The Second World War: Remaking the British Working Class?

2021 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 133-143
Author(s):  
Richard Croucher
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Industrial Relations ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Joint Production ◽  
British Society ◽  
World War ◽  
Gender Hierarchies ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Post War ◽  
Second World

In the post-war years, to the 1970s, most historians’ verdict on the Second World War was abundantly clear: it represented a watershed in social and political relations, shifting Britain in a social-democratic and more egalitarian direction. In more recent years, this verdict has increasingly been called into question. Some historians began to judge the war’s results, especially in terms of the flattening of social and gender hierarchies, to have been considerably exaggerated. Geoffrey G. Field has produced a sizeable, detailed and well-produced work which reaffirms the judgements of the ‘war as dramatic watershed’ school. He synthesizes much of the work on British society and the working class in the Second World War, interspersed with analysis of the vast holdings of The National Archives, the Mass Observation Archive, as well as film and literary sources. This review focuses on industrial relations, particularly the arms industries: where unionization, collective bargaining and workplace union organization were transformed. Joint production committees, however, proved ephemeral.

scholarly journals Punkty, czyli złuda modernizacji

2018 ◽  
Vol 62 (1) ◽  
pp. 265-271
Author(s):  
Marcin Kula
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Historical Sociology ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Class Origin ◽  
Post War ◽  
The University ◽  
Second World

The author’s remarks on Agata Zysiak’s book Punkty za pochodzenie. Powojenna modernizacja i uniwersytet w robotniczym mieście [Points for Class Origin: Post-War Modernization and the University in a Working-Class City] (2016) primarily concern the question of social advance through education and Zysiak’s outline of this process in Poland after the Second World War. As a participant of that process — first as a student, and later as a teacher — the author suggests that it should be viewed from the perspective of historical sociology.

Life stories: biography and creativity

2020 ◽  
pp. 21-44
Author(s):  
Paul Thompson ◽  
Ken Plummer ◽  
Neli Demireva
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Social Changes ◽  
Key Factors ◽  
World War ◽  
War Experiences ◽  
And Gender ◽  
University Expansion ◽  
Second World

This chapter traces the engine of the pioneers' success and discusses their earlier lives, hinting or reflecting on how these experiences may have shaped their research. It begins by analyzing how the pioneers' were influenced by the communities where they grew up. Looking at the pioneers' families as a whole, even though this generation for which unprecedented university expansion brought rare opportunities for upward mobility, the chapter examines the pioneers' working-class families and old Oxbridge intellectual aristocracy. It notes that some of the key factors which brought them opportunities were due to national social changes and international events. The chapter also looks at how the older generation generally benefitted from Second World War experiences that took them out of their social-class cocoon. The chapter then discusses the pioneers who chose to explore other cultures rather than to research their own communities. It emphasizes social class injustice, racism, and gender injustice.

War and Gender

2020 ◽  
pp. 633-676
Author(s):  
Karen Hagemann ◽  
Sonya O. Rose
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Collapse Of Communism ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Post War ◽  
Complex Features ◽  
Global Cold War ◽  
Second World

The chapter focuses on the development from the Global Cold War and anticolonial struggle to the global conflicts of the post–Cold War period. It first provides an overview of the complex features of a period that starts in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War with the challenges of the aftermath of the conflict and a post war reordering of economies, societies and national and international politics, and continues with the rise of the Global Cold War and the spread of the Wars of Decolonization in Asia and Africa that led to the decline of European empires. Then it explores the consequences of the collapse of communism, the end of the Global Cold War, and the proliferation of Wars of Globalization along with new forms of humanitarianism and peacekeeping. In the last section, it discusses the research by gender scholars from different disciplines on the Global Cold War and the Wars of Globalization and their attempts to rewrite mainstream narratives.

Reconstruction and restoration: the legacies of post-war German Industrial Sociology

2016 ◽  
Vol 30 (6) ◽  
pp. 1017-1029 ◽  
Author(s):  
Holm-Detlev Köhler
Keyword(s):  
Social Research ◽  
Industrial Relations ◽  
Work Organization ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Institutional Settings ◽  
Intellectual Traditions ◽  
Post War ◽  
Second World ◽  
High Skill

The article reconstructs the re-birth of Industrial Sociology in Germany after the Second World War in a comparative perspective. Although sharing the main context conditions and maintaining a constant and fluent exchange with their colleagues in other countries, the German intellectual traditions and specific institutional context motivated several particular interests and perspectives that shape a distinct German Industrial Sociology until today. The dominance of qualitative in-depth research, the focus on the emancipative potentials in high-skill-based work organization, the cooperative industrial relations tradition and the constant attempts to link employment studies with general social theory on modern capitalist society and social change characterize German Industrial Sociology. The richness of distinct national institutional settings for comparative social research on employment regimes may be another lesson to be learned from critical reconstruction of labour sociology.

scholarly journals The inclusion of Brazilian flight female nurses in the second world war: challenges and achievements

2017 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mariane Bonfante Cesário Lourenço ◽  
Cecília Maria Izidoro Pinto ◽  
Osnir Claudiano da Silva Junior ◽  
Lúcia Helena Silva Corrêa Lourenço ◽  
Graciele Oroski Paes ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Air Force ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Historical Study ◽  
World War ◽  
Historical Method ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Post War ◽  
Gender Boundaries ◽  
Female Nurses ◽  
Second World

Abstract Objectives: To describe the circumstances of inclusion of female nurses in the Second World War through the Brazilian Air Force, and discuss the challenges faced by and the achievements of these nurses. Methods: Socio-historical study developed with textual and photographic sources, in addition to oral sources through interviews with war veterans. Data were treated according to the historical method and discussed with concepts support from the theory of social world, by Pierre Bourdieu. Results: The research has demonstrated that the inclusion of female nurses to the Air Force was characterized by social and symbolic effects of war demands and gender boundaries. Conclusion: The great challenge was the official incorporation of women by the Brazilian Air Forces in the post-war period. For this purpose, the organization of a flight female nurses cadre during the conflict was fundamental. Moreover, the record of this history reiterates the Nursing's legacy and the necessity of preparation for care in chaos situations.

