Handbook The Global History of Work by Karin Hofmeester Marcel van der Linden

Author:Karin Hofmeester, Marcel van der Linden
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Published: 2018-02-28T16:00:00+00:00

Historiography

We have already discussed a number of studies on attitudes to work, but a systematic, albeit non-exhaustive survey is useful as a “pre-history” of the work by Lis and Soly. Their work, although admittedly only about Europe, offers a research agenda that is valuable to a global approach too. Influential studies on the concept of work in European history can be traced to Herbert Applebaum’s impressively pioneering work The Concept of Work, which described and analysed trends and tendencies from antiquity to the industrial age.1264 In an earlier study, the same author had already addressed the subject of work from an anthropological perspective. The volume he edited entitled Work in Non-Market and Transitional Societies comprises collected essays on work organization among hunters and gatherers in pastoralist societies, among cultivators and gardeners in villages, and in cultures and societies where non-market and market-oriented work values underwent change and adaptation. The studies discuss mostly contemporary non-European cases. In his categorizations of work in non-market societies Applebaum defines work as being embedded in the total cultural fabric, with strong communal aspects that involve mutuality and reciprocal exchange. Work is intended mostly for subsistence, is not very specialized, and is task-oriented rather than time-oriented.1265 While Applebaum treated Europe and many non-European regions and communities separately, other historians have focused on both.

The volume edited by Michel Cartier, Le travail et ses représentations, follows in the tradition of Maurice Godelier1266 and has a strong anthropological and linguistic focus. The case studies there discuss extra-European communities in Oceania, Africa, and South America from the eighteenth century to the present, and the book includes an essay by the editor himself on work in ancient China.1267 Of particular interest in this collection are the contemporary articles on rituals and work, but also the discourse analysis of eighteenth-century texts from Madagascar that focus on the various forms of labour relations, including reciprocal, tributary, and commodified labour relations.1268 Similarly based on texts, but mainly literary ones, is the work of Keith Thomas, who in The Oxford Book of Work provides a thematically structured anthology of mainly European and especially British poetry and literature on work. In his interesting introduction Thomas describes how for a long time work was not a popular theme in poetry and literature, and how that fact relates to attitudes to work among the writing elite.1269

More recently Jürgen Kocka and Manfred Bierwisch have separately edited collected volumes of articles on the history of work.1270 Both share a concern about contemporary changes in work, the decrease in the extent of wage labour and long-term commitment on the part of employers. They both link to periods when dependent wage labour was not the norm, and they look to extra-European regions too for patterns of work organization that diverged from the West European case. They do so for reasons of contrast in a situation where the West is in crisis rather than on the rise. As for the European historical experience, both still offer the standard narrative. In their introduction, Kocka

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.