• History of Work
• African History
• American History
• Ancient Egypt
• Ancient Greece
• Ancient Rome
• Australian History
• British History
• Chinese History
• Filipino History
• French History
• German History
• Global Labour History
• Global South
• History of Technology
• Indian History
• Italian History
• Japanese History
• Knights of Labor
• Labour History
• Latin America
• Luddites
• Middle Ages
• Modernity
• New Zealand History
• Russian History
• Spanish History
• Sublimes
• Women's Work in History
• Work in World History

References for Theme: History of Work

• Allmendinger, Blake
• The Cowboy: Representations of Labor in an American Work Culture (1992)

• Applebaum, Herbert
• The Concept of Work: Ancient, Medieval, and Modern (1992)

• "The concept of work in Western thought" (1995)

• Applebaum, Herbert A
• Colonial Americans at Work (1996)

• Axster, Felix; Lelle, Nikolas
• Deutsche Arbeit: Kritische Perspektiven auf ein ideologisches Selbstbild (2018)

• Boydston, Jeanne
• Home and Work: Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic (2009)

• Burawoy, Michael
• Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labor Process Under Monopoly Capitalism (1982)

• Burford, Allison
• Craftsmen in Greek and Roman society (1972)

• Campbell, Joan
• Joy in Work, German Work: The National Debate (1989)

• Cartier, Michel
• Le travail et ses représentations (1984)

• Castel, Robert
• From Manual Workers to Wage Laborers: Transformation of the Social Question (2002)

• Cavazzini, Andrea
• "Le travail et ses spectres. Un parcours archéologique" (2017)

• Chalcraft, John T
• The Striking Cabbies of Cairo and Other Stories: Crafts and Guilds in Egypt, 1863-1914 (2004)

• Curtis, Daniel
• "Marcel van der Linden, Leo Lucassen (eds.), Working on Labor: Essays in Honor of Jan Lucassen" (2013)

• Daston, L
• "Calculation and the Division of Labor, 1750-1950" (2018)

  (p.30) In a sense, the analytical intelligence demanded by human-machine production lines for calculations was no different than the adaptations required by any mechanized manufacture: mechanical weaving looms did not operate the way human weavers did; the sequencing of human and mechanical labor in a textile factory also required breaking down tasks in new and counter-intuitive ways. In another sense, however, the analytical intelligence applied to making human machine cooperation in calculation work was a rehearsal for anactivity that would become known first as Operations Research and later computer programming.

• "Calculation and the Division of Labor, 1750-1950" (2018)

  (p.30) In a sense, the analytical intelligence demanded by human-machine production lines for calculations was no different than the adaptations required by any mechanized manufacture: mechanical weaving looms did not operate the way human weavers did; the sequencing of human and mechanical labor in a textile factory also required breaking down tasks in new and counter-intuitive ways. In another sense, however, the analytical intelligence applied to making human machine cooperation in calculation work was a rehearsal for anactivity that would become known first as Operations Research and later computer programming.

• "Calculation and the Division of Labor, 1750-1950" (2018)

• David, Paul A
• "The Dynamo and the Computer: An Historical Perspective on the Modern Productivity Paradox" (1989)

• Deranty, Jean-Philippe
• "Historical Objections to the Centrality of Work" (2015)

• Descola, Philippe
• Beyond Nature and Culture (2013)

  (p.322) Marx’s position is indicative of the more general tendency of modern thought to regard production as the element that determines the material conditions of social life and as the principal way for humans to transform nature and, by doing so, transform themselves. Whether or not one is a Marxist, it is now commonly thought that the history of humanity is primarily founded on the dynamism introduced by a succession of ways of producing use value and exchange value of the materials that the environment provides. But it is fair to question whether this preeminence ascribed to the process of productive objectivization applies generally to all societies. To be...

