This article analyzes the characteristics of domestic service in the city of Buenos Aires at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, showing the importance it had in a porteño society undergoing profound societal transformation. It reconstructs the changes in the sociodemographic profile of the sector and investigates the living and working conditions therein. It describes how that particular labor market was structured. It shows that the complexity of the sector was not only due to the existence of different occupational categories, functions, and hiring conditions, but also to the coexistence of various remuneration concepts, “arrangements” in which work and family life were interwoven in a particular way. It explores domestic service in the light of phenomena such as immigration, urbanization, family dynamics and child-rearing practices, state assistance policies, and the social reproduction processes of the working classes.

“Work means everything to us,” James Livingston writes in the introduction to his recent book, No More Work: Why Full Employment Is A Bad Idea. The meaning of work, what Livingston calls the work ethic, is our problem. “And we've believed that, even if it sucks, a job gives meaning, purpose and structure to our everyday lives—at any rate, we're pretty sure that it gets us out of bed, pays the bills, makes us feel responsible, and keeps us away from daytime TV.” The time for this mode of thinking, we learn, has passed. “These beliefs are no longer plausible,” Livingston says. “In fact, they've become ridiculous, because there's not enough work to go around, and what there is of it won't pay the bills.”

In the beginning was the Theory. Even before the collapse of Soviet communism, the glow of Marxism in American (and European) universities was beginning to dim. Now we look back on our own investment in Marxism, not always with satisfaction. At best, the theory did not so much fail historians, as historians, in their efforts to redress the lacunae in the theory, wrote around it to the extent that theory ultimately became marginal to their enterprise. This is hardly surprising since Marxism, having given up pretense to science by the mid-1960s, became largely a critical theory in the sense that its main sources were European thinkers – Gramsci, Adorno, Foucault, Althusser – who sought to repair the crumbling walls and beams remaining from the wreckage of Stalinism.

Of all state social provisions, education is among the most important. It also shows the greatest amount of variation among Western industrial nations. England and the United States, countries with many common intellectual and governmental traditions, with longstanding commitments to individualism and democratic forms of government, exhibit great disparity in education. Even today, the United States is by far the leader in the field of mass education while England occupies a position in the bottom ranks.

This article examines shop-floor bargaining in China in both the socialist and reform eras. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in three manufacturing factories, document analysis, and secondary sources, the author discusses how government policies and organizational structure shape the interaction between workshop managers and workers and how the practice on the shop floor alters managerial attempts in return. The author argues that, despite different economic structures in the two historical periods, Chinese workers are not the docile labor force often portrayed in literature and media. Instead, they utilize any leverage given within organizational structures and bargain for not only economic gains, but also for respect and autonomy. Their bargaining, though different from institutionalized union bargaining, influences managerial decisionmaking in a subtle way with ideological implications.

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

This article gives an overview of the European “immigration system,” which includes both immigration control and immigrant integration. Special attention is given to the Euro-specific division of competences between supranational and national levels, which is still evolving. Some lessons, both positive and negative, for the United States are drawn. Most importantly, there cannot be a coherent “immigration system” but only a patchwork of divided legal regimes guided by conflicting principles, with friction between them likely to be permanent.