This paper illustrates some linguistic and statistical tools that can be profitably used by historians and social historians in the study of events (such as strikes, demonstrations and other types of collective conflict). More specifically, the paper shows that “semantic grammars” provide rigorous tools for the collection of rich event narratives. Semantic grammars structure information around the “canonical form” of the language: noun phrase/verb phrase, or subject, action, object and their modifiers (e.g. time, space). The fact that semantic grammars can be easily implemented in a computer environment using relational database systems (RDBMS) makes feasible the practical application of such powerful coding schemes. The data that computer-based semantic grammars make available are richer, more flexible and more reliable than those delivered by more traditional content analysis methods. They are also very well suited for the application of new tools of data analysis such as network models. Both semantic grammars and network models are fundamentally concerned with actors and their actions, with agents and agency. As such, these linguistic and statistical tools should draw sociology closer to history, traditionally much more concerned with issues of agency. I illustrate the power of both the linguistic and statistical tools using data that I collected from some 15,000 newspaper articles on the 1919–1922 period of Italian history, a period characterized by widespread working-class mobilization (1919–1920, the “red years”) and fascist countermobilization (1921-1922, the “black years”).

CLEARLY AN OUTLIER: 1969

The year 1969 is clearly an outlier. The plots reported in Chapter 1 of strike indicators (Figures 1.3, 1.4, and 1.5) and strike shapes (Figure 1.6) singled out that data point as an anomaly. The analyses of the regression residuals throughout this book have provided additional support. What caused the surge in strike activity in 1969? We have seen that the timing of the two major outbursts of industrial conflict in postwar Italy (1959–63, 1969–72) coincided with the timing of both the signing of industrywide collective agreements (1959, 1962, 1963, 1969, 1972) and favorable labor-market conditions (the nearly full levels of employment of the late 1950s and 1960s) (Halevi, 1972, p. 81; see also Bordogna and Provasi, 1979). In terms of my stated goal of fitting together all the pieces of the puzzle, following the clues provided by the available theories, this explanation could suffice. I could call off my investigative work.

But the theory of statistical outliers teaches us that there may be important lessons to be learned from them (Franzosi, 1994). In cross-sectional analyses, we typically throw out outliers, physically removing them from the sample. Because that is more difficult to do with time-series data, we are more likely to take a different route: ignore outliers, or deal with them via dummy variables.

WHY STRIKES? WHY ITALY?

It has been twenty years since Shorter and Tilly's Strikes in France: 1830–1968 and Pizzorno's Lotte operaie e sindacato in Italia: 1968–1972 were published – two books unsurpassed in the strike literature, even as the levels of industrial conflict reached during the turbulent 1960s remain unsurpassed, and not only in France and Italy. The 1960s saw a great resurgence of conflict across a range of industrial nations, and with that renewed conflict came a revival of scholarly interest, as researchers began trying to make sense of what had happened. Just as eventful as the 1960s had been on the stage of historical reality, the 1970s saw the development of new theoretical approaches to the study of strikes.

HOW THE LABOR-MARKET ARGUMENT RUNS

Labor-market theories of strikes claim that union behavior and the propensity to strike are heavily dependent on the state of the labor market. As early as the beginning of the twentieth century, in two seminal articles, Rist (1907, 1912) argued that there exists a strong relationship between the business cycle and strike activity, but that this relationship is mainly indirect, mediated by the state of the labor market. According to Rist (1912, pp. 748–9), “the rise or fall of strikes is related to the fluctuations of unemployment, because it is through the rise or fall of unemployment that industrial hardship or prosperity is felt by the workers.”

UNANSWERED QUESTIONS

In Chapters 2 and 3 we saw that economic models of strikes can explain the nonperiodic, medium-term fluctuations in strike activity. In Italy, however, strike activity also shows distinct periodic, two- to three-year cycles. Furthermore, the cycles in numbers of strikes and strikers peak at different times: the cycle in the number of strikers peaks approximately one year earlier than the cycle in the number of strikes.

The evidence confirming the existence of a three-year periodic cycle has been accumulating over the preceding three chapters. The exploratory data analyses summarized in Chapter 1 revealed the basic pattern (Franzosi, 1980). The empirical testing of the Ashenfelter and Johnson model in Chapter 2 showed the existence of a three-year lag structure in real wages, thus pointing to a relationship between a three-year strike cycle and a three-year wage cycle. Traces of this pattern remained unexplained in the residuals obtained from the econometric estimates of the Ashenfelter and Johnson model.

