Craft Organization Research Articles

Desenvolvimento Regional de Redes Organizacionais de Produção Artesanal e Racionalidade Sócio-Econômica

The central hypothesis of this study is that business decisions made in the build-up of craft production to meet a specific market expansion changes production system currently threatening the differences in their outputs, that is, of their goods before the similar products in the industry capitalist. To understand the extent of the transformation under way in this production system we will examine the rationality of organizational actors and how it pervades the social reality that stimulates and limits their options for action. The dynamics of bureaucracy aimed to meet its growing demand for craft products, which has resulted in standardization of their outputs and the formation of a social network to enable mass production. The characterization of the craft organization and its specificity, which is the result of organizational development of the production system and the social transformations that were driven by economics in this production system, which before they are social and economic influence that the purpose and usefulness of decisions. It will discuss how the organization and institution in the city scale analysis as a link between economic reality and an aspiration of individual and collective survival.

Becoming a baker in the Ottoman town of Rodosçuk (1546-1552): A textual analysis of the records of designation

AbstractIn the history of Ottoman institutions, their roots in a “timeless Islamic culture and mentality” have been emphasized to such an extent that Ottoman state institutions appear as perfectly defined and applied ideals and myths rather than real entities. The myth of Ottoman guilds controlling all of the empires economic activities is one of these. As court records, which show the details of the guilds' functioning, as well as other relevant records have been examined more often after the 1980s, a new image of institutional change has emerged, and the myth of continuity has been challenged. For the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, numerous sources demonstrate transformations in various local guilds; however, for the first half of the sixteenth century, from which scarcer records have survived, it is more difficult to disprove the myth of the guilds' static nature. In this study, I analyze the court records of Rodosçuk in order to explicate the type of changes that occurred in craft organizations between 1546 and 1552. The textual analysis of the designation records of bakers and other documents concerning the crafts help to bring to light modifications to the conditions of membership of the bakers' guild by 1551, challenging the assumed myth of the monopoly over membership, or the professional restrictions on crafts.

Aristocracies of Labor: Craft Unionism, Immigration, and Working-Class Households in West Oakland, California

Within the railroad industry, the most powerful labor unions were exclusive craft organizations that concentrated on defending the privileges of a few skilled workers. Data from archaeological work conducted by Sonoma State University during the Cypress Freeway Replacement Project is used in an historical materialist exploration of class-consciousness among railroad workers in a late-19th-century working-class neighborhood in West Oakland, California. Comparing aspects of diet and dining, this study focuses on divisions among the railroad workers along the lines of craft-skill and nativity, examining the ways skilled craft unionists used the assumptions of Victorian ideology to organize against both their employers and other groups of workers, especially immigrants.

Toronto 1919

In their examination of the conflicts which followed the First World War, Canadian labour historians have tended to draw a sharp dichotomy between a “radical” west and a “conservative” east. Events in Toronto, however, which brought the city to the edge of a general sympathetic strike in late May 1919 cannot be explained in this way. The most notable feature of the Toronto labour movement was the degree of polarization within it. The potential clearly existed for a break with past forms of craft organization, towards a highly politicized industrial unionism. A powerful left wing, with wide support among newly organized, less-skilled workers, as well as workers with an immediate need for new forms of organization, was rapidly gaining dominance in the central bodies of the Toronto labour movement. Opposing them were the major beneficiaries of previous waves of organizing. These consisted, on the one hand, of union leaders who had helped shape the Toronto labour movement, and found key places for themselves within it. On the other hand, it also included a large number of workers who had established a stable bargaining relationship with employers, and a stake in the benefits their organizations had given them. This division meant that, from the outset, the possibilities for the establishment of a “One Big Union” did not exist, despite the enthusiasm that the western movement initially generated in Toronto. Conservative unions and leaders lost their dominance within the city's central union bodies but, by foiling the sympathetic general strike, were able to prevent the radicals from implementing an alternative strategy.

Creativity, celebration and play at the Bauhaus, Berlin, 1920: lessons from history for contemporary marketers and arts organizations

Abstract Organizations can be seen as rigid, rewarding conformity not creativity. Managing the creative team or individual can be challenging. This paper contributes to this special issue of the International Journal of Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Marketing by addressing ways to manage creativity in an organization, as well as to creatively market the organization. It presents a case study of an organization based in Germany in the 1920s, the Bauhaus. This art and craft organization achieved extraordinary creative output in just over a decade of operation, during the devastation of post World War I. This paper demonstrates how its leader managed the creativity of the staff and students and creatively marketed the organization despite a lack of funds and the desperate shortage of resources. The Bauhaus provides a key lesson for contemporary marketers and managers in developing the characteristics of organizations that nurture creativity and the creative individual. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Mycenaean Beads: Gender and Social Contexts

Although Mycenaean burial customs and the absence of written sources make many questions about beads unanswerable, nonetheless there is some evidence, or room for speculation, about who wore beads, how they were worn, uses other than as jewellery, relations to seals and amulets and spindle whorls and textiles, their materials and sources and their part in long‐distance and other cultural contacts,colours and the possible significance of them, manufacturing processes and craft organization, symbolic values of relief‐bead motifs, beads as rank‐ or status‐markers. Gender roles and differences are sometimes hinted at in the archaeological record. Written sources from Egypt and Mesopotamia and archaeological and ethnographic studies in India can sometimes help to fill gaps by suggesting questions or answers.

The Derrynaflan Hoard and Early Irish Art

The discovery in 1980 of a hoard of church plate in the ancient monastery of Derrynaflan, Co. Tipperary, Ireland (Ill. 1), at a stroke added significantly to the corpus of Insular metalwork, extended our knowledge of early-medieval European altar plate, and raised afresh important questions about patronage, craft organization, wealth, trade, and exchange. Issues of importance to the interpretation of the history of early-medieval Ireland brought into sharp focus included the relative significance of the Viking invasions as a disrupting influence on Irish society in the ninth century and the form and origins of the liturgy practiced in the early Irish church. Above all, the extension of the known variety of motifs and decorative techniques has greatly enriched the understanding of one of the great ecclesiastical arts of medieval Europe.' The circumstances of the finding of the hoard led to litigation lasting almost seven years, which eventually enabled the state to replace the law of treasure trove with new measures to protect archaeological finds in Ireland and to rescue substantial numbers of artifacts, many of them also adding significantly to the corpus of early Irish art.2

Dignity in the Workplace Under Participative Management: Alienation and Freedom Revisited

Participative management provides a profound challenge to traditional organizations of work. Some researchers view participative management as providing an opportunity for workers to exercise increased power based on heightened responsibilities. Other researchers view participative management as management's newest ploy to extract not only labor but also the knowledge of production from workers. I use a model of workplace organizations that combines elements from Blauner's (1964) technology-based model and Edwards's (1979) labor-control model to evaluate workers' experiences of alienation and freedom across different systems of production. Data for the analysis are provided by the population of published Englishlanguage workplace ethnographies. The results provide partial support for Blauner's U-shaped curve of declining then increasing freedom under modern forms of production. Under participative organizations of work, however, positive and meaningful experiences in the workplace do not return to the same levels that they achieved under the craft organization of work. Relations among coworkers evidence less improvement under participative organizations of work than task and management-related aspects of work. This incomplete recovery of the positive experiences of craft production leaves at least some room for less optimistic visions of emergent workplace relations.

The Organization of Crafts in Third Millennium Babylonia: The Case of Potters

A partir des evidences epigraphiques cuneiformes et archeologiques, l'auteur presente dans cet article le contexte institutionnel, le statut economique et social, les activites professionnelles, la production et l'industrie ceramique, et la situation des potiers par rapport aux autres corps artisanaux en Babylonie au IIIe millenaire

Craft Information Sources

A brief history of the development of the craft movement and the American Craft Council is given. Sources of information on craft include: major authorities in the field; major bibliographic sources; book reviewing sources; reference tools; periodicals and indices; major exhibitions and catalogs; craft artists; craft organizations; databases; educational sources; business sources; how to locate craft fairs and galleries; major craft museums; how to locate craft exhibitions and competitions; funding sources; appraising sources; photography; suppliers; travel guides; and online services.

