William Form
Bill Form, as he was widely known, was born William Humbert Formicola in Rochester, New York, on June 2nd, 1917, the fifth child of Antonio Formicola and Salvatrice Cornetti. Antonio was a cabinet maker who emigrated from the village of Pignataro Maggiore (25 miles north of Naples, Italy) to Rochester in 1897. Salvatrice, a Sicilian, came to Rochester on her own in 1903 after her father was refused admittance at Ellis Island. They met through their shared Italian Protestant (Waldensian) faith and the associated religious community in Rochester, after marrying they made their home in a predominantly Irish Catholic neighborhood. The family assimilated itself into local life, and to his subsequent regret, the young William Formicola forgot Italian; much later, he had to re-learn the language in advance of a mid-career sabbatical spent in Milan.
In the fall of 1934 he enrolled at the University of Rochester. The family's assimilation in American ways was formalized around August 1935, when Antonio changed their surname from Formicola to Form. William Form, as he was now known, earned the B.A. in sociology in 1938 and the M.A. in 1939. Intellectual curiosity drove him toward a career in the academy, but his interests were shaped by his upbringing in a working-class setting, and most specifically, by the deep involvement of his oldest brother, George Form, in labor organization. In 1939 William was accepted into a newly-created graduate program in sociology at the University of Maryland. He gained the Ph.D. in 1944 for a dissertation entitled "The Sociology of a White-Collar Suburb: Greenbelt, Maryland," under the direction of C. Wright Mills.
Bill Form married Millie (Mildred Cotton) in Rochester in March 1942. They had two children. He taught at Hood College in Frederick, Maryland, American University in Washington, and the University of Maryland while completing the doctorate, and then took a position as an assistant professor at Stephens College, a women's junior college in Columbia, Missouri, during the academic year 1944-1945. Form found the environment stifling and the following year took a position as an associate professor at Kent State University in Ohio. At this point he began working on analyses of organizational politics in industry that eventually led to the publication of an influential research-oriented textbook, Industrial Sociology (1951; 2nd. ed. 1964), co-authored with Delbert C. Miller, who was briefly at Kent State at that same time.
While teaching a course at Michigan State College (soon to become Michigan State University) in the summer of 1947, Form was invited to stay. He accepted the offer, the promise of the college's growing commitment to sociological research outweighing the obligation to give up tenure and re-enter the track once again as an assistant professor. In any event, Industrial Sociology had a major impact on the field, and in 1953 Form was promoted again to associate professor. In 1954 he published an influential concise study of the politics of land-use, analyzing zoning decisions over time ("The Place of Social Structure in the Determination of Land Use," Social Forces 32: 317-323). A study of the sociological consequences of a tornado that struck Beecher, a northern suburb of Flint, on June 8, 1953, led eventually to the co-authorship with Sigmund Nosow of Community in Disaster (1958). During the academic year 1954-1955, he spent his first sabbatical engaged in a comparitive study of community power in El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, and he wrote another sociological study of the consequences of a disaster, when the Rio Grande flooded in the fall of 1954.
Again as co-author with Miller, Form published Industry, Labor, and Community (1960), and in collaboration with William V. D'Antonio he published Influentials in Two Border Cities (1965). A Fulbright Award enabled Form to spend his second sabbatical (the academic year 1961-1962) doing research on autoworkers at the FIAT plant in Turin, Italy. Later, he examined workers at an Oldsmobile plant in Lansing, Michigan, at the Industrias Kaiser Argentina plant in Cordoba, Argentina, and at the Premier Auto Limited plant in Mombai (then Bombay), India. Form published his findings in articles and eventually in his monograph Blue-Collar Stratification: Autoworkers in Four Countries (1976). In this study, Form found himself at loggerheads with Marxists and other sociological theorists. He argued that working-class solidarity did not increase with industrialization, but rather that the working classes became increasingly heterogeneous and stratified, and he found extensive evidence of job satisfaction, rather than alienation.
Having joined the American Sociological Association (ASA) in 1946, Form began a quarter-century of service in the organization in 1964, initially on committees and then on its council. From 1965 to 1968 he chaired the sociology department at Michigan State. Form divorced in 1969 and married the sociologist Joan Huber in 1971. Immediately thereafter they accepted positions at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, Form taking a joint appointment in sociology and the Institute of Labor and Industrial Relations. While Form was completing his monograph on automobile workers, he and Huber co-authored Income and Ideology (1973). That same year, 1973, Form became secretary of the ASA, serving in that capacity to 1979, and from 1981 to 1982 he edited the Association's journal, the American Sociological Review (ASR). In January 1984 Form and Huber left Illinois to take positions at the Ohio State University, Huber as Dean of the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, and Form in sociology.
Form's analyses of stratification in the work force led to considerable controversy in the field. In support of his views he published two further scholarly monographs, Divided We Stand: Working-Class Stratification in America (1985), and Segmented Labor, Fractured Politics: Labor Politics in American Life (1995), as well as a number of related articles in academic journals. In 1986 he began a four-year appointment as editor of the ASR. This service culminated in further academic sparring with Marxist sociologists, over the journal's direction and content.
Form retired from Ohio State in 1996. As Professor Emeritus he published two autobiographical monographs: On the Shoulders of Immigrants: A Family Portrait (1999) and Work and Academic Politics: A Journeyman's Story (2001). The latter's bibliography includes a comprehensive listing of Form's own books and articles.
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