‘Everybody's Lonesome for Somebody’: age, the body and experience in the music of Hank Williams

Popular Music ◽  
1990 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 259-274 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Leppert ◽  
George Lipsitz
Keyword(s):  
Turning Point ◽  
Second World War ◽  
The Body ◽  
Political Struggle ◽  
World War ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Post War ◽  
Historical Moment ◽  
Second World

Houston Baker locates the blues at the crossroads of lack and desire, at the place where the hurts of history encounter determined resistance from people who know they are entitled to something better (Baker 1984, pp. 7, 150). Like the blues singers from whom he learned so much, Hank Williams (1923 to 1953) spent a lot of time at that particular intersection. There he met others whose own struggles informed and shaped his music. Williams's voice expressed the contradictions of his historical moment – post Second World War America – a time when diverse currents of resistance to class, race and gender oppressions flowed together to form a contradictory, but nonetheless real, unity of opposites. Standing at a crossroads in history, at a fundamental turning point for relationships between men and women, whites and blacks, capital and labour, Williams's songs about heartbreak and failed personal relations indentified the body and the psyche as crucial terrains of political struggle in the post-war era.

Slovenia: neo-corporatism under the neo-liberal turn

2018 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 709-724 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miroslav Stanojevic
Keyword(s):  
Industrial Relations ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Wage Policy ◽  
Average Growth ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Democratic Capitalism ◽  
Transitional Processes ◽  
Post War ◽  
Second World

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to reveal the formation and development of Slovenia’s neo-corporatist industrial relations system in the 1990s, and its change which overlaps with Slovenia’s accession to the EU and the eurozone. Design/methodology/approach The approach is based on the presumption that the transitional processes engaged in by the societies of “real socialism” were merely part of a larger and deeper transition – the great recommodification of the post-war decommodified societies of European democratic capitalism. Findings Already by the mid-1990s, the Slovenian industrial relations system contained all key features of the neo-corporatist regimes emerging after the Second World War in the European systems of democratic capitalism. Like those systems, in the 1990s Slovenia also saw a system being formed of political exchanges based on wage restraint policy. The combination of this wage policy and appropriate national monetary policy facilitated the Slovenian economy’s competitiveness and above-average growth. Slovenia was a success story. Originality/value The Slovenian system started to change in the middle of the last decade. The trigger of this change was Slovenia’s entry to the eurozone. Since then, Slovenian neo-corporatism has been subject to systematic deregulation. Despite this, the analysis suggests the Slovenian industrial relations system still contains a coordinating mechanism that distinguishes it from other “post-communist”, and, generally speaking, liberal market economies.

Revisiting Southam Street: Class, Generation, Gender, and Race in the Photography of Roger Mayne

2014 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 453-496 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Brooke
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Line Of Sight ◽  
Class Identity ◽  
World War ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Second World ◽  
Urban Working

AbstractThis article examines pictures taken by the British photographer Roger Mayne of Southam Street, London, in the 1950s and 1960s. It explores these photographs as a way of thinking about the representation of urban, working-class life in Britain after the Second World War. The article uses this focused perspective as a line of sight on a broader landscape: the relationship among class, identity, and social change in the English city after the Second World War. Mayne's photographs of Southam Street afford an examination of the representation of economic and social change in the postwar city and, not least, the intersections among class, race, generation, and gender that reshaped that city.

Employment, Selection and Training Procedures in Australian Manufacturing, 1940-1960

1991 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 178-195 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Wright
Keyword(s):  
Manufacturing Industry ◽  
Industrial Relations ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Employment Selection ◽  
Post War ◽  
Personnel Practice ◽  
Second World ◽  
And Training

While contertrporary Australian industrial relations studies are focusing increasingly on the workplace, our understanding of the historical development of workplace industrial relations remains hazy. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the area of workplace labour management, and the role of the personnel manager. This paper seeks to rectify this neglect by analyzing the origins and development of the personnel function in manufacturing industry since the Second World War. Personnel initiatives in the areas of employment, selection and training are examined. The paper concludes that, while a tight post-war labour market provided a general impetus for the more widespread use of specialist personnel work, the nature of personnel practice varied widely between firms.

Boys Will Be Boys: Working-Class Masculinities in the Age of Mass Production

2006 ◽  
Vol 69 (1) ◽  
pp. 6-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Craig Heron
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Mass Production ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Male Body ◽  
World War ◽  
Half Century ◽  
Attitudes And Practices ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Second World ◽  
Over Time

This article investigates the changing construction of masculine identities among working-class males in a large Canadian factory city, Hamilton, Ontario, in the half century before the Second World War. It argues that, long before individual working men embraced the patriarchal identity of breadwinner and head of family, they had learned and practiced how to be “masculine” in family homes, schools, city streets, workplaces, and pleasure sites. The result was a complex bundle of contradictory attitudes and practices in which the processes of class, ethnic/racial, and gender formation were closely interwoven and in which the male body became a crucial vehicle for expressing gender. The article stresses that working-class masculinities were not fixed, static, or universal, but shaped in specific ways in different contexts and subject to challenges and re-negotiation over time. In the period under study here, working-class males faced new forms of institutional regulation in schools, workplaces, streets, and military trenches, the commercialization of many of their pleasures, and new independence and assertiveness in the pubic sphere among the women of their communities. Negotiating these challenges brought both continuities and significant changes in masculine identities.

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