David Montgomery in Brazil

Abstract

David Montgomery's semester as a Fulbright lecturer at the State University of Campinas, Brazil, in 1986 proved quite memorable. Bela Bianca, a member of the anthropology department who had known David and Marty when she was on a postdoctoral grant at Yale, made the initial contacts. A few specialists here had read Workers' Control in America at the time, but his work was not yet widely known in Brazil. However, questions about the labor process and control over production had become subjects of lively academic debate, largely on the basis of works by social scientists. The labor historians then being read were primarily French and British.