• Beyond Nature and Culture (2013)

  (p.323) The idea of production as the imposition of form upon inert matter is simply an attenuated expression of the schema of action that rests upon two interdependent premises: the preponderance of an individualized intentional agent as the cause of the coming- to- be of beings and things, and the radical differencebetween the ontological status of the creator and that of whatever he produces. According to the paradigm of creation- production, the subject is autonomous and his intervention in the world reflects his personal characteristics: whether he is a god, a demiurge, or a simple mortal, he produces his oeuvre according to a preestablished plan and with a defi...

• Beyond Nature and Culture (2013)

  (p.325) As a way of conceiving action on the world and a specific relationship in which a subject generates an object, production thus does not have a universal applicability. It presupposes the existence of a clearly individualized agent who projects his interiority on to indeterminate matter in order to give form to it and thus bring into existence an entity for which he alone is responsible and that he can then appropriate for his own use or exchange for other realities of the same type. Now, to return to our two examples: the production model does not correspond either to the concept of a continuous autopoietic process as...

• Ege, Ragip
• "Le concept de travail chez Friedrich Engels et ses implications éthiques et politiques" (2011)

• Eisenberger, Robert
• Blue Monday: The Loss of the Work Ethic in America (1989)

• Faitini, Tiziana
• Shaping the Profession: Towards a Genealogy of Professional Ethics (2023)

• Federici, Silvia
• Caliban and the Witch (2004)

• Foucault, Michel
• Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1979)

  (p.120) Discipline is the unitary technique by which the body is reduced as a ‘political’ force at the least cost and maximized as a useful force. The growth of a capitalist economy gave rise to the specific modality of disciplinary power, whose general formulas, techniques of submitting forces and bodies, in short, “political anatomy”, could be operated in the most diverse political regimes, apparatuses and institutions.

• Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1979)

  (p.121) in 1597 a prisoner was condemned to twelve years' imprisonment, which could be reduced to eight, if his behaviour proved satisfactory). Work was obligatory; it was performed in common (indeed the individual cell was used only as an additional punishment; prisoners slept two or three to a bed, in cells containing between four and twelve persons); and, for the work done, the prisoners received wages.

• Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1979)

  (p.150) The gradual extension of the wage-earning class brought with it a more detailed partitioning of time 'If workers arrive later than a quarter of an hour after the ringing of the bell . . .' (Amboise, article z); 'if any one of the companions is asked for during work and loses more than five minutes . . .', 'anyone who is not at his work at the correct time . . .' (Oppenheim, article 7-8). But an attempt is also made to assure the quality of the time used: constant supervision, the pressure of supervisors, the elimination of anything that...

• Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1979)

  (p.174) (Quote covering pages 174 -75)But, the disciplinary gaze did, in fact, need relays. The pyramid was able to fulfil, more efficiently than the circle, two requiremens: to be complete enough to form an uninterrupted network - consequently the possibility of multiplying its levels, and of distributing them over the entire surface to be supervised; and yet to be discreet enough not to weigh down with an inert mass on the activity to be disciplined, and not to act as a brake or an obstacle to it; to be integrated into the disciplinary mechanism as a function that increases its possible...

• Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1979)

  (p.200) (Quote covering pages 200 - 01)And this invisibility is a guarantee of order. If the inmates are convicts, there is no danger of a plot, an attempt at collective escape, the planning of new crimes for the future, bad reciprocal influences; if they are patients, there is no danger of contagion; if they are madmen there is no risk of their committing violence upon one another; if they are schoolchildren, there is no copying, no noise, no chatter, no waste of time; if they are workers, there are no disorders, no theft, no coalitions, none of those distractions that slow...

• Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1979)

  (p.202) A real subjection is born mechanicalty from a fictitious relation. So it is not necessary to use force to constrain the convict to good behaviour, the madman to calm, the worker to work, the schoolboy to application, the patient to the observation of the regulations.

• Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1979)

  (p.203) With this exception, the Panopticon also does the work of a naturalist. It makes it possible to draw up differences: among patients, to observe the symptoms of each individual, without the proximity of beds, the circulation of miasmas, the effects of contagion confusing the clinical tables; among schoolchildren, it makes it possible to observe performances (without there being any imitation or copying), to map aptitudes, to assess characters, to draw up rigorous classifications and, in relation to normal development, to distinguish 'laziness and stubbornness' from 'incurable imbecility'; among workers, it makes it possible to note the aptitudes of each worker,...

• Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1979)

  (p.205) It is polyvalent in its applications; it serves to reform prisoners, but also to treat patients, to instruct schoolchildren, to confine the insane, to supervise workers, to put beggars and idlers to work. It is a type of location of bodies in space, of distribution of individuals in relation to one another, of hierarchical organization, of disposition of centres and channels of power, of definition of the instruments and modes of intervention of power, which can be implemented in hospitals, workshops, schools, prisons. Whenever one is dealing with a multiplicity of individuals on whom a task or a particular form...

• Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1979)

  (p.215) Discipline' may be identified neither with an institution nor with an apparatus; it is a type of power, a modality for its exercise, comprising a whole set of instruments, techniques, procedures, levels of application, targets; it is a 'physics' or an 'anatomy' of power, a technology. And it may be taken over either by 'specialized' institutions (the penitentiaries or 'houses of correction' of the nineteenth century), or by institutions that use it as an essential instrument for a particular end (schools, hospitals), or by pre-existing authorities that find in it a means of reinforcing or reorganizing their internal mechanisms of...

• Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1979)

  (p.232) This 'self-evident' character of the prison, which we find so difficult to abandon, is based first of all on the simple form of 'deprivation of liberty'. How could prison not be the penalry par excellcnce in a society in which liberty is a good that belongs to all in the same way and to which each individual is attached, as Dupon put it, by a 'universal and constant' feelingl lts loss has therefore the same value for all; unlike tlrc 6ne, it is an 'egalitarian' punishment. The prison is the clearest, simplest, most equitable of penalties. Moreover, it makes it...

• Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1979)

  (p.233) For the prison has a purpose, which is laid down at the outset: 'The law inflicting penalties, some of which are more serious than others, cannot allow the individual condemned to light penalties to be imprisoned in the same place as the criminal condemned to more serious penalties .. . although the penalty fixed by the law has as its principal aim the reparation of the crime, it also desires the amendment of the guilty man' (Real, 244). And this transformation must be one of the internal effects of imprisonment. Prison-punishment, prison-apparatus: 'The order that must reign in the maison...

• Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1979)

  (p.240) Several polemics that took place under the Restoration and the July Monarchy throw light on the function attributed to penal labour. First, there was the debate on the subject of wages. The labour of prisoners was remunerated in France. This posed a problem: if work in prison is remunerated, that work cannot really form part ofthe penalty; and the prisoner may therefore refuse to perform it. Moreover, wages reward the skill of the worker and not the improvement of the convict: 'The worst subjects are almost everywhere the most skilful workers' they are the most highly remunerated, consequently the most...

• Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1979)

  (p.241) There were strikes against the prison workshops: when a Chaumont glove-maker succeeded in organizing a workshop at Clairvaux, the workers protested, declared that their labour was dishonoured, occupied the manufactory and forced the employer to abandon his project (cf. Aguet, 3o-3r). There was also a widespread press campaign in the workers' newspapers: on the theme that the government encouraged penal labour in order to reduce 'free'wagesl on the theme that the inconveniences of these prison workshops were even more evident for women, who were thus deprived of their labour, driven to prostitution and therefore to prison, where these same women,...

• Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1979)

  (p.242) Penal labour cannot be criticized for any unemployment it may give rise to: with its limited extent, and its low output, it cannot have a general effect on the economy. It is intrinsically useful, not as an activity of production, but by virtue of the effect it has on the human mechanism. It is a principle of order and regularity; through the demands that it imposes, it conveys, imperceptibly, the forms of a rigorous power; it bends bodies to regular movements, it excludes agitation and distraction, it imposes a hierarchy and a surveillance that are all the more accepted, and...

• Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1979)

  (p.244) The length of the penalty must not be a measurement of the 'exchange value' of the offencel it must be adjusted to the 'useful' transformation of the inmate during his term of imprisonment. It is not a timemeasure, but a time finalized. The form of the operation, rather than the form of the wages.

• Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1979)

  (p.285) Erecting the barrier to separate delinquents from all the lower strata of the population from which they sprang and with which they remained linked has been a difficult task, especially no doubt in urban milieux. It has been a long and arduous undertaking. It has involved the use of the general principles of the 'moralization' of the poorer classes that elsewhere has had such crucial importance both from an economic and a political point of view (the acquisition of what might be called a 'basic legalism', which was indispensable from the time when custom was replaced by the system of...

• Gellner, Ernest
• Plough, sword, and book: The structure of human history (1989)

• Gini, Al
• My Job, My Self: Work and the Creation of the Modern Individual (2013)

• Gordon, Robert J
• The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War (2017)

• Gutman, Herbert George
• The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925 (1976)

• Hamacher, Werner
• "Arbeiten Durcharbeiten" (2002)

• Harley, Sharon
• "Speaking up: The Politics of Black Women's Labor History" (1997)

• Hartsock, Nancy C M
• Money, Sex, and Power: Toward a Feminist Historical Materialism (1983)

• Harvey, David
• A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005)

• Hobsbawm, Eric
• Workers: Worlds of Labour (1984)

• Age Of Revolution: 1789-1848 (2010)

• Hobsbawm, Eric J; Hobsbawm, Eric John Hobsbawm
• Labouring Men: Studies in the History of Labour (1964)

• Hobsbawm, Eric John
• Worlds of Labour: Further Studies in the History of Labour (1910)

• Hunnicutt, Benjamin Kline
• "The Jewish Sabbath Movement in the Early Twentieth Century" (1979)

• Hélène, D’almeida-Topor; Monique, Lakroum; Spittler, Gerd
• Le travail en Afrique noire - Représentations et pratiques à l'époque contemporaine (2003)

• Jacques, Rancière
• Proletarian Nights: The Workers' Dream in Nineteenth-Century France (2012)

• Jacques, Roy
• Manufacturing the Employee: Management Knowledge from the 19th to 21st Centuries (1995)

• Just, Daniel
• "The Invention of Work in Modernity: Hegel, Marx, and Weber" (2017)

• Kessler-Harris, Alice
• A Woman's Wage: Historical Meanings and Social Consequences (1990)

• Lelle, Nikolas
• "Firm im Führen: Das „Harzburger Modell“ und eine (Nachkriegs-)Geschichte deutscher Arbeit" (2016)

• "Arbeit und Nationalsozialismus: Überlegungen zu Kontinuität und Bruch einer wirkmächtigen, deutschen Tradition" (2017)

• Lis, Catharina
• The Idea of Work in Europe from Antiquity to Modern Times (2016)

• Lis, Catharina; Soly, Hugo
• Worthy Efforts: Attitudes to Work and Workers in Pre-Industrial Europe (2012)

• Lucassen, Jan
• "A Multinational and its Labor Force: The Dutch East India Company, 1595–1795" (2004)

• Global Labour History: A State of the Art (2008)

• The Story of Work: A New History of Humankind (2021)

• Lucassen, Jan; De Moor, Tine; van Zanden, Jan Luiten
• "The return of the guilds: Towards a global history of the guilds in pre-industrial times" (2008)

• The Return of the Guilds: Volume 16 (2009)

• Lytle, Ephraim
• A Cultural History of Work in Antiquity (2018)

• Marx, Karl
• Grundrisse (1973)

  (p.202) capitalism’s historic destiny is fulfilled as soon as, on one side, there has been such a development of needs that surplus labour above and beyond necessity has itself become a general need arising out of individual needs themselves – and, on the other side, when the severe discipline of capital, acting on succeeding generations, has developed general industriousness as the general property of the new species.

