Trousson, Raymond / Vercruysse, Jeroom (dir.), Dictionnaire general de Voltaire. (Champion classiques, references et dictionnaires 18) 1272 p. 2020:10 (Champion, FR) <670-9>
ISBN 978-2-38096-016-7 paper ¥7,064.- (税込) EUR 38.00

Roesser, Michael, Prisms of Work: Labour, Recruitment and Command in German East Africa. (Work in Global and Historical Perspective 21) 428 pp. 2023:12 (de Gruyter Oldenbourg, GW) <715-941>
ISBN 978-3-11-120462-8 hard ¥12,141.- (税込) EUR 49.95 *

The phenomenon of labour takes the character of a prism. Labour is thereby always context dependent and constituted through the actions of all protagonists involved in any labour relationship. On the basis of three case studies in colonial German East Africa ? the construction of the Central Railway (1905?1916), the Otto Plantation in Kilossa (1907?1916) and the palaeontological Tendaguru Expedition (1909?1911) ? labour and labour relations are analysed. The focus lies on hitherto neglected actors and groups of actors of labour in the colonial context of East Africa. These were especially German companies and their staff, white subaltern railway sub-contractors and labour recruiters, Indian skilled workers and (qualified) East African workers. Furthermore, all three sites of labour proved to have their individual logics and characteristics. But all of them were in tension between the ‘global’ and the ‘local’, coercion and voluntariness, machine and manual labour, skilled and unskilled labour, reproductive and wage labour, as well as between black and white.

李大釗－中国の最初の共産主義者
Shan, Patrick Fuliang, Li Dazhao: China's First Communist. (SUNY Series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture) 304 pp. 2024:3 (State U. New York Pr., US) <715-853>
ISBN 978-1-4384-9681-8 hard ¥22,215.- (税込) US$ 99.00 *

労働組合とイギリス労使関係の危機－H.クレッグの知的伝記
Ackers, Peter, Trade Unions and the British Industrial Relations Crisis: An Intellectual Biography of Hugh Clegg. (Routledge Research in Employment Relations) 264 pp. 2024:4 (Routledge, UK) <715-245>
ISBN 978-1-03-242290-9 hard ¥38,907.- (税込) GB￡ 135.00 *

Hugh Clegg was a founding figure of post-war British Industrial Relations, the forerunner of Employment Relations and Human Resource Management, as taught in most Business Schools today. He defined 'industrial democracy' as collective bargaining with trade unions, laid the foundations for the pluralist approach to Industrial Relations, was a key figure in the post-war social sciences and a major public policy player. More widely, he was an important figure in the Cold War social democratic academic left, who broke with his earlier Communism to champion free trade unions in a liberal democratic society. He also produced the major Oxford University Press trade union history. This book aims to understand the politics and industrial relations of the post-war period in Britain (in which trade unions were central) through the life of a key public intellectual. It will help readers understand the political and social science roots of contemporary Employment Relations and Human Resource Management through a deep historical study of Clegg's life and times, in the context of his post-war social democratic generation. It illustrates how the failures of post-war industrial relations led to Thatcherism. Current Employment Relations academics and public policy can learn much from this history, making it of value to researchers, students, and academics in the fields of Human Resource Management and business and management history.

Struempell, Christian / Hoffmann, Michael (eds.), Industrial Labour in an Unequal World: Ethnographic Perspectives on Uneven and Combined Development. (Work in Global and Historical Perspective 20) 270 pp. 2023:11 (de Gruyter Oldenbourg, GW) <715-250>
ISBN 978-3-11-130426-7 hard ¥12,141.- (税込) EUR 49.95 *

The volume scrutinizes the fundamentally uneven character of industrial production and working class formation by bringing together anthropologists specializing on industrial labour in various locations from South America, Western and Eastern Europe, North Africa, and South Asia. Through their engagement with Leon Trotsky’s concept of ‘uneven and combined development’ the authors unravel the complex relations that connect (and disconnect) labour in their sites of research with workers in other places and other times. As the contributions likewise reveal, the unevenness and combination inherent in industrial developments shape and are at the same time also shaped by the different politics workers in an unequal world pursue, as well as the historical experiences and future expectations of workers that inform these. With the attention the authors pay to the specificities of ethnographic detail as well as to broader regional and global developments the volume demonstrates the value of long-term ethnographic research and is of interest to a wide audience ranging from specialists in the fields of anthropology, history, sociology and development studies to students and activists.

van der Linden, Marcel / Maier-Ahuja, Nicole (eds.), Power At Work: A Global Perspective on Control and Resistance. (Work in Global and Historical Perspective 16) 360 pp. 2023:6 (de Gruyter, GW) <715-251>
ISBN 978-3-11-108235-6 hard ¥6,064.- (税込) EUR 24.95 *

