With appropriate lags for rethinking, research, writing and publication, international events impinge strongly on the work of social scientists and social historians. The recent popularity of democratization, globalization, international institutions, ethnicity, nationalism, citizenship and identity as research themes stems largely from world affairs: civilianization of major authoritarian regimes in Latin America; dismantling of apartheid in South Africa; collapse of the Soviet Union, the Warsaw Pact and Yugoslavia; ethnic struggles and nationalist claims in Eastern Europe, Asia and Africa; extension of the European Union; rise of East Asian economic powers. Just as African decolonization spurred an enormous literature on modernization and political development, the explosion of claims to political independence on the basis of ethnic distinctness is fomenting a new literature on nationalism.

The implantation of a modern police in the industrial districts of Northern England resulted from a new consensus among the propertied classes that it was necessary to create a professional, bureaucratically organized lever of urban discipline and permanently introduce it into the heart of working-class communities. The coming of the new police represented a significant extension into hitherto geographically peripheral areas of both the moral and political authority of the state. This was to be accomplished by the creation of a powerful and quite modern device – a bureaucracy of official morality. By 1840 it came to be “an axiom in police that you guard St. James by watching St. Giles”. This was a novel attitude. Eighteenth-century governments and the upper classes in general were surely apprehensive of the movements of the lower orders, but did not consider it either useful or necessary to watch St Giles all the time. One could learn what one needed to know about what was on the collective mind of St Giles when it rioted; one might even use or manipulate its riots in useful ways as the reform movement of 1830–32 did with great success. Previous to the nineteenth century urban disorder was not necessarily perceived as subversive of the social order. “Provided that the ruler did his duty, the populace was prepared to defend him with enthusiasm. But if he did not, it rioted until he did. This mechanism was perfectly understood by both sides, and caused no political problems beyond a little occasional destruction of property […]. Since the riots were not directed against the social system, public order could remain surprisingly lax by modern standards.”

In recent years feminist scholars have called for a complete rethinking and revision of the foundations of labour history as a necessary prerequisite for the integration of gender as a core concept into histories of labour and social class. In this attempt one of the most deeply rooted assumptions in male-oriented labour history needs to be identified and made subject to careful rethinking, namely the assumption that the public and the private sphere should be seen in terms of an essentially gendered opposition. Undoubtedly, one of the most powerful images used not only to represent but also to justify the gendering of the public and the private sphere is the image of the male breadwinner family and the male household head as the sole provider for his dependent wife and children. For this reason, the articles in this volume are all firmly at the heart of what may currently be seen as the crucial intersections in the history of labour, gender and social class.

At the turn of the century, the authoritative political theorist Henri Michel had this to say of the characteristic approach in France to all problems, and in particular to political problems. “We are infatuated with isms, it is part of the national temperament. It is significant that a large number of our fellow-citizens like them so much, that every time they are presented with a new one, they greedily seize upon it, without asking themselves whether it can be accomodated alongside the one with which they were previously enamoured.”; The accuracy of this observation has not substantially diminished over the last half-century, the parties left of centre being particularly addicted to doctrinaire formulations of their political philosophies and programmes and to the consequent verbal fetishism and pompous dogmatism. The rise of Socialism in the late nineteenth century overshadowed the contemporary crystallisation of Radical attitudes and aims into the doctrine of Solidarism. Solidarism, however, played a major part in galvanising and rallying the protagonists of state intervention and voluntary association; uniting them in the task of building, by a series of piecemeal reforms inspired by a simple principle and a multiplicity of imperative needs what has come to be known as the “Welfare State”. Despite the doctrinal fragility of Solidarism, its practical programme was inspired by and was appropriate to the social and political needs of a society in transition from individualist and non-interventionist liberalism to associationist and statist socialism, just as liberal economism had secured the transition from corporativism and mercantilism to private enterprise, laisser faire and laisser passer. To-day it is Gaullism that dominates the political scene, but the tenacious Radical tradition of the Third and Fourth Republics may yet reassert itself, transforming in retrospect the tidal wave of to-day into a ripple, as it has so frequently done during the last eighty years of France's tormented history.

The survival of a concept is generally only secured at the price of an intellectual odyssey in the course of which it is transformed out of all recognition. The nineteenth century fortunes of the idea of solidarity exemplify this axiom only too strictly. It became the victim of a multiplicity of ingenious puns and metaphors as well as outright malicious distortions that rendered a simple, technical word, drawn from the sphere of jurisprudence, at once emotive and obscure, influential and diffuse. As the eminent and caustic critic of the twentieth century, Julien Benda, formulated this vital problem of the fate of concepts, “pour l'historien des idées des hommes, la réalité ce n'est point ce qu'ont été les idées dans l'esprit de ceux qui les ont inventées, mais ce qu'elles ont été dans l'esprit de ceux qui les ont trahies… car il est clair qu'une doctrine se propage d'autant plus largement qu'elle est apte à satisfaire un plus grand nombre de sentiments divers.” This pessimistic view has been all too frequently verified in human history.

