Description
Book Synopsis Searching for a job has been an everyday affair in both modern and past societies, and employment a concern for both individuals and institutions. The case studies in this volume investigate job search and placement practices in European countries, Australia, and India in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The contributors explore how looking for work becomes a means by which participants (individuals, placement agents, trade unions, municipalities, administrations, state authorities, and schools) articulated specific interests, perspectives, and agendas. Taking an exploratory approach, the chapters illustrate different approaches to the history of employment and job searching, ranging from organizational and regulatory histories to the analysis of practices and autobiographical accounts. In the process, they uncover the interrelations of search practices and attempts to arrange placement services.
Trade Review “The editors should be applauded for going some way towards re-orienting historical research from the well-established focus on nascent systems of public labour intermediation to show the continuous persistence of older forms of labour recruitment and social classification as well as the precarious economic and bureaucratic conditions upon which public offices operated.” • H-Soz-Kult
“This collection has the great merit of having chosen an interesting and socio-politically topical theme which, up to now, has been paid little attention by historians… No doubt, it represents a first insightful step towards a phenomenon still to be researched more extensively.” • Sehepunkte
“[This book] offers a valuable overview of the histories of job mediation in Europe from the late 19th century onwards. It shows different trajectories that are predicated upon different types of state interference or abstinence from economic life, national trajectories of labour movements, and the trajectories of organisation of labour placement over time. For anyone who wants to get a proper understanding of the working of labour markets in modern Europe this work is a potential ‘must read.’” • Ulbe Bosma, International Institute of Social History
“…the book provides insight into job-search and job-placement institutions and practices….The entire enterprise is predicated on providing, for the very first time, a transnational view of job-placement issues, with a focus on the turn of the 19th century. Another point of interest is combining the study of institutions and individuals. This multi-level approach is quite an original and promising one…” • Bénédicte Zimmermann, EHESS
Table of Contents List of Illustrations
Introduction: Finding Work and Organizing Placement in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
Sigrid Wadauer, Thomas Buchner, Alexander Mejstrik
Chapter 1. Organizing the Market? Labour Offices and Labour Markets in Germany, 1890-1933
Thomas Buchner
Chapter 2. Between Labour Market Constituencies: The Struggles to Establish Vocational Counselling in Weimar Germany
David Meskill
Chapter 3. Organizing Labour Markets: the British Experience
Noel Whiteside
Chapter 4. Creating a National Labour Market: Public Labour Exchanges in Sweden, 1890-1920
Nils Edling
Chapter 5. Mediation, Allocation, Control: Trade Unions and the Changing Faces of Labour Market Intermediation in Western Europe in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries
Ad Knotter
Chapter 6. Labour Intermediation, Uncertain Employment and the Bourses du Travail in Late Nineteenth Century France
Malcolm Mansfield
Chapter 7. Transforming Soldiers into Workers. The Austrian Employment Agency for Disabled Veterans During the First World War
Verena Pawlowsky, Harald Wendelin
Chapter 8. The Usage of Public Labour Offices by Job Seekers in Interwar Austria
Irina Vana
Chapter 9. A Vocation in the Family Household? Household Integration, Professionalization and Changes of Positions in Domestic Service (Austria, 1918-1938)
Jessica Richter
Chapter 10. Tramping in Search of Work. Practices of Wayfarers and of Authorities (Austria, 1880–1938)
Sigrid Wadauer
Chapter 11. Labour Mediation Among Seasonal Workers, Particularly the Lippe Brickmakers, 1650-1900
Piet Lourens, Jan Lucassen
Chapter 12. Sardars, Kanganies and Maistries: Intermediaries in the Indian Labour Diaspora During the Colonial Period
Amit Kumar Mishra
Chapter 13. ‘Organizing the Labour Market’ in a Liberal Welfare State: The Origins of the Public Employment Service in Australia
Anthony O’Donnell
Concluding Remarks
Sigrid Wadauer, Thomas Buchner, Alexander Mejstrik
Notes on Contributors
Index
