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Adaptation to Industrialization: German Workers as a Test Case

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2008

Peter N. Stearns
Peter N. Stearns
Affiliation:
Rutgers University
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Extract

Historians, in their somewhat defensive perusal of sociology for sweeping theoretical statements, perhaps underestimate the careful, often narrow, empiricism of much sociological research. Sociologists unearth facts for subsequent historians to work on and sometimes to interpret more broadly. Historical sociologists to the contrary, fact-grubbing services are mutual in the two disciplines. German sociologists were the first to study the social effects of industrialization extensively. By the early twentieth century, when masses of workers were still entering factory industry for the first time, sociologists were ready to investigate the process of adaptation through systematic interviews. British researchers in the same period, besides being dedicated amateurs for the most part, focused on the urban poor and on material conditions too exclusively still. French efforts were even more scattered. Maurice Halbwachs did some valuable studies of consumption patterns, while Le Play and his school contributed rather conservative portraits of individual workers. For purposes of understanding the working class in manufacturing, German sociological research was long unrivaled.

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Articles
Information
Central European History , Volume 3 , Issue 4 , December 1970 , pp. 303 - 331
Copyright
Copyright © Conference Group for Central European History of the American Historical Association 1970

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77. Their average age was also higher than that of the skilled—by seven years in several machine and automobile factories—which increased their need to hang on to their jobs. Schumann, op. cit.; Reichelt, op. cit.

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