Social scientists often face a fundamental dilemma when they conduct social research. On the one hand, they may emphasize the complexity of social phenomena – a common strategy in ethnographic, historical and macro social research – and offer in–depth case studies sensitive to the specificity of the things they study. On the other hand, they may make broad, homo genizing assumptions about cases, and document generalities – patterns hold across many instances. Research strategies that focus on complexity are often labeled “qualitative”, “case–oriented”, “small–N”, or “intensive”. Those that focus on generality are often labeled “quantitative”, “variable–oriented”, “large–N”, or “extensive”. While the contrasts between these two types social research are substantial, it is easy to exaggerate their differences and t o caricature the two approaches, for example, portraying quantitative work on general patterns as scientific but sterile and oppressive, and qualitative research on small Ns as rich and emancipatory but journalistic. It is important to avoid these caricatures because the contrasts between these two general approaches provide important leads both for finding a middle path between them and for resolving basic methodological issues in social science Social scientists who study cases in an in–depth manner often see empiri cal generalizations simply as a means to another end – the interpretive understanding of cases. In this view, a fundamental goal of social science is t o interpret significant features of the social world and thereby advance our collective understanding of how existing social arrangements came about and why we live the way we do. The rough general patterns that social scientists may be able to identify simply aid the understanding of specific cases; they are not viewed as predictive. Besides, the task of interpreting and then representing socially significant phenomena (or the task of making selected social phenomena significant by representing them) is a much more immediate and tangible goal. In this view, empirical generalizations and social science theory are important – to the extent that they aid the goal interpretive understanding.

The transition from a family economy in which incomes were democratically secured through the best efforts of all family members to one in which men supported dependent wives and children appears as a watershed in many otherwise very different histories of the family. It looms large in both orthodox economic analyses of historical trends in female participation rates and feminist depictions of a symbiotic structural relationship between inherited patriarchal relationships and nascent industrial capitalism. Both camps agree, as Creighton has recently put it, about “the out-lines of [the] development” of the male breadwinner family. Where they disagree is in “the factors responsible for its origins and expansion”. Why did families move away from an asserted “golden age” of egalitarian sourcing of incomes, which involved husbands, wives and children, to dependence on a male breadwinner who aspired to a family wage? Neo-classical economic historians emphasize the supply conditions, concentrating on income effects from men's earnings, family structure variables and alternatives to women's employment in terms of productive activities in the home. In contrast, dual systems theorists emphasize demand conditions in terms of institutional constraints on women's and children's employment exemplified by the exclusionary strategies of chauvinist trade unions, labour legislation which limited the opportunities of women and children, and the legitimation of men's wage demands by references to their need for a family wage. Our view is that systematic empirical investigation of the male breadwinner family has been lacking, even the timescale of its appearance and development remains obscure. Unless we fill in the outlines with more empirical detail we will never discover the reasons for its origins and expansion.

In the introduction to this volume, the author explains why social historians should study the relationship between humour and social protest in the past. The following questions are of interest. Under what conditions did laughter serve the cause of the protesters? How did humour strengthen social protest? And to what degree has humour been an effective tool for contentious social movements? Recent developments in the field of social movement theory regarding framing, collective identity, and emotions are combined with insights from humorology. A short account of the individual contributions follow: they range from the Zapatistas in Mexico to Vietnamese garment workers, from sixteenth-century Augsburg to Madrid and Stockholm in the 1990s. The findings point, above all, to the power of humour in the framing of political protest. Humour was used in quite different political opportunity structures, from open democratic societies to harsh repressive regimes. Often, humour furthered the development of the collective identity of a social movement, whereas in several cases humour acted as a powerful communication tool, serving as a true “weapon of the weak”.

Through a study of private security guards in urban India, this paper investigates emerging labour processes in the increasingly dominant private corporate sector of Third World rising economies, in the wake of economic liberalization and globalization. To meet the escalating need for labour in interactive services, a vast cadre of low-paid, casual workers has emerged, working under a regime of organized informality. Recruitment and training here are systematically institutionalized and formalized by private agencies, with the imprimatur of the state, but employment relations remain informal and insecure. The paper examines forms of labour subordination and a culture of servility at the workplace, as well as embodied work and emotional labour that characterize low-end service jobs. The paper shows how workers’ political subjectivity and their perception of class difference and social identity are shaped by cultural and social interaction at work and how these relate to wider democratic politics and citizenship.

