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Expanding Class: Power and Everyday Politics in Industrial Communities, the Netherlands 1850-1950
Contributor(s): Kalb, Don (Author)
ISBN: 0822320223     ISBN-13: 9780822320227
Publisher: Duke University Press
OUR PRICE:   $28.45  
Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats
Published: January 1998
Qty:
Temporarily out of stock - Will ship within 2 to 5 weeks
Annotation: "Don Kalb has taken a boisterous series of excursions into North Brabant's modern history and come back with important news concerning ways of understanding economic change, class, and social experience."--Charles Tilly, Columbia University

"Don Kalb has put labor history back on the cutting edge of methodological innovation."--William M. Reddy, Duke University

Additional Information
BISAC Categories:
- History | Western Europe - General
- Business & Economics | Labor
- Social Science | Sociology - General
Dewey: 305.562
LCCN: 97-13963
Series: Comparative & International Working-Class History
Physical Information: 1.04" H x 6.03" W x 9.28" (1.30 lbs) 360 pages
Themes:
- Cultural Region - Western Europe
 
Descriptions, Reviews, Etc.
Publisher Description:
Expanding Class is the study and story of industrial class relations in North Brabant, a Catholic province of The Netherlands, over a hundred-year period. In examining the lives of workers in one of Europe's more idiosyncratic industrial regions, Don Kalb affirms the utility of class analysis while responding to the cultural critics who have encouraged a movement away from this focus in labor history. In so doing, Expanding Class advances an interdisciplinary historical anthropology of working-class formation. Basing his analysis on oral as well as archival sources, Kalb reveals a dynamic relationship between capitalist industrialization, locality, and cultural class identities.
Expanding Class compares Brabant's quaint central shoemaking district to its electrical boomtown Eindhoven, home of the enormous Philips Corporation. It introduces the concept of "flexible familism," a sociological phenomenon in which family daughters were employed to facilitate a cheap and ample labor force. Industrialists manipulated and fostered flexible familism to ensure the discipline and loyalty of the working-class community. By using the industrial Netherlands as a paradigm, Kalb reveals new and productive ways to examine class construction and the development of labor history in other countries over the past thirty years, steering a path between the two schools of thought--cultural and economic--that have dominated labor history discussions in recent years.