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Outlines the objectives and layout of the volume; discusses the main theories that have guided empirical research on intergenerational social mobility and the findings of this research; and explains the main concepts and instruments (such as the class schema) that are used in the book.

Revisits welfare regimes through the analytical lens of the family, first making the point that modernization theory should not have been taken at face value, since even if history has, in general, eroded the role of households in welfare production, this is perhaps less salient than specific international variations (some nations are characterized by their advanced level of de‐ familialization of welfare responsibilities, others for their sustained adherence to familialism). In other words, some societies may have brought the idealized Parsonian family into being; others reproduce many of the features of the ‘pre‐industrial’ household. Most welfare state theory provides little help in understanding such variation, and the real problem begins with the association of the nuclear family with industrialism, for it is simply wrong to assume that it lost its welfare functions with the advent of welfare states. The second point addresses the prevailing, often feminist, arguments that models of welfare regimes that have been specified via a political economy perspective fail to hold up when subject to a gendered analysis. Alternative gendered typologies do, in fact, often contradict political economy typologies, but the contradiction may be spurious because different phenomena are being explained and compared. The objective of this chapter is not to debate gender theories, but to understand the position of the (changing) family in the overall infrastructure of welfare production and consumption: what happens to our political economy models of welfare regimes when we insert the family; what are the effects of family change on welfare states and, ultimately, on post‐industrial change? However, since household‐welfare production is largely—but far from exclusively—based on women's unpaid labour, gender differences in the family‐welfare nexus clearly must be addressed. The three sections of the chapter are: Households and Welfare Production; The Family and Comparative Welfare Regimes; and Familialism and the Low‐Fertility Equilibrium.

This is the third of three chapters on the sources of pressure on contemporary national welfare states, all of which seek to show how examining the sources of strain carries implications for identifying who is likely to fight with whom over what; the authors of the three chapters are not of one mind on this issue. Here, Pierson focuses on trends within affluent democracies that constitute potential sources of the strains usually attributed to globalization. Like Iversen in the previous chapter, he highlights the role of the shift from manufacturing to services, but rather than focusing on the disruption of employment, his concern is the shift in the workforce to activities where productivity improvements are more limited; the result has been slower economic growth, which generates fiscal strain for mature welfare states. This, for Pierson, is one of a series of ‘post‐industrial shifts’ that produce severe pressures on the welfare state — others include the maturation of governmental commitments, the transformation of household structures, and population ageing. All these shifts create intense fiscal problems; in addition, social change in a context where programmes are often slow to adapt generates mismatches between the inherited capacities of welfare states and contemporary demands for social provision.

This chapter looks at tractarian criticism of the commercial spirit — ‘the worship of Mammon’ — and of the industrialism and economic individualism that threatened paternal social structures in Victorian England. As Christopher Dawson recognised at the outset of his celebrated essay The Spirit of the Oxford Movement in 1933, the anti-liberalism of the Oxford Movement is not a proof of its insensitiveness to the need for social reform. On the contrary, its hostility to liberalism was due, at least in part, to its dissatisfaction with a social system which seemed dedicated to the service of Mammon. The worship of mammon entailed individual and social evils. In the individual this was self-evident: it displaced the worship of God. Leading critics of commercialism during the period included John Henry Newman and Thomas Mozley. The chapter also discusses tractarians' medieval idealism as an obvious reflection of wider correspondences between tractarianism and romanticism.

Chapter five describes how historical memory became a battleground on the postwar Iron Range. Amid conflict over the future direction of the Iron Range's economy, the region turned to heritage tourism. The centerpiece of heritage tourism on the Iron Range was a museum and entertainment complex known as Ironworld. Ironworld was a microcosm of the larger problems of historical memory on the Iron Range and in other declining industrial regions, where residents were torn between a desire to honor the industrial past and the challenge of moving into a post-industrial future.

In chapter 6, Neyrat moves to describing the new ecologists and environmentalists of the twenty-first century: the ecomodernists. Neyrat provides the origins of this new capitalist and industrialist friendly environmentalism that promised to take into account all environmental concerns within its mode of development and growth. In taking on a seemingly pragmatist position outside of ideological frameworks and offering a positive vision of our environmental future whereby technologies such as nuclear power, GMOs, and fracking, as well as rejecting the division between nature and technology, ecomodernists completely reject the environmentalism and ecology of their twentieth-century forebears. Neyrat provides an introduction to these ecomodernists who have a very different conception of the current era, where striving to comprehend some ideal or old environmental state of nature was always already impossible due to the inherent perpetual instability of the turbulence of ecosystems.

This chapter follows John Ruggie’s work in contesting the common IR assumption collapsing very different forms of state power into one. It distinguishes the welfare state form as a separate state type from absolutist and constitutional states by drawing on historical sociology. When looked at through a historical lens, state power in the welfare state form does not consist merely in societal pacts over redistributive programs. The outputs of state power were indeed fundamentally different in Europe in historical comparison during these redistributive programmes’ ‘golden years’ of 1945-1973. But against pluralist, neo-marxist, and industrialist theories this chapter used the institutionalist theory developed to show the force of social institutions of state power in the consolidation and sustaining of welfare states. It focused on institutions of international politics of state building in particular. The contestation over nationalist and internationalist politics about the state of the late-19^th century resulted in the consolidation of the first welfare states around the 1870s. Different organisational compromises (commonly, social pacts such as corporatism) to the politics of nationalism and internationalism characterise emerging European welfare states during this period, and contribute to the restructuring of the organisational architecture of absolutist and constitutional state power in world politics.