“Stalin over Wisconsin”: The Making and Unmaking of Militant Unionism, 1900–1950 by Stephen Meyer

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 623 quences that run throughout the history of cotton technology. For these enormously important stories we have to look elsewhere in the literature ofAfrican-American, agricultural, economic, and southern history. Peter H. Cousins Mr. Cousins is curator of agriculture and industry at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan. “Stalin over Wisconsin”: The Making and Unmaking of Militant Unionism, 1900-1950. By Stephen Meyer. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univer­ sity Press, 1992. pp. xi+265; notes, index. $45.00. Stephen Meyer’s fine book should be of special interest to readers of Technology and Culture interested in a closer engagement between the fields of labor history and history of technology. His study of the huge Allis-Chalmers complex in West Allis, Wisconsin (a Milwaukee suburb), closely links technology and production methods with the composition of the workforce, and resultant patterns of union formation and workplace conflict. Traditional themes for 20th-century labor history, especially radicalism and federal regulation of labor relations, are closely tied to the intricate influence of the firm’s production process. Allis-Chalmers’s use of both batch- and mass-production meth­ ods provides the foundation for Meyer’s study. Until World War I, the company primarily made huge metal castings refined to order by massive machine tools. Allis-Chalmers’s specialized products and complex machinery entailed employment of a highly skilled work­ force, generally native born. To create a more stable business, AllisChalmers aggressively expanded into farm equipment in the 1920s and successfully used modern mass-production techniques to rise into the upper tier of that market. Workers in the mass-production division differed significantly from those engaged in batch production. They generally were recent immigrants and performed far simpler tasks than the machinists, molders, and foundry workers who made and refined the castings. Meyer carefully tracks how the firm’s “dual industrial structure” (p. 20) profoundly shaped the process of unionization. He effectively shows how “a social matrix of skill and ethnicity divided craft and industrial unionists in the West Allis shops” (p. 63). Production workers fell under the sway of industrial union advocates (led by a small core of Communists) who formed United Auto Workers (UAW) Local 248. Skilled workers formed a stable “social basis for opposition” to leftist militants and leaned toward more conservative forms of unionism. Meyer successfully draws this thread through the sometimes bewildering institutional conflicts between the production-worker based UAW and successive American Federation of Labor craft organizations and inde­ pendent unions that took root among skilled workers. 624 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE The deep sociocultural divisions within the workforce were an asset to a management that, as Meyer shows, never conceded union recognition and fought UAW Local 248 at every step, using the tensions between batch and production workers as a lever against the UAW. Consequently, union security emerged as a persistent source of labor-management conflict and the main issue in several sharply fought strikes. Local 248 wanted a closed shop—mandatory union membership—to mitigate against the centripetal forces generated by internal differentiation among Allis-Chalmers employees. Management was equally opposed to union security, as it feared industrial unionists would be able to translate a firm base in the plant into an effective challenge to managerial authority. As long as Local 248 remained insecure, management could always count on conservative attitudes among its valuable skilled employees to blunt union militancy. During World War II, when the government forced AllisChalmers to implement limited forms of union security, Meyer sensitively shows how the union’s “dense shop steward and committee men system” (p. 105) did indeed undermine managerial authority. Meyer argues that it was management’s determination to uproot union power that lay behind the vociferous attacks on the allegedly Communist leaders of Local 248 immediately after World War II. He relentlessly describes the tawdry story of the virulent newspaper articles and hearings by the House Un-American Activities Committee carefully orchestrated by Allis-Chalmers officials, aided and abetted by UAW President Walter Reuther and conservative forces within the Wisconsin Congress of Industrial Organizations. These external pressures under­ mined a long strike—fought over union security—that began in 1946 and...

Guild or Union? A Case Study of Rural Dutch Weavers, 1682–1750

SummaryThis article discusses the defensive actions taken by a group of weavers in the rural eastern Netherlands in response to changing economic conditions; in particular, how they successfully re-established their weavers' guild to protect them against aggressive local merchants who were out to lower payments for woven cloth. A guild, by organizing many individuals into a group, could wield much more power than separate weavers on their own. But that was not all. Local weavers were aware that economic circumstances had changed, and that a new charter would have to be adapted so that it addressed the problems they faced. Hence, the charter they drafted provided for a guild that had the outward appearance of the old form of craft organization. However, in addition to the usual regulations it contains clauses that are more reminiscent of a trade union than a guild. The result was an organization that the weavers could use effectively to fend off their growing dependence on and subordination to merchants.

