I have created this public directory of material related to my first book, The Right to Manage: Industrial Relations Policies of American Business in the 1940s (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982), in order to contain files I referred to in "My Apprenticeship," my contribution to the symposium on it edited by Chad Pearson in Labor History 53:1 (March 2012), pp. 121-142. The book itself is freely available at http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=1zxnXWSREyoC – scanned by Google from a copy I sent them that I had given to my aunts, the late Misses Kay and Rona Rouse, who had helped finance my studies at Cornell, which is why it contains the otherwise curious note in my hand “With all love + thanks – Howell,” dated October 1982, i.e. when the book was published and I got my ten precious free copies for family and friends. Google Scholar also provides links to works citing it – not sure how accurate or comprehensive they are as compared with the Web of Knowledge version, but they’re free and convenient. It’s quite interesting to see how there was the initial flow of post-publication citations in the late 1980s/ early 1990s, then a hiatus after ten years (a pity – I was trying to persuade Wisconsin or somebody to do a paperback version at the time, with a complete lack of success), followed by a pickup and then a fairly steady stream of citations ever since.
The files are:
(A) The Bibliography -- http://www.dur.ac.uk/h.j.harris/TRTM/TRTM-Biblio.docx or https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B0Rq04JLJpZMazNadDgyaFFWc1U/edit?usp=sharing
This needs further editing, but it’s already quite useful as it stands – the book had endnotes and no bibliography, so this makes it more user-friendly for anybody interested in what it rested on.
(B) The Dissertation Proposal – “Responsible Unionism and the Road to Taft-Hartley: Change and Continuity in Total War and Reconversion, 1943-1947,” http://www.dur.ac.uk/h.j.harris/TRTM/Responsible_Unionism.pdf or https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B0Rq04JLJpZMb1dXc0Y5TmJFbFE/edit?usp=sharing
This was written in the second year of my graduate studies at Nuffield College, Oxford, in 1973-1974; probably in the spring of 1974, when I needed to persuade my supervisor, Roderick Martin, the Sub-Faculty of Sociology, and my college that I actually had a subject worth pursuing, and some ideas about how to do it. When I dug it out, I found that there were about ten earlier drafts – evidently my method of working out what I thought was to keep trying to write it down, which is not a bad idea.
[N.B. Because of my lack of expertise with using a photocopier as a scanner, I seem to have produced an upside-down file, but you can easily get it right way up by rotating the view in Adobe or whatever PDF reader you use.]
(C) The Worst Paper I Ever Wrote – “The Right to Manage: Business Programs and Policies in Industrial Relations, Political Action, and Public Relations in the Mid-1940s,” http://www.dur.ac.uk/h.j.harris/TRTM/The_Right_to_Manage.pdf or https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B0Rq04JLJpZMQlJvelNfckl3bVU/edit?usp=sharing
This was written for the late Maurice F. Neufeld’s ILR 702 course on labor history at the New York State School of Industrial and Labor Relations, Cornell University, where I was a visiting Fulbright Scholar in 1974-1975. When I went to Ithaca I didn’t really know what I wanted to do, and to keep my options open for shifting from doing an Oxford D.Phil. to a Cornell Ph.D. I decided to register for a Masters course. I enjoyed the first few weeks of ILR 702 and made a few friends, but it was pretty low-level stuff (as suited a clientele of students with little background in historical studies, most of whom were taking an ILR Masters as a pre-professional qualification). So I soon decided that my best move would be to focus on my own research and clear off to Detroit for a few weeks to work in what is now the Reuther Library at Wayne State and other places in the metro area. When I came back to Cornell I decided I might as well get something out of ILR 702 (still keeping my options open), so I dashed off this paper. In return, Maurice gave me a B- and excoriated my presentation standards and, in particular, “the obstacle of [my] prose style”: “Your ideas and your ability to develop them are first-rate. However, you conceal them under such turgid and undisciplined prose that I had to read every sentence several times in order to garner the full substance of your thought. Since your prose style is unfair to the reader, I picket you.” The main PDF at 200 dpi does not bring out Maurice’s caustic marginal comments, written in turquoise ink, but a higher quality version of his final remarks does them full justice, http://www.dur.ac.uk/h.j.harris/TRTM/Neufeld.pdf or https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B0Rq04JLJpZMWEp6dVFpNjZYTDQ/edit?usp=sharing.
(D) The Synopsis of the Thesis Itself – “Getting Everybody Back on the Same Team: An Interpretation of the Industrial Relations Policies of American Business in the 1940s” (written August 1976, revised June 1977), http://www.dur.ac.uk/h.j.harris/TRTM/Getting_Everybody_Back_On_the_Same_Team.pdf or https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B0Rq04JLJpZMOVY0ZWZDRlVScGM/edit?usp=sharing
This is better than my Oxford or Cornell drafts, and not just because I had access to an IBM Golfball typewriter and was no longer relying on my trusty Olivetti Lettera 32. When I got back from Ithaca in September 1975 I took a job as a bottom-of-the-scale History lecturer in a small department at an ancient, tiny, and very undistinguished liberal arts college. To hold this job and have some prospects of moving to anywhere better, I needed to complete my Oxford D.Phil., for which I returned from the United States with a stack of research notes and lots of ideas, but nothing written. In the summer of 1976 I organized my research notes, and began to firm up my ideas. From then on I managed to fill in the gaps in my secondary reading by making heavy use of interlibrary loan services, and by the summer of 1977 I was in a position to give my very patient supervisor a final version of a dissertation synopsis which guided me as I wrote up the chapters between then and the end of 1978. Final revisions and re-typing took until Easter 1979, when I submitted.
(E) An Extended Version of the Biographical Section of My Essay in the Labor History Symposium – “The Path I Trod,” http://www.dur.ac.uk/h.j.harris/TRTM/TRTM-The_Path_I_Trod.doc or https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B0Rq04JLJpZMTHlPV3J1NW9JUGM/edit?usp=sharing -- an edited version of this is to be published in the Pannon Management Review, Summer 2013.
The thesis itself is now freely available online -- "Getting Everybody Back on the Same Team: An Interpretation of the Industrial Relations Policies of American Business in the 1940s," Oxford University D. Phil., 1979: http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:5c5ef990-4ff7-44e4-b549-baf43d478266 for the metadata, http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid%3A5c5ef990-4ff7-44e4-b549-baf43d478266/datastreams/ATTACHMENT1 for the PDF itself. The PDF is good enough to enable one to see the defects of my typing (on an Olivetti Lettera 32), though not all of the TippEx is clearly visible. I had to do it myself, in all the spare time I could find from my teaching job, because the only experienced typists in the county of Dyfed capable of doing a dissertation with hundreds of footnotes all seemed to be busy, because I had not booked anybody early enough. The definition of frustration = getting to the bottom of a page at about one in the morning and realizing that the footnote isn't all going to fit on, and you are going to have to start again.
[to be extended, maybe…]