Recasting Labor History: A Response to Philip Scranton

Abstract

In his imaginative and ambitious essay, Philip Scranton urges labor historians to reorganize their approach to labor history by placing technology, specifically labor process technology, at the center of their research. He argues that doing so will reorient the way we conceptualize labor history. It will cut across industry and occupation designations, demonstrate the interplay of different factors affecting capitalist development, and expand our analyses into important new areas. It will shed light on the social worlds created in the workplace; provide a new view of entrepreneurs' broad concerns, including markets and product differentiation; lead us to focus on patterns of accumulation; link broad structures with concrete social practice ; stress diversity; point out contingencies; add the concept of space to that of time; and offer new ways to explore labor militancy and activism. Scranton's essay is rich in suggestions for future research, and its enthusiasm is infectious. It also poses a fundamental question ?what is our objective in studying labor history? Is the subject workers, capitalist development, power?or all three? Is labor history a valid field of inquiry or is it meaningful only as part of a larger industrial history? Although the essay offers a valuable start for reshaping and recasting our thinking about labor history, its approach is still incomplete. Rather than providing a singularly superior approach, as much of the essay implies, the concentration on labor process technologies stands as an additional and very revealing way to view capitalist development and the history of working people. What we need, however, is an even more broadly integrative approach, one that takes into account time, place, and technology, but does not bracket technolo gy apart from the social relationships, particularly those of gender and race, that fundamentally define and explain it. And while it is necessary to acknowledge the complexity of capitalist enterprise and the multiplicity of employers' concerns, it is important not to do so at the expense of muting the politics and power of class relations or idealizing craft production. I will return to these considerations, but first let me review some of the essay's central arguments and contributions. Scranton asks historians to deconstruct the accepted account of industrializa tion and labor degradation of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and look instead at the differentiation of workplace technical relations. He correctly points out that studying the dominion of bulk/mass production housed in standardizing corporations will not fully reveal the complex story of capitalist