By bringing together and critically engaging with accounts of certain themes in business and labour history, and utilizing original research, this book aims to widen understanding of industrial society and provide a background to further study and research in the area management and labour relations history.

By bringing together and critically engaging with accounts of certain themes in business and labour history, and utilizing original research, this book aims to widen understanding of industrial society and provide a background to further study and research in the area management and labour relations history.

This volume focuses on labour history in Britain, but brings in comparative material on the Continent, in particular inter-war Germany. Special attention is given to wages and living and working conditions in the 19th century, to Robert Owen and Co-operation, and to the modern trade union movement and its attempts to keep up the interests of its members in the fluctuating conditions of the late 19th and earlier 20th centuries. The author defends the notion that wage-earners have common interests and frequently share common experiences, and that their organisations have both a strictly economic aspect (trade unions) and a wider political dimension. The profound changes which the labour organisations underwent in the 19th and 20th centuries are a major concern of these essays.

Written at a critical juncture in the history of the Labour Party, Speak for Britain! is a thought-provoking and highly original interpretation of the party's evolution, from its trade union origins to its status as a national governing party. It charts Labour's rise to power by re-examining the impact of the First World War, the general strike of 1926, Labour's breakthrough at the 1945 general election, the influence of post-war affluence and consumerism on the fortunes and character of the party, and its revival after the defeats of the Thatcher era. Controversially, Pugh argues that Labour never entirely succeeded in becoming 'the party of the working class'; many of its influential recruits - from Oswald Mosley to Hugh Gaitskell to Tony Blair - were from middle and upper-class Conservative backgrounds and rather than converting the working class to socialism, Labour adapted itself to local and regional political cultures.

Andrew Thorpe's book rapidly established itself as the leading single-volume history of the Labour Party. This second edition takes the story to 2000 with a new chapter on the development of "New Labour" and the Blair government. The reasons for the party's formation, its aims and achievements, its failure to achieve office more often, and its remarkable recovery since its problems in the 1980s, as well as key events and leading personalities, are all discussed.

The cotton industry was the first large-scale factory system to emerge during the industrial revolution, and as such there were no set business practices for employers or employees to follow in the organisation of the shop floor. In this book, Janet Greenlees argues that this situation provided workers in both Britain and the United States with a unique opportunity to influence decisions about work patterns and conditions of labour, and to set the precedent for industries that were to follow. Furthermore, data relating to the mass employment of women in the cotton industries, is used to challenge many of the tacit assumptions of women's passivity as workers that pervade the current literature.

This account of artisan and working-class society in its formative years, 1780 to 1832, adds an important dimension to our understanding of the nineteenth century. E.P. Thompson shows how the working class took part in its own making and re-creates the whole life experience of people who suffered loss of status and freedom, who underwent degradation and who yet created a culture and political consciousness of great vitality.