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Labour History: The Old, the New and the Global

2007; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 66; Issue: 2-3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/00020180701482636

1469-2872

Marcel van der Linden,

Labor Movements and Unions

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. The terms Old and New Labour History seem to have been invented in the United States of America around 1970 (see Krueger 1971 Krueger, Th. A. 1971. American Labor Historiography, Old and New: A Review Essay. Journal of Social History, 4: 277–85. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). A kind of codification of the distinction can be found in Brody 1979 Brody, D. 1979. The Old Labour History and the New: In Search of an American Working Class. Labour History, 20(Winter): 111–26. [Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]. 2. That it is possible to build a well-functioning archive with modest financial means is shown by the example of the VV Giri National Labour Institute in Noida, India. 3. This does not mean that they were identified with each other. Rather they often functioned as counter-poles, as in Germany around 1848, when the concept of 'society' was used to show one's opposition to the state. 4. The inventor of this expression seems to have been the Singaporean diplomat Kishore Mahbubani (see Mahbubani 1992 Mahbubani, K. 1992. The West and the Rest. The National Interest, : 3–13. Summer [Google Scholar]). 5. Nisbet noted that Eurocentrism (at that time still called Ethnocentrism) is symbolised according to a biological metaphor of growth and development: societies are a bit like plants, emerging from seed and then developing into mature organisms. This growth metaphor is based on at least five additional assumptions: 'This meant, in the first place, that change is normally continuous. That is, each identifiable condition of a thing, be it a tree, a man, or a culture, is to be understood as having grown out of a preceding condition of that same thing. Second, large changes are to be understood as the cumulative, as well as incremental consequence of a host of small changes. Third, social change is characterized by differentiation. Precisely as the seed or fertilized germ cell is marked by differentiation and variegation of function and form in its history, so is the human culture or institution similarly marked by this kind of manifestation over time. Fourth, change of a developmental sort is regarded as caused for the most part by some persisting, uniform property or set of properties. From the doctrine of uniformity came the belief that social conflict, cooperation, geographic location, race, or any of the other alleged causes so richly strewn across the pages of social history, is the prime and continuing cause of all development. Fifth, it is clear that in all of these theories of social development a kind of teleology is present. Always there is some 'end' in view. The 'end' is conceived 'in purely Western terms'. (Nisbet 1971 Nisbet, R. 1971. "Ethnocentrism and the Comparative Method". In Essays on Modernization of Underdeveloped Societies, Edited by: Desai, A. R. volume one, 95–114. Bombay: Thacker and Co. [Google Scholar]:100)