Volume 47 part 3 (December 2002)

Summaries

Keith Mann Political Identity and Worker Politics: Silk and Metal Workers in Lyon, 1900-1914
This paper aims to explain the different political trajectories and identities of two sets of industrial workers in the city of Lyon, France during the years immediately preceding the first World War. Silk workers supported reformist socialist parties while metal workers were pillars of the revolutionary syndicalist current that dominated the prewar CGT. Unlike base and superstructure models or political autonomy explanations, it is argued that the particular industrial structures and social relations within each industry interacted with local and national political opportunity structures in ways that rendered some strategies and forms of collective action more efficacious than others. The programs and strategies proposed by revolutionary syndicalism matched the conditions of metal workers and attracted their support, while reformist socialism struck a similar chord with silk workers resulting in similar results.

"Family Strategies":, A Contested Concept
In the past three decades a fair number of historical demographers, and family and labour historians have used the concept of "family strategies" as a means to better understand the social behaviour of individuals and families. (This tendency has also been visible in the present journal. See, for example, Laurence Fontaine and Jürgen Schlumbohm (eds), Household Strategies for Survival 1600-2000: Fission, Faction and Cooperation = International Review of Social History, Supplement 8 (2000).) At the 26th Annual Meeting of the American Social Science History Association (Chicago, November 2001), a session of the Family/Demography network was devoted to a critical discussion of this concept of family strategies. Given the importance of the issue, we have invited three of the panelists to rework the papers they gave on that occasion. Two of them, Katherine Lynch and Pier Paolo Viazzo, have joined forces here to discuss the matter from a predominantly theoretical perspective with particular attention to the use of the concept in social anthropology, and in medieval and early modern history. Based on recent Dutch empirical studies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Theo Engelen questions the use of the concept of family strategies, given the availability of the broader concept of agency. The riposte to these critiques comes from Jan Kok, who is actively engaged in the application of the concept of family strategies in the research programme of the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam.