Sigrid Wadauer - Sales from door to door

In twentieth-century Austria, the share of self-employed in the workforce was declining. Yet, this was not a necessary and linear development. Nor did it concern all trades in the same way. Moreover, in the first decades of the century, this share was not small. According to the 1934 census, about 21 percent of the workforce (Berufsträger) was self-employed, including almost 25 percent of all economically active men and almost 14 percent of all economically active women. The share of self-employed was high in agriculture, in many crafts, and particularly in sales, where 40 percent were self-employed. 1 The number of small or one-man businesses was high, 2 and competition was fierce. 3 However, the categories of the census did not refer to homogeneous and clearly distinguished groups. Self-employment could be performed and perceived in quite different ways. It could be a consequential step in an occupational career. It couldperhaps at the same timebe a possibility to deal with difficulties of finding employment or with limited employability. 4 Yet, starting one's own business was not always easy at all. This paper deals with struggles over the possibilities and terms of taking on a trade. It focusses on trades with little or no requirements with respect to formal qualification, capital, or location.

Working on Labor, 2012

Rural History, 2014

Between the last decades of the eighteenth century and the middle of the nineteenth century, a large number of new markets were established in the Flemish countryside. The multiplication of rural markets tends to be seen as part of the process of market integration, with rural producers responding to the opportunities provided by increasing external demand, such as that from the growing towns. However, an analysis of the motivation behind new establishments, based on the files treating the requests for new markets, reveals that markets were more often established for entirely different reasons. In this period, markets were expected to permit households to intensify their activities in order to overcome increasing economic difficulties. Developments within rural society, particularly rising population pressure, the need to produce and sell more, and deteriorating informal exchange networks among countrymen, coupled to a decline in demand for rural industrial products, were the main drives behind the multiplication of markets. This contribution shows it is important to pay attention to how new markets and market integration in general fitted within the goals and strategies of the country dwellers themselves.

International Review of Social History, 2000

Labor, 2020

In the field of consumption history there is growing interest in informal shopping practices, smuggling, and black-market activities in state socialist societies. Yet, little emphasis has been placed on how the foremost socialist workplace, the factory, became a crucial hub for smuggled goods and the extent to which workers played a role within it. This article explores local Budapest court cases from the beginning of the 1960s using the methodological insights of everyday history (Alltagsgeschichte). The cases show that white-collar workers (and in rare cases blue-collar workers) with a command of foreign languages frequently acted as middlemen in making transactions. This specific cultural capital put white-collar workers in a position to gain profit over and above their usual state salary, often contradicting wage hierarchies set by the state. At the same time, blue-collar workers embraced informal shopping possibilities at the factory in a climate of diversifying consumer expectations. This article examines how informal practices of selling and obtaining goods transformed relations among workers and created a new social hierarchy within working-class communities.

This paper deals with the making of vagrancy in the context of early state welfare policy. Vagrancy is neither understood as an anachronism nor as deviance or marginality. Rather, it raises central questions concerning social policy and the history of labour. Starting from the problems of definition in the context of contemporary transnational debates, I will then focus on the practical implementation of distinctions in Austria from the late nineteenth century to the Anschluss in 1938. Different practices of varying efficacy will be accounted for, starting with the first attempts to formalize unemployment emerging in the late nineteenth century, when, based on a new understanding of unemployment as an effect of the labour market, new forms of supporting and regulating those wayfarers in search of employment were established. Such practices also aimed at outlawing vagrancy, with consistent penalties under the law. In addition, vagrancy will be discussed with respect to changing political regimes. Focusing on the 1920s and 1930s, the paper analyses crime statistics and crime records, and last but not least, the perspective of those who were ''on the tramp''.

Encounters and Practices of Petty Trade in Northern Europe, 1820–1960

This chapter traces a forgotten, yet important itinerant means of livelihood, namely rag collecting. Rags played an essential role as raw material for the paper and textile industries in the nineteenth century. The chapter identifies a business logic based on the idea that material perceived by one individual as worthless could be turned into something of economic value. As rags were commodified, they acquired new value in a different context. By analyzing newspapers, periodical articles and responses to ethnographic questionnaires, the authors follow a group of rag collectors from the Karelian Isthmus, who utilized their favorable geographic location to gain a livelihood from a circular flow of goods. The chapter demonstrates how an earthenware pot could be bartered for a discarded garment, which in turn became a piece of the puzzle in the process that kept industry and economic growth going.

2013