Official statistics for 1972 (which certainly understated the total picture) recorded over twenty-five hundred strikes in Britain, a figure exceeded only once before (in 1970) and three times subsequently. The number of “days lost,” almost twenty-four million, was the highest since 1926, the year of the General Strike; in only two subsequent years has the total been greater. To a generation that reached maturity in a dark period of trade union defeat and decline, the record of those years of (at least partial) victory and advance must seem like another world. In providing a chronicle of trade union activism in that year, Darlington and Lyddon perform a genuine service.

If this book had halted after its opening chapter, an adjective like “elegant” would fit the resulting essay well. Those opening pages sketch with precision “the classic social movement agenda” developed since the 1960s, respectfully yet sharply identify important limitations of that agenda, and suggest some plausible theoretical tools for moving beyond those limits. Having themselves over those decades made so many contributions to the study of movements and related phenomena (the bibliography cites a half-dozen of their own previous books and could easily have contained more), the intrepid trio are now marking out some very interesting new trails.

It wasn't quite the WTO in Seattle, but controversy did enliven the forty-sixth annual meeting of the Business History Conference at Palo Alto, California, March 10–12, 2000. Organized around the theme of “Enterprise in Society,” it boasted panels on work, science and technology, banking, social stakeholders and corporations, gender, the environment, and consumption. Participants came from many fields, and the event's interdisciplinarity sparked lively discussions as to whether particular papers even belonged at the conference. One commentator, Youssef Cassis (University of Grenoble, II), for example, asked if studies of working-class bank customers should be included in panels on banking, or whether such papers, however well done, are social or working-class history, and consequently outside the domain of business history? His question sparked a direct response from audience member Pamela Laird (University of Colorado-Denver) who suggested that this was precisely the direction that business history should be heading.

Ira's paper begins with an apparent paradox: He agrees with William Sewell's statement that labor history is not in crisis, and yet, the remarkable historical occurrences and the powerful methodological and epistemological challenges of the past decade have produced nothing less than “labor history's loss of élan, directionality, and intellectual purpose.” These developments are so serious that labor historians are encouraged to undertake a dramatic departure from the well-trod methodological and thematic pathways of labor history.Marxism, which in varying guises was hegemonic in our discipline for at least two decades, has all but collapsed under the double pressure of events and theoretical challenges. Its political project is undermined by a disappearing working class, a declining welfare state, and the end of European communism, its theoretical preeminence shaken by new deconstructive and Foucauldian approaches. These approaches have questioned the timelessness and solidity of Marxist categories, arguing that the “historical subject” of the theory—the working class—is not a sociological given or an ontologically secure phenomenon; it is a category that is not merely undifferentiated, but constituted in such a way as to obliterate its constitutive “other,” most preeminently “woman.” Poststructuralist historiography undercuts the teleological and triumphalist assumptions of Marxist philosophy of history, just as the aforementioned events have shown them to be counterfactual, if not “sentimental reminders of times lost and aspirations disappointed.”

Crumbling smokestacks, shuttered furnaces, and abandoned quarries are all striking representations of deindustrialization. These and other images construct a discourse whose ideological undertones, far from confining them to the realm of symbolic nostalgia, have profound effects on contemporary societies. In 2015, within the European Labor History Network (ELHN), a working group on historical cultures of labor under conditions of deindustrialization (working group) began to critically study and reflect on this nascent theme. It grew from a small group of researchers to a network of academics across Europe and beyond. Though the study of deindustrialization is not new, contemporary work offers insights into the continuing struggle over the meaning of classical industrial work and its loss, revealing unresolved social, cultural, and political tensions. Yet, existing representations of deindustrialization have been criticized as “smokestack nostalgia.” In order to chart how we understand contemporary industrial decay in our political, cultural, and economic climate, the working group explores representations and more-than representations of loss and regeneration in deindustrialized regions, primarily in Europe but widening to include a growing global network.

In her introduction to the new edition of Women on the Line, first published in 1982, Miriam Glucksmann notes that it had been written well before the body and embodiment had become an explicit focus of studies of work and employment. However, rereading Women on the Line reminds us that ethnographers have long paid attention to the embodied aspects of work, although few of them have written about them as eloquently as Glucksmann. In the original volume she was able to articulate how it felt to experience herself in relation to her environment, a phenomenological perspective made possible by her adoption of an autoethnographic writing style (a strategy linked to her rejection both of a narrowly academic approach and, in consequence, of the disembodied authorial voice that tended to go with it). Perhaps another reason why Glucksmann was able to write about her working on the line with such sensitivity to the embodiment of the experience is that she was new to assembly line work, so the embodied routines of factory life had not yet been submerged below the level of conscious articulation. It is useful therefore to summarize what she had to say and to think about how we can build on it.

Verity Burgmann's call for a reinvigorated class politics and language is timely. This essay shares her goal of strengthening social movements in which class is taken seriously. It argues, however, that her efforts to resuscitate an antiquated class politics dressed up in identity clothes will not further that goal. This response offers an alternative reading of the nature and history of the “new” and the “old” social movements, of what can be learned about class and class-conscious movements from “identity politics” and from cultural theorists, and of what is needed to encourage future movements for social and economic justice. It calls for a class politics that recognizes the diversity of the working classes, embraces multiple class identities, reflects the fluid and multitiered class structures in which we live, and honors the aspirations of working people for inclusion, equity, and justice.

Historically there has been a variety of ways for academics to engage with working people or to combine activism with scholarship. Women on the Line represents a historically specific form of engagement that was open to western feminists at the height of second wave feminism in the 1970s.

There's something about the New Deal that invites generational revision. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, when liberalism still defined the parameters of public policy, historians celebrated the New Deal as the culmination of modern reform—the federal government's relentlessly pragmatic, strikingly successful response to the burdens of an industrial age. The fierce politics of the late 1960s shattered that interpretation. The New Deal was a terrible disappointment, said the era's younger historians, its grand promise undermined by the Roosevelt administration's refusal to confront capitalist power while embracing—even reinforcing—racial, gender, and class hierarchies.1