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Response: Beyond Time and Money
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 December 2008
Extract
Next to the extinction of communism, nothing has disconcerted labor historians as much as the proliferation of cultural studies about mass consumption. By contrast, the critique of economism begun two decades ago under the influence of E. P. Thompson was a snap, for workers and the making of the working class remained the main focus, even as emphasis shifted from workplace to community contests over pub life, public parks, and other arenas of popular culture. Cultural studies of mass consumption, however, challenge whether it is still valid, much less possible, to focus uniquely on workers, except perhaps to deal with their unmaking as a class. Some are influenced by the “linguistic turn” associated with poststructuralism and deconstruction, putting pressure on labor historians to relate complex processes of signification to the changes in strategies and structures that are the meat and potatoes of the labor-history field.
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- Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. 1993
References
Notes
1. Cross, Gary, “Productivity and French Labor. 1910–1931” (MA thesis. University of Wisconsin, 1973).Google Scholar
2. Cross's books include A Quest for Time: The Reduction of Work in Britain and France, 1840–1940 (1989): A Social History of Leisure Since 1600 (1990): and Worktowners at Blackpool. Mass Observation and Popular Culture in the 1930s (1990).Google Scholar
3. Time and Money: The Making of Consumer Culture (London, 1993).Google Scholar
4. See, in particular. Clarke, John, “Pessimism sersus Populism: The Problematic Politics of Popular Culture.” in For Fun and Profit: The Transformation of Leisure into Consumption, ed. Butsch, Richard (Philadelphia, 1990)Google Scholar; and idem.The Devil Makes Work. Leisure in Capitalist Britain (Urbana, 1985).Google Scholar
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