This chapter demonstrates fundamental changes in the religious, literary, and medical images of mothers between the seventeenth century and the late-eighteenth century. It also provides an interpretation that balances the influence of religious and Enlightenment ideas against the effects of early commercial capitalism and industrialism. It argues that the feminine ideals of practical help in terms of aristocratic refinement gave way to the idealization of moral motherhood. Puritanism in some ways actually lowered the status of women. The lack of emphasis on motherhood in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Puritan literature reflected certain social realities of family life. The rise of the moral mother, even in its more conservative evangelical version, had ambiguous effects on the status of women. The rise of the moral mother also played its part in the long-range upgrading of the social status of women.

This chapter argues that the meaning of craft in twenty-first century America has been shaped by the transition from a preindustrial to a post-industrial society. Craft has been culturally located in traditions as a naturalistic sign of social belonging and a commentary on mechanical displacement engendered by modernity. It has been related to the intellectual construction of folk art representing the non-utilitarian uses of handwork in a post-industrial society. Discussed examples of craftsmanship that become symbols of human control in mass society include basketry, chairmaking, yard art, and roadside memorials.

This chapter begins by describing the final years of Henry Miller's life, and then explains that after his death, the company entered a steady decline from which it would not recover. Next it discusses the family's bitter legal battle over the estate and how it disappointed Miller. The chapter also explains that Miller and Lux symbolized a crucial component of a broader industrial society which transformed the region and the nation during the late nineteenth century. Next, it notes that by recognizing that far-western firms such as Miller and Lux operated at the heart of this transition, industrialism can be realized as a historical process which enveloped an entire nation and contained important regional contingencies. The chapter then explains that the fall of the company symbolized broader changes to the region and nation. Lastly, it highlights that wealth and power remained with those who could engineer the landscape and temporarily elude the environmental and social consequences.

A history of off-Island governance and capital ownership has informed Cape Breton, Nova Scotia’s self-definition of alterity. The counter-cultural movements of the early 1970s, which arose at the same time as the onset of post-industrialism and a subsequent, precipitous economic decline, brought new artistic media to express this sense of otherness: acid rock, alternative theatre, and underground comics among them. With his “Cape Breton Liberation Army,” Paul “Moose” MacKinnon created a platform for simultaneously exalting and deflating Cape Breton exceptionalism: a resistance militia whose plans after self-determination largely comprised playing pool and listening to blues music. This chapter traces the history of MacKinnon’s comic legacy within the Island’s attempted turn from an industrial to a cultural center, and challenges MacKinnon’s own assertion that he was never trying to be political.

Globalisation compelled the UK economy into a phase of rapid restructuring, turning away from the old industries in manufacturing and mining and towards a knowledge economy based around services. This new work replaced mainly male full-time jobs with part-time female work. This reconfiguration brought with it a new welfare state paradigm that began to replace the Beveridge model with a ‘competition state’, a workfare system geared towards supporting directly efficient economic performance. A new social geography emerged with the services economy, which was located in suburbs and small towns, leaving behind declining inner cities in the heartlands of the ‘old’ economy. Two-earner households underpinned a new wave of suburban home ownership. There were thus significant complementarities between economic restructuring, welfare state reconfiguration and the further embedding of the home-owning society. Meanwhile, council housing began a rapid descent as manufacturing industries closed down. Home ownership began to play a prominent part in shaping people's welfare choices, especially after the mortgage market was reinvented, providing access to housing equity on a massive scale.

This chapter discusses the relationship between culture and ethnicity within W. B. Yeats's idea of ‘the Celt’. It is primarily focused on the 1890s and the early 1900s, and considers the role of Yeats's Celticism within the political and cultural debates of that period. The chapter presents an account of Celticism that uses an approach which looks at the complicated interrelationships between culture and ethnicity within the four nations of the British Isles. It determines that Yeats's Celticism has its aesthetic bases in Arnold's Celtic essays and in London literary corruption, while its political roots are in the Irish nationalist tradition and in a Ruskinian anti-industrialism.

This chapter investigates why countries that share similar levels of taxing and spending for the welfare state vary greatly in the political trouble they generate. It shows that it is the visibility of taxing and spending, not their level, that leads to tax revolts and that different types of political economy differ not only in their structures of taxing and spending but in the policies that increase or decrease inequality. It evaluates the idea that advanced industrialism and its structural and ideological correlates may ultimately make all democracies more vulnerable to tax-welfare backlash.

Contrary to Western stereotypes, neither ignorance nor lack of capital prevented industrialism in the Arab–Islamic world. Flour was a staple food, so an economic decline, even if caused by a poor harvest, led to a paradoxical increase in demand for this filling starch. To satisfy increased demand for flour, royal officials and private entrepreneurs set up some steam mills. And yet, the sultan and his subjects deliberately blocked full-scale mechanization due to fears of foreign incursion, of the misuse of natural resources, and of the high cost of flour produced by steam mills. This collective check on industrialism highlights the importance of political consensus, even under authoritarian rule. This chapter argues that drought provoked some mechanization of flour production, but the sultan, millers, and struggling consumers together perpetuated a reliance on traditional technology.