This survey article seeks to contribute to the understanding of the concepts of precarious work and precarization in the history of industrial capitalism by addressing the debate in the social sciences and humanities over the past forty years. Based on a gendered global approach, this article aims to offer a critique of the Global North-centric perspective, which largely conceives precarious work as a new phenomenon lacking a longer historical tradition. The first part discusses the multiple origins, definitions, and conceptualizations of “precarious work” elaborated with regard to industrial as well as post-industrial capitalism, taking into account selected contemporary sources as well as studies conducted by historians and social scientists. In the second part, the influence of different approaches, such as the feminist and post-colonial ones, in globalizing and gendering the precarious work debate is examined in their historical contexts, exploring also the crucial nexus of precarious work and informal work. In the conclusion, the limitations of the available literature are discussed, along with suggestions for further directions in historicizing precarious work from a global perspective.

TRANSLATED ABSTRACTS FRENCH – GERMAN – SPANISH

Eloisa Betti. En historicisant le travail précaire: quarante ans de recherche dans les sciences sociales et humaines.

Cette enquête tente de contribuer à la compréhension des concepts de travail précaire et de précarisation dans l’histoire du capitalisme industriel, en examinant le débat dans les sciences sociales et humaines durant les quarante dernières années. Sur la base d’une approche globale de genre, l’article entend proposer une critique de la perspective globale nordique, qui conçoit en grande partie le travail précaire comme un nouveau phénomène dépourvu d’une assez longue tradition historique. La première partie examine les multiples origines, définitions et conceptualisations du “travail précaire” élaborées à propos du capitalisme industriel et post-industriel, en tenant compte de sources contemporaines sélectionnées et d’études conduites par des historiens et spécialistes des sciences sociales. Dans la seconde partie, l’influence de diverses approches, telles que les approches féministes et post-coloniales, mondialisant et générisant le débat sur le travail précaire, sont examinées dans leur contexte historique, tout en étudiant également le lien crucial du travail précaire et du travail informel. En conclusion, les limitations de la littérature disponible sont examinées et assorties de suggestions d’orientations ultérieures pour historiciser le travail précaire dans une perspective globale.

Traduction: Christine Plard

The largest corpus of jokes we have ridiculing both rulers and a political system comes from the former Soviet Union and the then communist countries of eastern Europe. These forbidden jokes were important to those who told them at some risk to themselves. They can be construed as a form of protest, but the relationship between jokes and protest is not a simple one. The number of jokes told was greater, and the telling more open, in the later years of the regimes than in the earlier years of terror and extreme hardship. The number of jokes is a product of the extensiveness of political control, not its intensity. Such jokes probably have no effect either in undermining a regime or in acting as a stabilizing safety valve. However, they were a quiet protest, an indication that the political system lacked stability and could collapse quickly.

In the past two decades, social network analysis (SNA) has become a major analytical paradigm in sociology and now occupies a strategic place in disciplinary debates on a wide variety of issues. Historians, however, have been slow to adopt the approach for at least three reasons. First, the conceptual orientation of sociologists practicing historical social network analysis (HSNA) remains unfamiliar to the majority of professional historians. Just when SNA was maturing in the late 1980s and 1990s, the interdisciplinary interest in social science theory among historians, so characteristic of the 1970s and early 1980s, began to wane. The subsequent turn toward post modernist thinking in history left the profession increasingly uninformed about both classical and contemporary social theory. Second, those quantitatively-oriented historians who might be predisposed to use SNA's specialized statistical methods constitute less than a quarter of the profession today, thus the risk of SNA finding its way into mainstream historical scholarship is low to start. Third, SNA's data requirements are formidable. SNA demands evidence of social interaction among all members of a social system for a variety of behaviors, and thus necessitates a broad range of high-quality records for the place, time and activities being studied. Because historians are plagued by an incomplete historical record and imperfect understandings of past social relations, HSNA remains an inherently problematic enterprise. Yet despite conceptual, methodological and evidentiary obstacles, SNA possesses real potential for historical analysis.

This article argues that the greatest economic and social transformations of the early colonial period in West Africa, the “cash-crop revolution”, and “the slow death of slavery” and debt bondage, had stronger and more varied causal connections than previously realized. The economic circumstances of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century West Africa delayed and diluted abolitionist measures. Indeed, the coercion of labour, through the exercise of property rights in people, contributed to the speed with which the cash-crop economies developed. Conversely, however, the scale and composition of cash-crop expansion did much to determine that the slave trade and pawning would be replaced by a consensual labour market. They also shaped the possibilities for peasant versus larger-scale organization of production, and the distribution of income by gender and between communities.

