This book is significant because of its powerful story, innovative methodology, and the challenges and elaborations it offers to contemporary research on industrial restructuring.
The author brings to life through a well-written narrative and the skilful use of oral history. Fundamentally, Cowie reinforces the need for labour historians and industrial relations scholars to consider both the spatial and temporal dimensions of work.
Journal of Industrial Relations
The strength of Capital Moves is its narrative, which demonstrates, better than any schematic argument or abstract model could, the persistent logic behind RCA's location decisions.... Its argument is one from which labor can take hope, for it suggests that the strategy of capital relocation is, ultimately, self-undermining.
New Labor Forum - Kimberly Phillips-Fein
This is a thought-provoking and innovative piece of scholarship that deserves a wide audience.
After reading Cowie's thorough and even-handed treatment of highly complex issues, one is left with neither outright despair no giddy optimism.... His intention is to make people aware of the historical forces that have shaped our lives, and how our lives in turn are embedded to these forces.
Labor historian Jefferson Cowie's book, Capital Moves , makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the way 'capital mobility' is enacted on the ground. This important work is a social history in the 'subaltern' tradition.
The Professional Geographer
A compelling reinterpretation of postwar American history.
American Historical Review
Capital Moves —based impressively on research about four sites and in two languages—exemplifies the salutary effect of the revival of geography on the social sciences. Cowie's core argument—that in spite of the claimed novelty of globalization, spatial factors long have been critical to the stability of capitalist production—deserves close attention.
"Capital Moves: RCA's Seventy-Year Quest for Cheap Labor is not the old familiar tale of deindustrialization as it exists in the popular imagination.... Cowie insists upon resurrecting the agency of local communities and upon portraying how worker actions affected decisions taken by management, perhaps more than the other way around. Captial Moves is an historically and geographically comparative study of the impact of capital migration on working-class communities."
Latin American Research Review
"Much has been written to document and lament the loss of American jobs to cheap labor abroad. Cowie's study of RCA, though, shows that U.S. companies have a long history of seeking out inexpensive labor."
"Cowie presents a bold thesis challenging the orthodoxy of globalization theorists by detailing the history of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) in four different locations and times.... Capital Moves is an essential volume for all those seeking to understand labor in the global economy—present and past."
"Cowie has provided an extended, detailed example.... His book is a useful step toward a new interpretation of the history of mass production industry in the post-World War Two years."
Industrial and Labor Relations Review
"This is a very refreshing read, successfully melding the experiences of workers and bosses with wider structural forces. The research is meticulous... and scholars will benefit from the many archival sources Cowie has trawled to excellent effect. This book deserves to be read for many reasons, not least of which is that it really does put flesh on the often rather bare bones of the debates around the local effects of capitalist globalization."
"This book is a major contribution both to labor and community studies. Examining four communities across seven decades, Cowie reveals larger patterns that would be lost in a cross-sectional study of one community.... Jefferson Cowie gives historians a model for tracing the histories of these communities as well as for following companies' stories after they depart."
Michigan Historical Review
"Much has been written to document and lament the loss of American jobs to cheap labor abroad. Cowie's study of RCA, though, shows that U.S. companies have a long history of seeking out inexpensive labor."
"Jefferson Cowie's important book mobilizes labor historysocial history, and gender analysis to challenge conventional conceptions of globalization and transnational capital migration. He traces RCA's factory relocations from the 1930s to the present, both within the United States and into Mexico, exposing the long-standing dynamic of industrial relocation as a response to working-class struggles, and showing how relocation in turn leads inexorably to labor and community resistance in each new locality. This insightful book deserves attention from anyone interested in cross-border organizing."
"Jefferson Cowie takes us on a remarkable tour of four communities transformed by industrial capitalism. This powerful, original book recasts our understanding of capitalism, labor, gender, and geography. It is a sobering reflection on the possibilities and limits of community in an era of transregional and transnational economic power. Capital Moves is must reading for those who want to understand the forces that have reshaped the American and global economies over the last half century."
"Capital Moves is a stunningly important work of historical imagination and rediscovery which links the present with the past in a fashion that is exciting and suggestive. Jefferson Cowie has written no 'contribution to the literature,' but instead has reconfigured a huge slice of recent business and labor history. His is one of the most provocative and useful books I have read in many years."
"A conceptually rich and deeply humane book. Jefferson Cowie narrates how industrial workers in two nations and four different communities coped with one company's relentless search for cheap and pliable labor. He is a rare historian who illuminates the future by explaining a vital part of the past."
"Cowie presents a bold thesis challenging the orthodoxy of globalization theorists by detailing the history of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) in four different locations and times. . . Capital Moves is an essential volume for all those seeking to understand labor in the global economy—present and past."—David Palmer, Enterprise and Society, March 2001
Cowie (industrial and labor relations, Cornell Univ.) highlights the power of financial capital in his examination of four RCA factory sites: Camden, NJ; Bloomington, IN; Memphis, TN; and Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. RCA moved production from one site to the next in search of cheap, compliant, and usually female labor; as workers developed a sense of entitlement to their jobs and demanded better conditions, the company saw them as less desirable and looked for less-sophisticated substitute workers. Cowie outlines the history of labor relations at each site along with the surrounding political conditions. He also takes a wider look at labor organization and its ties to politics, noting that while capital became international, labor organization remained local, giving workers less power. In describing one company in depth, Cowie provides valuable insight into the increasingly global work force. Recommended for academic and larger public libraries.--A.J. Sobczak, Covina, CA
