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The half-century from 1880 witnessed significant changes in the structure and practice of industrial leadership across Lancashire, as private, proprietorial capital gave way to the adoption of limited-liability organisation. The immediate effects of this development were twofold: first, authority within the day-to-day regulation of business operations increasingly passed to managerial personnel; second, the scale of industrial activity was transformed. Successive merger waves ensured that, by 1935, the largest 100 companies by capital value were responsible for almost one-quarter of national output. The coal and cotton industries were at the centre of these developments. This chapter examines changes in the culture of work in Britain during the years 1880-1930 and the increased provision of industrial welfare, especially in the coal and cotton industries in Lancashire. The growth of welfare provision was presented as continued evidence of management concern with labour efficiency and the need to ensure a disciplined and obedient workforce, but it could also be an adaptation of established patterns of paternalistic industrial leadership to modern business conditions.

The conflicting racial and cultural values that underpin much of the Supreme Court’s decision making in civil rights cases are brought under critical review in this chapter as part of a larger argument regarding cultural diversity made in the next chapter. Thus, this chapter is a bridge between the socio-legal and socio-cultural race problems. In preparation for arguing in the next chapter that cultural diversity rides with a corpse in its cargo—to wit, cultural subordination—this chapter discusses the conflicting racial and cultural crosscurrents of the American middle class and working class. White-middle-class values, more than any other values, shape the American mainstream culture—“It’s the Middle Class, Stupid!”—wherein the problem of cultural subordination lies.

This chapter focuses on the technological research projects of the Institut de Recherche et de Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) in the 1984, explaining that, during this time, computer music was expected to enrich the quality of sound materials by its capacity to stimulate any unimaginable sound, as well as completely new timbres. It highlights the pivotal ideological position of psychoacoustics and music research within IRCAM, and the musicians' commitment to define the future areas of research that would be of maximum musical use to composers. The chapter also discusses the structure of opposition in IRCAM's intellectual work culture.

This chapter engages with interdisciplinary scholarship on legal systems and revenge in order to argue that the Western, like other genres which seek to provide justifications for violence, has informed and been influenced by paradigmatic shifts in the American legal system. A fuller investigation into the style of the gunslinger's vengeance, this chapter argues, suggests a rather different relationship between cultural products and legal apparatuses than that suggested by critics who portray the Western revenger as a reactionary figure. The Western gunslinger is presented here instead as a progressive figure by reading the cultural work of the Western genre as a rhetorical thinking through of a set of interconnected conflicts and inconsistencies in American legal paradigms related to justifiable homicide and gun possession.

Cultural subordination is defined here as the suppression of important black values or folk ways—questions and concerns of keen importance to blacks—in the American mainstream culture. Like juridical subordination, cultural subordination is animated by post-Jim Crow norms that perform important rhetorical and regulatory functions in civil rights discourse—racial omission (traditionalism), racial integration (reformism), racial solidarity (limited separation), and social transformation (critical race theory). After defending the belief that blacks do have a distinct set of values that transcend class stratification, and after discussing the legitimacy of cultural diversity in American society, this chapter crafts four models of cultural diversity defined by these post-Jim Crow norms—cultural assimilation (traditionalism), biculturalism (reformism), cultural pluralism (limited separation), and transculturalism (critical race theory). It then proceeds to explain how most of these visions of cultural diversity subordinate legitimate black values. Deploying these models to purposefully enhance our racial democracy, which lies at the root of cultural diversity, can reduce (but not entirely eliminate) racial subordination in the American mainstream culture.

Guido is a youth subculture originating in New York City’s Italian American neighborhoods. This chapter understands Guido as a collective ethnic subject defined by a signature consumption culture or style. The chapter traces the origin of Guido to the disco movement of the 1970s; an urban Italian American youth subculture specializing in expanded opportunities for leisure-based consumption referenced to the mass media and entertainment industries. Because stylized youth identities were embedded in lived Italian American communities, consumption became an important new site for reworking ethnic cultural differences. Just as Guido symbolizes the incorporation of commodities into a new Italian American cultural identity and status, it has become a commodity that is merchandised to wider markets. Inclusion in the media spectacle—see, in particular, the reality television show Jersey Shore (2009-2012)—brings alignment with core consumption values, although it compromises subcultural boundaries. Guido is seen as part of a larger pattern that constructs Italian American difference in relation to American consumer culture while exposing ideological divisions inside the ethnic boundary.

This chapter presents a comparison of Denmark and Sweden with the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. These countries have different work cultures and family policy systems, and the variation in the employment level and working-time strategies of parents shows social differences among groups of women. It discusses how the choices of work/care strategies can be explained by the different childcare policies. It then studies the subjective experience of work/family conflicts of parents, as well as the discrepancies between actual and preferred working times. The chapter ends with a section on the implications for gender equality of different strategies in organising working time and care.

This chapter addresses how residents of the St. Helier estate in south London have experienced the disruption, within their lifetimes, to the class- and gender-specific routes that provided the transition to adulthood. It notes that this requires an examination of the world as it was for the respondents and upon which their own future lives were premised, before structural changes in the economy and in working practices undermined for many the likelihood of achieving their early expectations. It notes that Charlesworth argues that the fragmentation of working class-cultures has been accompanied by a generational shift, as the earlier reference points in which lives are grounded and class solidarities sustained are replaced with insecurity, anomie, and individualism.