The Handcraft Revival in Southern Appalachia, 1930-1990 (review)

Lanier, Jr.) on Norman's Divine Right's Trip demonstrate the Bachelardian approach convincingly. Essays on Miller's poetry ("The Mechanical Metaphor: Machine and Tool Images in The Mountains Have Come Closer" by Ricky Cox) and on Morgan's ("Inside-Outside in Robert Morgan's Poetry" by Mary C. Williams) seem to me very fine and quite useful readings in introducing these individual poets and in discussing the general state of Appalachian-oriented poetry. This collection has the virtues and drawbacks of selectivity, intense critical focus, and a self-limiting monotheory. It may irritate some readers with its narrowness, and it certainly is not comprehensive in dealing with important Appalachian writers and writings. It should be useful to students who encounter these writers and works and want to view them in a sociocultural context. —William J. Schäfer Garry Barker. The Handcraft Revival in Southern Appalachia, 1930-1990. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991. 257 pages. Hardback. $28.95. Garry Barker has written a valuable documentary about a vigorous period of craft activity in Southern Appalachia, particularly Kentucky. Crafts are, and have always been, important in the mountain area. However much they have changed in the last sixty years in volume, character, and public appreciation, this is still true. The story of crafts is an integral part of the area's history. Without Barker's contribution, much of this chapter of the story might have been lost. This may not be a book for the general reader, as it details the work of a somewhat bewildering succession of craft organizations and promoters. It is, however, a pleasantly readable book, its style being clear and often humorous, with occasional delightful bits of irony and of philosophy. Barker's very personal story tells about how he saw crafts and craftspeople and dealt with them through a succession of positions as craft administrator. This began in 1965, when he graduated from Berea in complete ignorance of the craft world, and continued through 1990, when he knew it thoroughly. Early in his career, Barker read and was deeply impressed by Allen Eaton's Handicrafts of the Southern Highlands, published in 1937. As his involvement in the craft world continued, he felt the need for a sequel, telling what happened in the following years. When none appeared he decided to write it. The first two chapters of this book are an adequate summary of the older book. The next three are a researched account of the following twenty-five years, when appreciation and sales of crafts were slowly growing. The rest of the book is personal experience, conclusions, and predictions. The difference in viewpoint between Eaton and Barker is interesting. Eaton wrote from a standpoint of appreciation of both craft and craftspersons and how 65 the work added to the worker's stature as a human being. Though Barker admires and appreciates Eaton, and has sincere feeling for crafts and craftspeople, he himself is an intensely practical man (even if he does write excellent fiction). His viewpoint is that of a merchandiser, since merchandising is a large part of the job of any craft administrator. Barker's first five years in the craft world were spent as an employee of the Southern Highland Handicraft Guild, which covers the mountain areas of nine states, with its office in Asheville, North Carolina. Director Robert Gray gave him a thorough grounding in the scope and intricacies of managing such an organization. At the end of that time, Barker returned to Berea to manage the college's retail craft shops, and after six months there he became executive director of the Kentucky Guild of Artists and Craftsmen. From then on he was involved with a staggering array of craft organizations, craftspeople, craft promoters and flinders, and government agencies. Since 1985 he has served as assistant director and marketing manager for the Student Crafts Program at Berea College. This was an era of great growth for crafts everywhere. Starting with President Johnson's Great Society, funding for the arts was extensive. In this era, craft organizations were not started as was the Southern Highland Handicraft Guild in 1930. The guild was started by a group of women with a dream...

