February 12, 1997
Committee Chair and Members:
I am writing on behalf of John Cross, who has applied for a position in your department.
I have known Professor Cross' work for slightly more than two years. Though I cannot speak to his capacity for teaching I can address his scholarship which is exciting and excellent. We met when I organized the 1995 regular session at the ASA meetings on the informal economy. The papers were uniformly excellent, and have been published since, but John's paper was particularly distinguished. In it he is concerned with quantifying measures to determine how dependent workers are on suppliers and clients. He revisits the question: Are informals exploited? If workers are independent of suppliers and clients they are considered entrepreneurial, if not they are exploited and in either case the prospective policy interventions are determined by whichever is the case. Cross makes an important contribution with respect the processual nature of careers and their changing degrees of independence over time. The notion of career and Cross's call for research on "informal" careers echoes Hughes (1984) and Spillermen's (1977) suggestion that more attention be paid to how careers are made by participants to deviate from trajectories assumed by analysts. Cross' contribution foreshadows some of the payoffs that come from locating work as an aspect of the income earning process and theorizing both as aspects of household decision-making processes. Despite the great distance between Cairo and Tucson, John was very cooperative in getting the volume published.
My next contact with John's work came when I was selected by Stanford University press as an external reviewer for Cross' manuscript on street vending in Mexico City. This book starts with a simple thesis: street vendors are political and economic actors whose political activities adapt to local conditions. He uses this thesis as a jumping off point to assess and revise the status of many important themes in social science and social policy. The book's unique contribution is that it treats political processes directly and in so doing addresses the theoretical problem of aggregation, or how large scale phenomena are built from the incentives, habits and actions of individuals. Cross pursues this theme with the literatures of political science, anthropology and sociology without regard for disciplinary boundaries and with an interest in pointing out similarities and points of articulation between literatures. He begins by contrasting Hart's observation that informality was ignored by scholars of development against Portes and others who argue that conditions for "informals" cannot improve due to relation with "formal" sector.
Cross indicates how both sides under theorize the agency of both the informals and state agents. But he also goes on the theorize the state's contradictory interests in promoting regulation and stability. The interests of the state do not account for the growth of informality, so what does? Evasion, manipulation, cooptative strategies organized and pursued by the "informals" in different ways according to particular historical circumstances.
This analytic strategy, exposing assumptions, investigating and re-theorizing, is pursued throughout the book's examination of collective action, state autonomy, the organization of household street vending business, the impact of international trade agreements on vendors and vending and other themes. If his research is evidence for teaching it indicates he would be an excellent teacher of theory, methods and Latin American societies.
So any reader of the manuscript, now forthcoming from Stanford press, will note Cross' expertise with the theoretical and empirical work of various disciplinary literatures regarding the informal economy and collective action. John is interested in both theoretical and empirical problems and only peripherally in disciplinary divisions and sub-divisions. Second, and as an artifact of the previous point, note that John approaches "macro" problems from "micro" foundations. His work demonstrates that social organization and how people are convinced of the presence or absence of organization, is our concern, not the analysts abstract conceptual apparatus. Third, his work is multi-method, again eroding onerous distinctions between history and contemporary work and between field work and aggregate statistical analysis. Finally, again, you will also note John's proficiency with Latin America and Mexico in particular.
John will bring this well honed social scientific consciousness to his future work as well. In particular he and I are working on a book on the informal economy from the data collected from the web page I co-sponsor with Steve Balkin (Roosevelt University) www.openair.org. This exciting project brings together a variety of interests and policy possibilities which we are barely beginning to consider but which will be founded on the two years of experience with this page.
You can tell from his vitae that he has a good record for external funding and knows those networks. His experience in international settings will provide a wealth of classroom examples as well as cases to cut his own and his colleagues ideas against. He speaks, writes and reads Spanish like a native speaker and his knowledge of Mexico, particularly the southern and urban areas is splendid. While I cannot speak to John's collegiality I can say that he is very pleasant and personable. But perhaps more important is this: any one who has lived and raised children in Mexico City and Cairo and coped well with the problems and possibilities those places have to offer has a flexibility of mind and character that will fit well and build bridges in our occasionally tumultuous academic culture.
In sum I recommend John Cross to you, most highly, and with much hope that he and I will soon share the same continent!!
Best wishes,
Alfonso Morales
Assistant Professor
Sociology
Social Sciences 423
University of Arizona
Tucson, AZ 85721
520.621.9209 vox
520.621.9875 fax
morales@u.arizona.edu
Return to my CV
Return to my home page