Review by Choice Review
Biernacki's highly recommended book combines provocative conceptualization with extensive primary research. Using the world industry as his focus, Biernacki argues that despite similar utilitarian demands for the commodification of labor, German and British cultural configurations of that commodification within factories--from the types of payment to discipline and building plans--formed polar opposites. British employers saw labor embodied in products exchanged in the market, with workers akin to independent producers. German employers believed that they were purchasing "labor power" that had to be carefully managed. In their confrontation with employers workers adopted the respective national models (the transfer of materialized labor or the disposition over the expenditure of labor), as did British and German economists in devising their abstract theories. Biernacki attributes these differences to the national patterns of capitalist development and acculturation. In Britain a free market in commodities preceded the removal of restraints upon labor, which was then viewed as a product to be exchanged. In Germany, the idea of labor power arose from the coincidence of formally free markets in manufacturing goods and wage labor and their overlapping with feudal labor services in agriculture. Graduate, faculty. C. T. Loader; University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