Craft Organization, Work Ethics, and the Strains of Change in Ottoman Syria

Craft organizations (guilds), whose origins in the Arab-Islamic countries are controversial, developed in a highly sophisticated way in these countries under Ottoman rule. Known as tawd'if (sing. td'ifa) in Ottoman Syria and in other Ottoman provinces, these organizations were autonomous. They regulated the affairs of their members, distributed collective taxes among them, controlled the quality of their products, and fixed the prices of their commodities. The stability of the economic and social life in Syria owes much to these organizations. Religioethnic tolerance was a major characteristic of these organizations which included Muslims, Christians and Jews within their ranks. Through work ethics, merit was the primary consideration for admission into, and promotion within, the craft. Under the impact of industrialized Europe, locally manufactured goods were unable to measure up to the competition of European goods which flooded the local markets in the 19th century. Bankruptcies were reported among local manufacturers, wages were lowered, causing friction between journeymen and masters, and emigration abroad progressed. Local manufacturers, however, were not altogether resigned to their fate. They pooled resources, introduced partnerships cutting across religious barriers, and produced competitive goods meeting local needs. A nascent local bourgeoisie thus began to take shape.

Formal Organization and the Fate of Social Movements: Craft Association and Class Alliance in the Knights of Labor

This paper asks how an existing field offormal organizations influences the formation of social movements around new interests. Data on the Knights of Labor are used to examine how craft organization in the iron and steel industry affected the incorporation of industrial workers into the labor movement. We find that even in the absence of ideological opposition to class-based organization, building on craft associations tended to create a divided and limited labor movement. This study suggests that pre-existing organization can simultaneously help emerging interest groups organize and reinforce the traditional divisions that segment these emerging interest groups.

The textile industry and the foreign cloth trade in late medieval Sicily (1300–1500): a “colonial relationship”?

Historians have recently argued that by the late Middle Ages a number of Mediterranean economies, notably southern Italy and parts of Spain, stood in a “colonial” relationship vis-à-vis other Mediterranean or northern European regions. For Sicily it has been argued that its economy was based on the exchange of agricultural products, principally grain, for imported manufactures, mainly textiles. Sicilian cloth manufactures were too weak to withstand foreign competition, which created an unbalanced and externally dependent structure of exchange and radically curtailed any chance of autochthonous economic development. This article discusses the empirical evidence upholding these statements about Sicilian textile manufactures. It includes an evaluation of the proportion of foreign imports to local production and consumption, of the socially distinct markets to which foreign and local manufactures catered, and of the nature, quality and extent of local production; the discussion is set in the context of the economic and social transformations taking place in Europe after 1350. The final part briefly analyses the institutional structures and constraints peculiar to Sicilian manufacture, such as the relationship between city and countryside and the apparent lack of any craft organizations. In the light of the extensive evidence for textile manufactures, the author concludes that the empirical basis for the argument that Sicily had a “colonial” dependence on cloth imports is insufficient, that local manufacture was quite capable of withstanding foreign competition of comparable quality, and that the explanation for Sicily's economic development in the late medieval and modern periods must be sought in its own social structures and in the result of the conflicts that arose within them.