The chapter identifies the arguments early-twentieth-century Italian socialists and anarchists in the United States elaborated transnationally about the challenges and opportunities the labor movement was presented with in the face of capitalist material abundance and shortcomings in its egalitarian distribution. Italian radicals tried to accommodate in original ways their critique of American consumerism with their efforts at offering organized moments of leisure and material enjoyment for militants and sympathizers. Political picnics, and other leisure activities and cultural institutions that the essay discusses, were part of a distinctive “movement culture” that helped shape, sustain, and spread an alternative lifestyle within the Little Italies. They were key occasions for political propaganda and fundraising, but they also became “forms of consumption that gave a sense of collective life” to Italian immigrants, reinforcing their working-class and ethnic identity.

This chapter deals with the question of how the war impacted on Labour’s electoral fortunes after 1918. It considers the post-war influx of Liberals who felt that Labour was now the real home of the radical Liberal tradition, the experiences of soldiers and ex-servicemen specifically, and the extent to which the Left made ‘cultural’ appeals to voters: as Englishmen and women, as Britons, as patriots, as Anglicans, as Catholics, and as individual people. This chapter argues that support for the war was critical to the successes of Labour in the inter-war period. Not only did it prevent a Parliamentary annihilation in 1918, it secured patriotic credentials to counter-balance the influx of middle-class radicals; prevented a break with the trade unions; and facilitated Labour’s appeals to a working-class culture based on family, neighbourhood, pubs and patriotism. It will be argued here that this cultural appeal to the wider working class allowed Labour to win support from beyond both the heavily unionised skilled workers and the Nonconformist tradition which had hitherto provided most of its support, and that the experience of the war – and labour patriotism during that conflict – was essential to this cultural appeal.

This chapter examines the market for labor in the aircraft industry in the Soviet Union during the 1930s. It describes the trends in employment, recruitment and turnover, the composition of the workforce, and the working culture of the industry. The chapter explains that the high demand for labor forced the industry to hire employees with no experience, skills, or work discipline, and that the authorities attempted to solve this problem using a varying mix of repression, regimentation, and rewards.

This introductory chapter briefly examines the roots and evolution of working-class manhood. It shows how working-class masculine identity had many roots. The relations of social class, gender, race, and ethnicity influenced and shaped male attitudes, values, and behaviors. Most important, boys becoming men, young men, and adult men fashioned and refashioned their manliness in a variety of all-male settings—such as the workplace. The workplace was central to the forming, nurturing, widening, and deepening of this masculine culture. Generally, this working-class masculine culture has surfaced in two distinct forms—a respectable culture and a rough one. Though analytically quite discrete, these two contradictory forms might result from either personal disposition or social position. Yet they sometimes coexisted with, overlapped with, or blended into each other.

Relations between Italian Americans and African Americans have been often tense, marked by racism, competition on the labor and housing market, and occasional violence. In the 1950s and 1960s Italian Americans in New York and other cities, along with other white ethnics, resisted urban change and supported residential segregation. However, in the field of popular music, the two groups have regularly exchanged mutual appreciation for the talent, style, and authenticity of the other. The chapter focus on Italian American artists’ hegemonic presence in a black musical genre (doo-wop) to show how popular and consumer culture provided the space for otherwise impossible cross-cultural exchanges at the dawn of the civil-rights era.

This chapter brings together the experiences and perspectives of three groups of actors—servers, managers, and customers—to explore how a work culture of emotional investment combined with a “homey” ambience and paternalistic management, helps produce loyalty at the Hungry Cowboy. It examines how notions related to family shape daily practice and how, like many families, this “family” is crosscut by the often unequal costs and rewards of belonging.

This chapter examines the accordion culture along the south shore of Lake Superior. From the late nineteenth century through the present, the accordion has reigned in the area as the most ubiquitous and emblematic folk-musical instrument. A downright working-class instrument, it fostered egalitarian social relations and interethnic alliances—a kind of alliance only possible in the New World, where the politics of ethnic identity has come to govern many social relations. The chapter focuses in the following: (1) how South Shore musicians acquired and learned to play assorted accordions; (2) the audiences for whom and contexts within which they performed; and (3) the sources and nature of their repertoires. The resulting cumulative historical and ethnographic portrait illuminates the accordion's significant role in establishing a common, creolized, regional, and enduring working-class culture that was substantially formed between the 1890s and the 1930s.

This chapter explains the book's concern with one primary aspect of public decision making as it affects mothers' opportunities: workplace flexibility policy. Workplace flexibility can be divided into three areas: flexible work arrangements; time-off options; and career exit, maintenance, and reentry pathways. While flexibility can be offered on paper, employees might be reluctant to use it. In the United States, there is a strong work culture that promotes the notion of the ideal worker—an employee who is heavily committed to his job and is available twenty-four hours a day. The book explores the phenomenon of women joining the largest and most influential mothers' organizations in the United States, groups that all endorse workplace flexibility. It examines whether support for workplace flexibilitycan unite members across divergent groups, potentially creating a mothers' movement.

This introductory chapter explores the intertwined histories of smoking and the working class, pointing out the ubiquity of smoking in twentieth-century workplaces despite its marginalized presence in histories of labor. Moreover, the chapter shows that, as cigarette smoking and subsequent nicotine addiction became significant components of many working-class lives in the twentieth century, smokers in a multitude of workplaces shaped, established, and defended the work cultures that sustained their need to use nicotine regularly during the workday. These developments at times accommodated or challenged employers' rules that limited or even banned working-class smoking practices outright. Worker demands for the right to smoke, and their abilities to cultivate spaces and times (sometimes clandestinely) for smoking, underpinned a new dimension of shop floor politics in the cigarette century.