Life Course, Work, and Labour in Global History

Josef Ehmer, Carola Lentz, Josef Ehmer, Carola Lentz

• Publisher: De Gruyter Oldenbourg
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN:
  9783111145907
• eBook ISBN:
  9783111147963
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Modern History
• Index: History

This multidisciplinary volume offers unique perspectives, across the globe and throughout the centuries, on the complexity of the nexus between work and the life course. For industrialized regions, from Germany and Western Europe to China and Japan, it questions the widespread notion of an overall growing working life course instability, since the 1970s. For unindustrialized or industrializing regions, from West Africa to state socialist East Central Europe, as well as for transnational and transcontinental labour migrations, it shows the enormous influence of the extended family and wider kin on individual pathways into and out of work. For early modern Europe, India, and China, and up to twentieth-century state socialism and to current welfare states, it stresses and concretizes the crucial impact of age and gender for both societal labour relations and individual work-related decision making. With all chapters based on original research, the volume reflects a close cooperation between historians, anthropologists, and sociologists. Its multidisciplinary approach finds expression in its methodological plurality, reaching from archival research and sophisticated statistical analyses to biographical interviews and participant observation. This mix allows to grasp the interaction between societal change and individual agency.

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Remembering Josef (Sepp) Ehmer (1948–2023)
• Figures and Tables
• Foreword
• Work and the Life Course in a Global and Multidisciplinary Perspective: An Introduction
• The Puzzle of Flexibilization: Stability and Changes in Working Lives in (West) Germany, 1920s to 2015. Evidence from Quantitative Life-Course Research
• Life Courses, Career Paths, and the Search for Employment in Times of Change: Industrial Workers in Germany, France and Britain, 1970 to 2000
• Tumbling Down the Standard Life Course: The Ice Age Generation of the Turn of the Twentieth Century and the Origins of Polarisation in Japan
• When They Told Their Stories: Industrial Workers’ Life Courses in the People’s Republic of China
• The Life Courses and Careers of Public Employees in Interwar Austria
• Textile Work, Gender, and the Female Life Course in Europe and China since the Beginning of the “Great Divergence,” Eighteenth to Early Twentieth Centuries
• Older Female Workers in the Global Apparel Industry in Bangladesh
• The Changing Politics of Women's Work and the Making of Extended Childcare Leave in State-Socialist Hungary, Europe, and Internationally: Shifting the Scene
• Family, Work, and Social Mobility: Perspectives from Ghana
• The Linking of Vital Conjunctures: Negotiations over Girls’ Futures
• Mobile People Versus Static Institutions: National School Policies in the EU and the Life Course of Transnational Grandparents
• Contingent Return: Moral Assessments of the Life Course in Transnational Cape Verde
• Life and Labour on the Road: Mail Runners and Palanquin Bearers in Nineteenth-Century India
• Wage Labour as a Life Phase: Life-Cycle Service and Petty Commodity Production in Early Modern Europe
• Notes on Contributors
• Index