None-Too-Porous Boundaries: Labor History and the History of Technology

None-Too-Porous Boundaries: Labor History and the History of Technology PHILIP SCRANTON This article represents an attempt to assess the relationships be­ tween research in labor history and issues of moment in studies of the history of technology. To make this topic manageable, the dis­ cussion will be confined to matters concerning American industrial labor, excluding work in agriculture, extractive sectors, and service trades,1 in order to keep the focus on what might be termed the core of labor history studies, the articulation of the manufacturing base in the United States. The plan of exposition is tripartite, a customary craft practice among mental laborers. Initially, the thematic devel­ opment of American labor history will be summarized, followed by an assessment of elements that have divided and may link labor and technology research, concluding with a bundle of suggestions for fu­ ture inquiry, based on the state of our collective arts. American Labor History: An Overview The historiography of American labor studies breaks readily into two major eras, with a third perhaps at present dawning. The roots of the discipline lie in the Midwest, at the stronghold of institutional economics in the World War I decade, the University of Wisconsin. There John R. Commons erected labor history as an integral element Dr. Scranton is associate professor in the Department of History at Rutgers Uni­ versity, Camden, New Jersey. His study of development and decay in skill-intensive manufacturing, Figured Tapestry: Production, Markets, and Power in Philadelphia Textiles, 1885—1940, will be published in spring 1989 by Cambridge University Press. ■One must, having narrowed the span of the present article, acknowledge that im­ portant work has recently been done in all three of the excluded sectors. For agriculture, see Pete Daniel, Breaking the Land (Urbana, Ill., 1985), and T. J. Byres, ed., Sharecroppers and Sharecropping (London, 1983); for mining, Donald Miller and Richard Sharpless, The Kingdom of Coal (Philadelphia, 1985); and, in service trades, Susan Porter Benson, Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890— 1940 (Urbana, Ill., 1986), as representative of the current body of published work.© 1988 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040- 165X/88/2904-0002$01.00 722 Labor History and the History of Technology 723 in the analysis of industrial economies, assembling first the massive Documentary History ofAmerican Industrial Society, followed by the mul­ tivolume History of Labor in the United States, completed in the 1930s. Befitting adherents of the school of institutional economics, Com­ mons and his followers, most prominently Selig Perlman and Philip Taft, devoted themselves to chronicling the vagaries of American trade unionism, especially the “job-conscious” craft organizations that engendered the American Federation of Labor. This commitment to the study of pure-and-simple trade unions generally passed over the radical initiatives evident in efforts at cooperative, labor-managed production and the transformation-minded struggles by socialist ag­ gregations and the Industrial Workers of the World. It also led to a focus on collective bargaining, interunion rivalries over jurisdiction, and intraunion battles over organizational structure, funds, and power, rather than any emphasis on workplace relationships or the links between workers and their social and political communities. This is not to say that the Commons group operated from ivory towers or that they were indifferent to theorizing. Selig Perlman served the Commission on Industrial Relations as a species of secret agent in 1913—14, investigating labor relations at Lawrence, Massachusetts, in the wake of the great 1912 Bread and Roses IWW strike—at some risk to life and limb, as he noted in his reports to the commission staff. In the late 1920s, Perlman also attempted to draw together European and American patterns in his Theory of the Labor Movement (1928).2 Yet, as the literature produced by the third generation, the post-World War II scholars led by Philip Taft, amply demonstrates, institutional studies rooted in labor economics failed to advance be­ yond earlier boundaries. Although they continued to produce large tomes choked with detail, the “old institutionalists” occupied an in­ tellectual dead space even as Taft published the second half of his study of the AFL in 1959 and helped launch...

