BAKKE, E. WIGHT

Edward Wight Bakke (November 18, 1903–November 22, 1971) was a sociologist and professor of economics at Yale University. Bakke is best known for his investigations of long-term unemployment in the Great Depression, published in the two-volume 1940 study The Unemployed Worker and Citizens without Work. He played an important role in shaping the fields of industrial relations, human resource management, and labor economics as they were emerging in the 1930s through the post World War II decades. As director of Yale's Labor and Management Center, Bakke strove to bring an empirically grounded, "real world" perspective to union-management relations and labor market policy. Bakke held key advisory positions on the New Deal Social Security Board, the National War Labor Board, and in the Department of Labor, among other government appointments. Amidst this distinguished record, Bakke's study of Depression-era unemployment remains his most influential and far-reaching work.

Conducted while he was director of Unemployment Studies at Yale's interdisciplinary Institute for Human Relations, Bakke's eight-year study explored the social psychological, cultural, and economic impact of joblessness on unemployed men in New Haven, Connecticut. The study combined methods of survey research, case study, ethnographic observation, and personal interview, through which Bakke tracked how workers who fully embraced broader cultural values of work and self-reliance coped with "the task of making a living without a job." While capturing their frustration, loss of dignity, fear, and, eventually, despair as the Depression lingered on, Bakke also emphasized the resourcefulness with which workers and their families made "adjustments" to long-term joblessness. Especially striking to contemporary readers was the degree to which traditionally male providers would exhaust every possible alternative—turning to savings, credit, cutting back on necessities, and finally to the earnings of their wives and children—before accepting public assistance, or "the dole." While frequently invoked to shatter the stereotyped imagery of the unemployed "welfare chiseller," for Bakke this pattern was also a sign of something more troubling: the unemployed worker's tendency to blame himself for a situation over which he had little control.

In its time and for future generations, Bakke's study stood as a powerful statement of the importance of stable, adequately-paying work opportunities for individual well-being, as well as broader social well-being. For Bakke himself, it was also a statement of the need for a strong and lasting public sector commitment to making those opportunities available and protecting workers' rights to achieve them.

See Also:SOCIAL SCIENCE; UNEMPLOYMENT, LEVELS OF.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bakke, E. Wight. The Unemployed Worker: A Study of theTask of Making a Living without a Job. 1940.

Bakke, E. Wight. Citizens without Work: A Study of the Effects of Unemployment upon the Workers' Social Relations and Practices. 1940.

Alice O'Connor