Description:
- Investigates job search and placement practices in European countries, Australia, and India in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
- Explores how looking for work becomes a means by which participants articulated specific interests, perspectives, and agendas.
- The chapters illustrate different approaches to the history of employment and job searching
Brief description:
Thomas Buchner is a Postdoctoral researcher at the University of Vienna, ERC-project "The Production of Work." His recent publications include Shadow economies and irregular work in urban Europe: 16th to 20th centuries (Münster, Vienna and Berlin 2011) (ed. with Philip. R. Hoffmann-Rehnitz).
Review Quotes:
"The editors should be applauded for going some way towards re-orienting historical research from the well-established focus on nascent systems of public labour intermediation to show the continuous persistence of older forms of labour recruitment and social classification as well as the precarious economic and bureaucratic conditions upon which public offices operated." - H-Soz-Kult
"This collection has the great merit of having chosen an interesting and socio-politically topical theme which, up to now, has been paid little attention by historians... No doubt, it represents a first insightful step towards a phenomenon still to be researched more extensively." - Sehepunkte
"[This book] offers a valuable overview of the histories of job mediation in Europe from the late 19th century onwards. It shows different trajectories that are predicated upon different types of state interference or abstinence from economic life, national trajectories of labour movements, and the trajectories of organisation of labour placement over time. For anyone who wants to get a proper understanding of the working of labour markets in modern Europe this work is a potential 'must read.'" - Ulbe Bosma, International Institute of Social History
"...the book provides insight into job-search and job-placement institutions and practices....The entire enterprise is predicated on providing, for the very first time, a transnational view of job-placement issues, with a focus on the turn of the 19th century. Another point of interest is combining the study of institutions and individuals. This multi-level approach is quite an original and promising one..." - Bénédicte Zimmermann, EHESS