Between working men and women (which may include “free” wage earners, chattel slaves, indentured labourers, sharecroppers, domestic servants, and many others) and those employing them, there has always been a constant ? mostly silent but sometimes overt ? struggle concerning employers’ discretionary power and over the interpretation of formal and informal rules. There is a constantly shifting frontier of control, that is, an ongoing struggle for control in the workplace, with managers and supervisors trying to increase their power over their subordinates, and their subordinates, in reaction, trying to maintain and increase their relative autonomy. The detailed case studies in this volume span three centuries and cover different parts of the world. Still, they speak to each other in many ways, highlighting the fact that power at work, whether on the shopfloor or beyond, results from a wide range of complex interrelations. Between technological innovations and the ways in which they are actually implemented. Between the division of labour at the site of production or service provision and changing standards of social segmentation beyond the premises of the company, which can be reinforced ? or weakened ? by management strategies of utilizing labour power as well as workers’ reaction to these strategies. And finally, between politics in production, which shape the relations between capital and labour on the shopfloor, and state politics of production, which cannot be understood without reference to broader developments in economy and society.

Rienks, Manuela, Ausverkauft: Arbeitswelten von Verkaeuferinnen in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland. (Quellen und Darstellungen zur Zeitgeschichte 143) 608 S. 2024 (de Gruyter Oldenbourg, GW) <715-1300>
ISBN 978-3-11-114135-0 hard ¥20,650.- (税込) EUR 84.95 *

Von Tante Emma zur Schlecker-Frau und schliesslich zur Computer-Kasse im menschenleeren Supermarkt des 21. Jahrhunderts ? diese Entwicklungen im Einzelhandel seit den 1950er Jahren zeichnet ?Ausverkauft" empirisch dicht, mit hohem Detailgrad und mit neuartigem methodischen Zugriff nach. Durch den praxeologischen Zugang auf raum-zeitliche Phaenomene wie Selbstbedienung, Computerisierung der Kassen, Rationalisierung, Teilzeitarbeit und Ladenschluss gelingt es, das komplexe Bild der geschlechtsspezifischen Arbeitszusammenhaenge und Hierarchien im Einzelhandel zu erklaeren. Die Verkaeuferinnen spielen in dieser Geschichte die Hauptrolle: Sie dienen als weibliche Arbeitskraefte allen ausser sich selbst: ; den Kundinnen und Kunden im Laden unter hohem Zeitdruck, und den Unternehmen, fuer die sie arbeiten und die sie tagtaeglich repraesentieren; und ihren Familien mit ihrem Zuverdienst und ihrer Care-Arbeit. Individuelle Beispiele von jungen Filialleiterinnen und altehrwuerdigen Kassiererinnen koennen die geschlechtsspezifische Diskriminierung im Einzelhandel, und der gesamten Dienstleistungsbranche, nicht aufwiegen. Und so zeigt diese Studie, wie die Arbeitswelt des 20. Jahrhunderts die geschlechtsspezifische Ungleichheit in der Gesellschaft stets aufs Neue hervorbrachte und verfestigte.

Ehmer, Josef / Lentz, Carola (eds.), Life Course, Work, and Labour in Global History. (Work in Global and Historical Perspective 18) 450 pp. 2023:9 (de Gruyter Oldenbourg, GW) <715-1470>
ISBN 978-3-11-114590-7 hard ¥6,064.- (税込) EUR 24.95 *

This multidisciplinary volume offers unique perspectives, across the globe and throughout the centuries, on the complexity of the nexus between work and the life course. For industrialized regions, from Germany and Western Europe to China and Japan, it questions the widespread notion of an overall growing working life course instability, since the 1970s. For unindustrialized or industrializing regions, from West Africa to state socialist East Central Europe, as well as for transnational and transcontinental labour migrations, it shows the enormous influence of the extended family and wider kin on individual pathways into and out of work. For early modern Europe, India, and China, and up to twentieth-century state socialism and to current welfare states, it stresses and concretizes the crucial impact of age and gender for both societal labour relations and individual work-related decision making. With all chapters based on original research, the volume reflects a close cooperation between historians, anthropologists, and sociologists. Its multidisciplinary approach finds expression in its methodological plurality, reaching from archival research and sophisticated statistical analyses to biographical interviews and participant observation. This mix allows to grasp the interaction between societal change and individual agency.

Eyben, Rosalind, John Horner and the Communist Party: Uncomfortable Encounters With Truth. (Routledge Studies in Radical History and Politics) 264 pp. 2024:4 (Routledge, UK) <715-1471>
ISBN 978-1-03-267134-5 hard ¥38,907.- (税込) GB￡ 135.00 *
ISBN 978-1-03-267077-5 paper ¥7,489.- (税込) GB￡ 25.99 *

John Horner and the Communist Party is a biography of a leading trade unionist and activist who became disillusioned with the Communist Party.Known for creating the modern Fire Brigades Union during the Second World War, John Horner (1911-1997) resigned from the Communist Party in 1956. Formerly one of the Party's leading members, he afterwards refused to speak or write about his communist past. Horner's silence left him forgotten, but Horner's daughter, Rosalind Eyben, has remedied this through her engrossing account of how and why John Horner and Pat, his wife, became communist, and the events that led them to resign from the Party. She pieces the story together from a wide range of sources, including Horner's own lively unpublished memoir of his early years. The narrative occasionally diverges from the historian's voice to deliver personal reflections on the author's communist childhood and on what her father told her shortly before his death about his shame and guilt for having so long denied uncomfortable truths about the Party and the Stalinist terror.This book is for anyone concerned with the problem of political allegiance, personal morality and associated states of denial that were to haunt Horner in later life. It will also be of interest to scholars and students researching communism and the Communist Party.