• Mercure, Daniel; Spurk, Jan
• Le travail dans l'histoire de la pensée occidentale (2003)

• Mies, Maria
• Patriarchy and Accumulation On A World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour (1986)

• Murphy, Emily C; Oesch, Daniel
• "Is Employment Polarisation Inevitable? Occupational Change in Ireland and Switzerland, 1970–2010" (2018)

• Negri, Antonio
• Filosofia del lavoro: storia antologica (1980)

• Ness, Immanuel; Azzellini, Dario
• Ours to Master and to Own: Workers' Control from the Commune to the Present (2011)

• Pavsek, Christopher
• "History and Obstinacy: Negt and Kluge's Redemption of Labor" (1996)

• Pinard, Rolande
• La révolution du travail: de l'artisan au manager (2000)

• Pollard, Sidney; Salt, John
• Robert Owen, Prophet of the Poor: Essays in Honour of the Two Hundredth Anniversary of His Birth (1971)

• Rabinbach, Anson
• "From Idleness to Fatigue" (1990)

• The Eclipse of the Utopias of Labor (2018)

• Rancière, Jacques
• Proletarian Nights: The Workers' Dream in Nineteenth-century France (2012)

• Rebérioux, Madeleine
• "Les Ouvriers Du Livre Devant L'innovation Technologique. Esquisse D'une Réflexion" (1986)

• Roediger, David R
• The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (1991)

• Rye, Gill; Browne, Victoria; Giorgio, Adalgisa; Jeremiah, Emily; Six, Abigail Lee
• Motherhood in Literature and Culture: Interdisciplinary Perspectives from Europe (2018)

• Schatz, Holger; Woeldike, Andrea
• Freiheit und Wahn deutscher Arbeit: zur historischen Aktualität einer folgenreichen antisemitischen Projektion (2001)

• Schleuning, Neala
• Idle Hands and Empty Hearts: Work and Freedom in the United States (1990)

• Simonton, Deborah; Montenach, Anne; Lytle, Ephraim; Garver, Valerie Louise; De Munck, Bert; Safley, Thomas Max; Thompson, Victoria Elizabeth; Walkowitz, Daniel J
• A Cultural History of Work (2019)

• Smith, V O; Smith, Y S
• "Bias, history, and the protestant work ethic" (2011)

  (p.287) The histories agree that Luther gave secular value to work by his teachings about “calling.” Calvin then enlarged the idea of “calling” into what eventually became the PWE by convincing his followers that hard work was a means of gaining wealth for God’s glory as well as a means of salvation. This ennobled work and made it necessary for human development.

• "Bias, history, and the protestant work ethic" (2011)

  (p.288) The point is that the “historical facts” asserted in the organizational literature appear to have emerged from a complex interaction of facts, values and interests as interpreted through a specific ideology. For example, many work histories echo Engels’ (1895) argument that the early Hebrews thought mankind was doomed to work as a penalty for the fall of Adam and Eve. That rationale is found in Genesis 3:17 “Cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it” (Erikson, 1990; Nord et al., 1990). However, earlier in Genesis, the Hebrew writers discuss God working in the act...

• Sutherland, Gillian
• In Search of the New Woman: Middle-Class Women and Work in Britain 1870–1914 (2015)

• Vogel, Lise
• "Their Own Work: Two Documents from the Nineteenth-Century Labor Movement" (1976)

• Voß, G Günter
• "Kapitel I Arbeit als Grundlage menschlicher Existenz: Was ist Arbeit? Zum Problem eines allgemeinen Arbeitsbegriffs" (2010)

• Vöing, Nerea
• Arbeit und Melancholie: Kulturgeschichte und Narrative in der Gegenwartsliteratur (2019)

• Wildt, M
• "Der Begriff der Arbeit bei Hitler" (2014)

• van Haute, Bernadette
• "Ryckaert at work: A Flemish painter's view of labour" (2008)

  (p.16) In his portrayal of labour, Ryckaert applied a formula derived from his paintings of drinking, smoking, courting and gambling peasants. However, like the works of his colleagues in the Northern Netherlands,37 his paintings of artisans’ workshop interiors must be interpreted as expressions of the early modern civic virtue of industry and diligence (De Vries 2003:135). In the earlier representations which are still rooted in traditional iconography related to the peasantry, the milieu of the craftsman is openly subjected to criticism. The artisan himself, on the other hand, is always seen at work, the focus being on the process of labour,...

• "Ryckaert at work: A Flemish painter's view of labour" (2008)