Recent research on international interdependence has led to increasingly sophisticated conceptualizations of the phenomenon. However, it has not been very successful in measuring interdependence, nor in testing theories about it. Although the theoretical message of most interdependence research is that interdependence is multinational or systemic, empirical operationalization has tended to concentrate on looking for interdependence (or integration, or community) as a relationship between a pair of nation states, rather than as an international pattern of behavior among an entire set of countries. Complicating these empirical analyses is their lack of operationally defined end states. In general, the approach has been to look for changes or differences in behavior, rather than for absolute levels of interdependence or integration. This is, at best, only an indirect test of the validity of a theory, regardless of how well or how badly it enables one to examine and compare one set of nations with another or the same set over time.

Professor Robert Cox's “Labor and hegemony” in the Summer 1977 issue of International Organization includes one of the most sophisticated versions of the corporate unionist or “revisionist” description and explanation of American labor's foreign policy that has appeared to date. Nevertheless, it is inaccurate both as description and explanation, and like other attempts to use the corporate unionist approach, it is a misleading paradigm impeding research into the nature of labor's transnational involvements.

When I wrote “Labor and hegemony,” I anticipated two kinds of critical reaction: one on the ground that the method and approach was at variance with mainstream political science; the other in defense of two institutional establishments whose ideological foundations were challenged in the article— those of the ILO and the AFL-CIO. Both these organizational establishments place great stock in the idea of tripartism, representing it as a form of pluralism or a bargaining relationship of independent actors—unions, employers, and government. In “Labor and hegemony,” I argued that this appearance of independence has to be understood as the ideological expression of a particular structure of social power, a particular form of hegemony that is found in advanced capitalist societies with the emergence of a corporative form of state. This blocco storico is the proper object of study, and since it has international as well as national dimensions its study can be a fruitful approach to international affairs and international organization.