ナチの労働者
Hake, Sabine, The Nazi Worker: The Culture of Work and the End of Class. (Interdisciplinary German Cultural Studies 35) 244 pp. 2023:10 (de Gruyter, GW) <715-1472>
ISBN 978-3-11-100398-6 hard ¥21,865.- (税込) EUR 89.95 *

The Nazi Worker is the second in a three-volume project on the figure of the worker and, by extension, questions of class in twentieth-century German culture. It is based on extensive research in the archives and informed by recent debates on the politics of emotion, the end of class, and the future of work. In seven chapters, the book reconstructs the processes by which National Socialism appropriated aspects of working-class culture and socialist politics and translated class-based identifications into the racialized communitarianism of Volksgemeinschaft (folk community). Arbeitertum (workerdom), the operative term within these processes of appropriation, not only established a discursive framework for integrating proletarian legacies into the cult of the German worker. As a social imaginary, workerdom also modelled the work-related emotions (e.g., joy, pride) essential to the culture of work promoted by the German Labor Front. The contribution of images and stories in creating these new social imaginaries will be reconstructed through highly contextualized readings of the debates about workerdom, Nazi movement novels, worker's poetry, workers' sculpture, as well as industrial painting, photography, film, and design.

Reiman, Ken, Ron Carey and the Teamsters: How a Ups Driver Became the Greatest Union Reformer of the 20th Century by Putting Members First. 320 pp. 2024:7 (Monthly Review, US) <715-1473>
ISBN 978-1-68590-059-5 hard ¥19,971.- (税込) US$ 89.00 *
ISBN 978-1-68590-058-8 paper ¥5,610.- (税込) US$ 25.00 *

Singer, Alan J., Class-Conscious Coal Miners: The Emergence of a Working-Class Movement in Central Pennsylvania. (SUNY Series in Labor Studies) 240 pp. 2024:5 (State U. New York Pr., US) <715-1477>
ISBN 978-1-4384-9771-6 hard ¥22,215.- (税込) US$ 99.00 *

ドイツ連邦共和国におけるギリシア人の外国人労働者　1960～74年
Adamopoulou, Maria, The Greek Gastarbeiter in the Federal Republic of Germany (1960-1974). (Migrations in History 4) 230 pp. 2024:5 (de Gruyter Oldenbourg, GW) <715-1169>
ISBN 978-3-11-120132-0 hard ¥21,865.- (税込) EUR 89.95 *

Was migration to Germany a blessing or a curse? The main argument of this book is that the Greek state conceived labor migration as a traineeship into Europeanization with its shiny varnish of progress. Jumping on a fully packed train to West Germany meant leaving the past behind. However, the tensed Cold War realities left no space for illusions; specters of the Nazi past and the Greek Civil War still haunted them all. Adopting a transnational approach, this monograph retargets attention to the sending state by exploring how the Greek Gastarbeiter’s welfare was intrinsically connected with their homeland through its exercise of long-distance nationalism. Apart from its fresh take in postwar migration, the book also addresses methodological challenges in creative ways. The narrative alternates between the macro- and the micro-level, including subnational and transnational actors and integrating a diverse set of primary sources and voices. Avoiding the trap of exceptionalism, it contextualizes the Greek case in the Mediterranean and Southeast European experience.

Bernardi, Claudia / Mueller, Viola Franziska et al. (eds.), Moving Workers: Historical Perspectives on Labour, Coercion and Im/Mobilities. (Work in Global and Historical Perspective 19) 290 pp. 2023:10 (de Gruyter Oldenbourg, GW) <715-1174>
ISBN 978-3-11-113651-6 hard ¥12,141.- (税込) EUR 49.95 *

This book explores how workers moved and were moved, why they moved, and how they were kept from moving. Combining global labour history with mobility studies, it investigates moving workers through the lens of coercion. The contributions in this book are based on extensive archival research and span Europe and North America over the past 500 years. They provide fresh historical perspectives on the various regimes of coercion, mobility, and immobility as constituent parts of the political economy of labour. Moving Workers shows that all struggles relating to the mobility of workers or its restriction have the potential to reveal complex configurations of hierarchies, dependencies, and diverging conceptions of work and labour relations that continuously make and remake our world.