UNEXPECTED FINDINGS, ONE MORE TIME: CLASS CONFLICT AS THE INDEPENDENTVARIABLE

Just when we thought that we had it all wrapped up, with a pat solution for the temporal dynamics of Italian strikes in the postwar period, the reversal of the causal reading at the end of Chapter 8 (strikes as the cause, rather than the effect, of economic, organizational, institutional, and political factors) has brought in a new twist.

DID I GO WRONG?

Studies of the economic determinants of strikes (i.e., their relationships to the level of general economic activity) have not been based exclusively on unemployment. Actually, given the novelty of labor-force surveys in most industrialized countries, it was only in the postwar period that unemployment became the most commonly used cyclical indicator in empirical investigations of strikes. Various other economic series have been used as proxies for the business cycle: price and wage indices, the value of imported raw materials, industrial production, composite cyclical indicators, and GNP.

The empirical evidence put forward in this literature strongly supports the hypothesis of a positive relationship between strike activity and the business cycle, however measured, with one major qualification: The number of strikes is the factor that is most sensitive to business-cycle fluctuations. The findings reported in Chapter 2 confirm that strike frequency in Italy was related to the movements of real wages and unemployment. These findings run counter to those reported by David Snyder (1975) in one of the few econometric analyses of Italian strike data. According to Snyder, there is no evidence in favor of an economic model of strikes for the Italian case.

In order to address this discrepancy between Snyder's findings and my findings, in this chapter I will take up at greater length the question of economic determinants of strikes.

SWITCHING SIDES: THE VIEW FROM ABOVE

Mobilization of a group is likely to lead to countermobilizations by other groups. In the case of industrial conflict both political and economic elites may respond. And if the telltale signs of the magnitude of a mobilization process are the speed and extent of the elites' responses, then the 1968–72 strike wave was a momentous process. Political elites reacted quickly, in some cases repressing but mostly facilitating those official, large-scale organizations (i.e., unions) that could control conflict. In the case of industrial conflict, political elites could also remain aloof from the movement, letting social classes deal with their problems on their own. Prime Minister Giolitti adopted such a hands-off strategy during the 1919-20 “red years” (biennio rosso).

Lo duca e io per quel cammino ascoso

intrammo a ritornar nel chiaro mondo;

e sanza cura d'alcun riposo,

salimmo su, el primo e io secondo,

tanto ch'i vidi de le cose belle

che porta 'l ciel, per un pertugio tondo.

E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle.

This book took four years to write and ten to rewrite (in an ideal sense, anyway, because the actual rewriting took place between April 1992 and September 1993, with further spells of writing between April and December 1994). It started as a dissertation project in the Department of Sociology (back then, Social Relations) at The Johns Hopkins University in 1978. carried out the empirical work and the final writing of the dissertation at the Centro Studi Confindustria in Rome, during the two years I spent there as a researcher, from September 1979 to August 1981. I began the rewriting during the 1981–82 academic year at the Center for Research on Social Organizations at the University of Michigan and continued it at the University of Wisconsin.

Several people back then thought the dissertation to be of sufficient quality to be publishable as a book (it was accepted as such in 1986 by another press). Over the years they encouraged me, pushed me, threatened me to “get it out.” Why, then, has it taken me ten years to do so? The answer to this question is bound up with both professional and personal strands of my life. In 1982, I believed that the dissertation was a good piece of statistical analysis. After all, I had taken great care in digging out long forgotten and buried data, in teasing out the statistical details of the arguments, in always being true to the data and what they had to tell me.

LEFT TO EXPLAIN: THE 1975–78 STRIKE SHAPES

Little by little, chapter by chapter, I have used the available theories about strikes to investigate the meaning of the data presented in Chapter 1 (the pieces of the puzzle). I have fitted almost the entire puzzle. I am left with only one of the original pieces (the 1975–78 strike shapes) and one theory: political exchange. But in fact, do we not already have an explanation for the 1975–78 strike shapes? Did we not see, in Chapter 5, that the 1975 wage escalator agreement between labor and capital could account for the lower frequency,

SHIFTING GEARS

The findings in Chapters 2 and 3 have shown that economic models go a long way toward explaining Italian strikes. Yet the findings have also revealed the limits of this type of model for the Italian case. In particular, economic models do not explain why the statistical relationships to economic factors should be stronger for strike frequency than for other strike components, nor can they identify the noneconomic determinants that lie behind strike size, duration, and volume. The economic literature has very little to say on these points (Skeels, 1971). The economic strike literature has even less to say about why, under unfavorable labor-market conditions, the Italian working class has been less militant than would seem warranted by economic factors alone (paradox of the génie d'un peuple).