This article draws on ethnographic research to analyse the role of humour in the process of collective identity formation within autonomous anti-capitalist groups in Madrid. Autonomous groups embrace the principles of horizontality, openness, diversity, participatory democracy, self-organization, and direct action, so defining themselves in contradistinction to more “vertical” movement organizations of the institutional left. The process of collective-identity formation involves both generating a sense of internal cohesion, and projecting an alternative identity. Autonomous groups in Madrid face a double challenge, for they must integrate ideologically heterogeneous activists, and they must define themselves as being alternatives to the much more consolidated groups of the institutional left. I shall analyse the different ways in which humour is used to address both those challenges: to sustain groups over time, to defuse tensions and try to resolve conflict, for myth-making, and to integrate marginal group members. I will also discuss the role humour plays in charismatic leadership and its use in the projection of an alternative political identity in direct actions. Finally, I will discuss the contested nature of humour as a political tool in the context of the Madrid network.

Prophecies of doom for both working-class party and labor unions have gained popularity in the Western industrial democracies over the last two decades. The “old” Siamese twins, working-class party and labor unions, have a century-long history of their combined struggle to achieve political and industrial citizenship rights for the working class. Both forms of interest representation are seen as facing new challenges if not a crisis due to internal and external changes of both long-term and recent nature. However, despite these prophecies political parties and union movemehts have been differently affected and have responded in dissimilar ways across Western Europe. The Siamese twins, party and unions, as social institutions, their embeddedness in the social structure, and their linkages, were molded at an earlier time with long-term consequences. Hence, we cannot grasp today's political unionism, party-union relations and organized labor's capacity for change, if we do not understand the social and political conditions under which the organization of labor interests became institutionalized. An understanding of the origins and causes of union diversity helps us to view the variations in union responses to current challenges.

Analyses of anarchism emphasizing cyclical patterns of advances and retreats inadequately explain how anarchism sustained itself over time. They foster a picture of powerlessness before repression and cyclical reappearances as if by spontaneous germination, thus lending themselves to interpretations, such as Hobsbawm's millenarianism, that identify discontinuity, spontaneism, and lack of organization as features of anarchism, and ultimately supporting charges of ineffectiveness and irrationalism. A narrow framework of analysis of national scope is responsible for such explanatory inadequacy. This article illustrates the transnational dimension of Italian anarchism, by analysing its presence in the United States and worldwide, with special emphasis on the anarchist press. A transnational analysis reveals new forms of integration, continuity, and organization, based on the mobility of militants, resources, and ideas across the Atlantic Ocean and Mediterranean Sea. In times of repression, seeming entrances and exits of anarchism on the Italian stage often corresponded to shifts of initiative across the Italian border. Transnationalism was a built-in characteristic that supported insurrectionary tactics by enhancing the opaqueness of their preparation. Together, insurrectionism, organizational opaqueness, and transnationalism help providing an alternative to the advance-and-retreat pattern of explanation.

Among the many historical conventions that went out of fashion in the wake of the linguistic and/or cultural turn was the grand explanatory narrative rooted in an interpretive tradition that typically traced an arc from causes to consequences. A chorus of criticism consigned the grand or meta-narrative to the dustbin of historiography, if not history. Linguistic theorists like Hayden White seemed to challenge historians' cherished notions of interpretive truth by stressing the resemblance between historical and fictional narratives; postmodernists of various stripes questioned whether historical narratives could escape the teleological tendencies of the master narrative of the Western/liberal tradition; and recently a leading postcolonial theorist has denounced all historicism, broadly defined, as incurably eurocentric.

In early modern Europe, as in developing countries today, much of the population had to struggle to survive. Estimates for many parts of pre-industrial Europe, as for several countries in the so-called Third World, suggest that the majority of the inhabitants owned so little property that their livelihood was highly insecure. Basically, all those who lived by the work of their hands were at risk, and the reasons for their vulnerability were manifold. Economic cycles and seasonal fluctuations jeopardized the livelihood of the rural and urban masses. Warfare, taxation, and other decisions by the ruling elites sometimes had far-reaching direct and indirect repercussions on the lives of the poor. This is also true of natural factors, both catastrophes and the usual weather fluctuations, which were a major factor affecting harvest yields. Equal in importance were the risks and uncertainties inherent in life and family cycles: disease, old age, widowhood, or having many young children.

The 1999 plan of the Social Democratic government to adjust Germany's 1913 nationality law has generated an intensely emotional debate. In an unprecedented action, the opposition Christian Democrats managed to gather hundreds of thousands of signatures against the adjustment that would have granted citizenship to second generation “immigrants” born in Germany. At the end of the twentieth century, Germans still strongly cling to the principle of jus sanguinis. The idea that nationality is not connected ot place of birth or culture but rather to a “national essence” tJiat is somehow incorporated in the subject's blood has been strong in Germany since the early nineteenth century and has been especially decisive for the country's twentieth-century history.