of the Rose book series from 2000-05, and editing or co-editing three books. Dan spent his entire academic career at one institution, to the great good fortune of his colleagues and students at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. There he was not only a pillar of the sociology department but also a stalwart supporter of the campus’ vibrant Labor Center, which he helped rescue more than once from the ever-threatening administrative ax. The Center’s website features a brief remembrance saying that when the next crisis comes, they’ll start by asking “WWDD: What would Dan do?” He was a beloved activist in and leader of the Massachusetts Society of Professors, the union that […]
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