Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 January 2010
It is difficult to comprehend social change when living in the midst of it. It is easier to study periods of social change in the past – to describe the elements, evaluate the impact, search for linkages, and adumbrate the unintended consequences of change. Many historians have mined these rich veins to describe the changes that occurred in employment relationships as production shifted from an artisan-based system in the nineteenth century to the industrial system of the twentieth century. We are now undergoing another fundamental transformation of the workplace, and this book is an attempt to understand this current metamorphosis, to place it in historical context, and to explore its ramifications.
We are accustomed to thinking of history as divided into a series of parallel realms. Economic history, labor history, history of technology, intellectual history, political history, military history, and legal history are usually treated as separate enterprises, each with its own narratives of stability and change, its own moments of necessity and accident, and its own cast of insiders and outsiders. At times, one type of history imports another to enhance its own story, as when social historians weave in events from economic history to support their narratives or when intellectual historians use examples from legal history to strengthen their assertions of intellectual trends. But by and large, each type of history is studied as a separate story that happens to share with other types of history only a common moment in time. This book is based on a different understanding of how histories fit together and how they together bear on the present.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.