Expanding class: power and everyday politics in industrial communities, The Netherlands, 1850-1950

Abstract

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 Europe'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 labour 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 industrialisation, locality, and cultural class identities. Expanding Class compares Brabant's quaint central shoemaking district to its electrical boomtown Eindhoven, home of the enormous Philips Corporation. It introduces the concept of 'flexible familism,' a sociological phenomenon manipulated and fostered by industrialists in order to facilitate cheap and ample labour, one that employed the family daughters in order 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 thought - cultural and economic - that have dominated labour history discussions in recent years. A major contribution not only to Western European labour and social history but also to contemporary debates about the utility and vitality of 'class' as a concept, Expanding Class will be provocative reading for labour historians, economists, sociologists, anthropologists, geographers, and scholars of Dutch or European history.