Islamic Technology: An Illustrated History by Ahmad Y. al-Hassan, Donald R. Hill

668 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE has many useful and clear line drawings and ample statistical infor­ mation to prove that their program certainly worked once, and, given the chance, might very well work again in the hands of peasants who must still extract food and some wealth from a reluctant earth. Edward Peters Dr. Peters teaches medieval history at the University of Pennsylvania. Islamic Technology: An Illustrated History. By Ahmad Y. al-Hassan and Donald R. Hill. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Pp. xiv + 304; illustrations, bibliography, index. $39.50. Ahmad al-Hassan and Donald R. Hill present a survey of mechan­ ical and civil engineering, military technology, navigation, chemical technology, textiles, agriculture, mining and metallurgy, and the role of engineers in Islamic society, with an introduction on Islamic science and an epilogue on “critical issues.” Islamic Technology is intended as a popular book, and, for this reason, footnotes are omitted. This is frustrating, especially when new material is presented and the source is not readily accessible; it also leads to the inclusion of a number of passages in quotation marks to which—inexcusably—no author is ascribed. The volume covers mainly the Middle Ages and, although no ter­ minal date is indicated, extends the study of some techniques into early modern times. The best sections are passages from Arabic texts, such as ibn Badis on papermaking, al-Jildaki on iron smelting, or ibn Hawqal on silver mining, and explications of the excellent technical illustrations, like those of al-Jazari’s machines. There is no continuity of argument, however, and so what might have been a pioneering statement on the role of technology in Islamic society is, in many chapters, little more than an inventory of resources (with the most important one, wood, omitted) and how they were processed. Some of the best recent monographs are not used: for example, R. Bulliet’s The Camel and the Wheel, which offers, besides its ingenious hypothesis on the substitution of the camel for wheeled vehicles, some observations on technological zonation in the Medi­ terranean that finely tunes the interdependence of Islamic and Eu­ ropean technology; D. Ayalon’s Gunpowder and Firearms in the Mamluk Kingdom·, the first volume, on economic foundations, of S. D. Goitein’s A Mediterranean Society; or M. Lombard’s great study of the wood trade. Still other reasonably well-studied episodes, such as the diffusion of new techniques by Moriscos fleeing Spain in the 16th and 17th cen­ turies, belie the constantly reiterated disclaimers that scholarship is as yet too thin to present a more comprehensive study. Ultimately, of course, the choice of what to include is the authors’ and much of value technology and culture Book Reviews 669 is covered. The chapters on mining and on the social role of engineers are particularly successful. Coverage aside, there are serious conceptual failures. The first is a contradictory view of traditional craft organization that has been so central to the technological enterprise in the Islamic world. The au­ thors cite a wonderful passage from Abu’l-Farraj (p. 13) to the effect that craft techniques are perfected by the process of transmission from artisan to artisan. This they characterize as evidence of a “real spirit of research and invention,” but Abu’l-Farraj’s observation might better be seen as a “folk model” that contrasts sharply with the modern view of traditional guild structure as conservative and an impediment to innovation. Assertions about a “state science policy” are unsubstan­ tiated. When discussing premodern societies one must at least define what the requirements for a “science policy” might be under tradi­ tional sociopolitical constraints. Then there are a whole slew of valuejudgments, all unsubstantiated, that really merit analytic treatment: that Islam was the driving force behind the great scientific advance of the early Islamic period; that Sarton’s insistence on an 11th-century decline has been an impedi­ ment to study of later periods; that Western historians of technology ignore the Islamic contribution or belittle it; that Islamic society once produced science and can again—with regional cooperation. Such statements overly simplify problems of great complexity. With regard to the early scientific surge, it could as well be...

Labor organization and class alliance

The analysis reported here helps to clarify the dual role played by craft organization in labor movement development. In the United States, as in France, community rather than industry was the more promising ground on which to build an inclusive working-class organization. Craft organization in the community always helped mobilize less-skilled workers, and the effect was strongest during the period when the labor movement was growing most rapidly. In contrast, craft organizations within a local industry may have impeded less-skilled workers' organization during the Knights' early years. Only later, when the Knights found themselves on the defensive - attacked by employers, the press, and the craft unions affiliated with the rival American Federation of Labor - did craft locals provide unambiguous support for the organizational efforts of less-skilled workers in their own industries.

Civic ceremony in early modern London

The ceremonial life of the early modern town has emerged as an important area of study for urban historians. Ever since the publication of Charles Phythian-Adams' innovative study, attention has focused on the elaborate series of processions, pageants and rites of passage which were a constant feature of the yearly cycle of town life. In the wake of his work other studies of the ceremonial life of late medieval and early modern towns have added to the urban historian's awareness of the importance of ritualized forms of behaviour as a symbolic thread which helped bind together the social fabric of the townscape. The research done thus far forms one of those areas of scholarship in which the cross-fertilization of the interdisciplinary approach, so beloved of the ‘new’ urban history, has proved particularly fruitful. It might be surprising then that London, the largest of English towns, has yet to receive similar treatment. There have been, of course, several important studies of the capital in the early modern period, and they have something to say about the ceremonial life of the city. These have largely concentrated on topics such as the structure of government, the nature of London's ruling elite, and social mobility within the city's craft organizations. While providing important sidelights on ceremony, these treatments have tended to place ceremonial events in the background, as the ‘icing on the cake’. At the same time there have been many important studies by art and literary historians of ceremonial occasions such as coronations, royal entries or the Lord Mayors' Shows, but these have tended to concentrate on ceremony as an expression of dynastic propaganda or as a development in dramatic form rather than as part of the social history of the city. The object of this article will be to attempt to rectify this gap in our knowledge by applying some of the framework bequeathed by Phythian-Adams, and so try to assess the relevence of his conclusions about urban society in this period to the particular case of London.