Review by Choice Review
Focusing on France, Castel traces the transformation of work as an activity performed by marginal groups whose behavior was controlled by status relations of inferior to superior, to a wage-related activity of everyone in society. He uses two developmental constructs--one by Sir Henry Sumner Maine (1861) and undocumented in the text (the passage from status to contract), and the other by Ferdinand Tonnies (1887), which is documented (the passage from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft). This transformation was accomplished by state intervention through what were essentially wages-and-hours regulations that supplanted earlier charitable activities of patrons, religious orders, families, and localities. Thus it became possible for people to acquire skills and survive in an increasingly complex world. But the possibilities of that survival created a new "social question": as work becomes more readily available, the number of individuals who want to work exceeds the number of jobs available. Stable, wage-related work is itself threatened, and for many sectors of the population, identity through work is lost. The book lacks a subject index; a river in Germany is spelled three different ways; "phenomena" and "phenomenon" are misused. This is a difficult read. ^BSumming Up: Optional. Graduate students and faculty. L. Braude SUNY College at Fredonia
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
