Synopses & Reviews
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 Europeandrsquo;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 Brabantandrsquo;s quaint central shoemaking district to its electrical boomtown Eindhoven, home of the enormous Philips Corporation. It introduces the concept of andquot;flexible familism,andquot; 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 thoughtandmdash;cultural and economicandmdash;that have dominated labor history discussions in recent years.
Review
andquot;Don Kalb has taken a boisterous series of excursions into North Brabantandrsquo;s modern history and come back with important news concerning ways of understanding economic change, class, and social experience.andquot;andmdash;Charles Tilly, Columbia University
Review
andquot;Don Kalb has put labor history back on the cutting edge of methodological innovation.andquot;andmdash;William M. Reddy, Duke University
Synopsis
A unique study of economic change, class and social experience in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the industrial Netherlands.
Description
Includes bibliographical references (p. [317]-332) and index.
About the Author
Don Kalb is Assistant Professor of Social Sciences at the University of Utrecht.