Studies of Work 'in the Wild

The schematic framework of the essay is as follows. It will give a brief overview on how the conception and performance of work (in the sense of manual labor performed by the working class) changed in the nineteenth century. It will analyse the shift from irregular labour rhythms to regimental ‘factory discipline’ through Marxist economic theory of labour value. Successively, the essay will briefly consider why capitalist mode of production was intensely competitive and acquisitive. Taking the volatile nature of capitalist mode of production as the background, it will seek to prove how this work culture marked by alienation and regimentation was “invented” rather than fortuitous. In other words, its ideological and discursive basis will be investigated. The essay will attempt to explore this issue keeping in mind not only the aspect of class antagonism, but also the gender dynamics and child labour

2001

Medical History, 1987

Workers' health in the inter-war years has been the subject ofrecent enquiry and was a topic that generated much contentious contemporary debate.' The focus of discussion has been the impact ofmass unemployment and consequent deprivation on standards of health, physique, and general well-being. The object here is to open up a further, so far very neglected dimension, by switching attention to the workplace, and investigating the theme of health at work in the 1920s and 1930s.2 The present generation has grown up with the knowledge that work, working conditions, and technology may seriously affect the mental and physical health and well-being of individual workers, and that health, fitness, and fatigue can considerably influence productivity levels and efflciency. Evidence of these correlations accumulated with the practical work of the Factory Inspectorate from the 1830s, the weight of experience of a relatively thin strand of welfarist, humanitarian employers (of the G. Cadbury and S. Rowntree genre), and the experimentation of "scientific management" theorizers, including the Americans, F. W. Taylor (time study) and F. and L. Gilbreth (motion study).3 However, an important contribution to the industrial health and efficiency debate was also made by the research organizations established by the British govemment during the crisis years of World War I and its aftermath, under the auspices of the recently created Medical Research Committee (MRC). The Industrial Health Research Board (IHRB) was formed in July 1918: "To consider and investigate

The International Journal of African Historical Studies, 1988

and the English-language quarterly Helsinki Monitor. 7 The human dimension encompasses all human rights and fundamental freedoms, human contacts and other issues of a related humanitarian character, democracy, democratic institutions and the rule of law. 8 Diana Chigas, with Elizabeth McClintock and Christophe Kamp, "Preventive Diplomacy and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe: Creating Incentives for Dialogue and Cooperation", in

The History Teacher, 1988

Journal of Markets and Morality, 2014

History of Science, 2023

This article offers suggestions for what a labor history of science might look like and what it might accomplish. It does so by first reviewing how historians of science have analyzed the history of both "science as labor" and "science and labor" since the 1930s. It then moves on to discuss recent historiographical developments in both the history of science and labor history that together provide an analytical frame for further research. The article ends by projecting into the future, considering how a labor history of science might help us grapple with connecting our understanding of the past with the challenges of today and tomorrow.

Labor: Studies in Working-Class History, 2024

The study of work is flourishing in a corner of our discipline where few readers of Labor tread. In recent years, historians of science have begun to think about "science in action": that is, science as constituted by, and constituent of, work. Much of this work is situated in sites that aren't conventionally identified as "scientific" and carried out by actors who are not conventionally viewed as "scientists." Historians of science have turned their attention, for example, to the infrastructural labor that supports research, asking who carried the intrepid geologist's suitcases, washed the chemist's glassware, or watched the kids so that someone else could have an "aha" moment at the microscope. So too have they trained their focus on the scientific work done by distillers to develop product substitutions that evaded excise duties, by shipyard managers who introduced new standards to compartmentalize "mental" and "manual" labor, and by miners at Potosi who developed new ways to extract silver from ores. Historians of science have credited artisanal and agricultural laborers with investigative/ constructive practices and forms of knowledge about the natural world that are more typically remembered as belonging to famous scientists and their "discoveries." They have embedded Taylorist fantasies of workplace discipline in the broader evolution of the human sciences and created deep intellectual genealogies for the "scientific racism" that has historically structured who does a society's most backbreaking labor. 1 Historians of science have done all these things quite effectively, albeit with only the loosest engagement with the prevailing scholarship in the field of labor history. Citations to Labor, International Labor and Working-Class History, and Labour/ Le Travail are few and far between on the pages of Isis, History of Science, and other

Labor History, 1981

A few warnings at the beginning. First of all, since common laborers were "the lower or the uninstructed part"^ of the 19th century's working classes, they spoke very little in the first person.

Labour in a Single Shot: Critical Perspectives, 2022

This essay attempts to evaluate the success of the Labour project in supplying what its German title punningly claims to be a new Einstellung (attitude towards, cinematic shot of) labour by situating its visual strategies within a longer historical series of ways of imaging labour in the West, in each case assessing how historical conventions of representation have reflected and helped to shape contemporary attitudes toward work. Moving from images of labour on ancient Roman calendars through medieval breviaries and books of hours, early modern and 19th-century “books of trades,” the Encyclopédie of d’Alembert und Diderot, the protocinematographic investigations of Étienne-Jules Marey and Edweard Muybridge, early cinema, the ideas of early 20th-century labour psychologists, and Soviet and National Socialist propaganda, it describes how the Labour project’s aesthetic and technical constraints encourage productive departures from traditional ways of representing, imagining, and valuing labour.