Practices and Strategies — Workers in Third-World Industrialization: An Introduction

This book addresses a classical and central topic in the social sciences — wage-labour in an industrial and capitalist work organization — in fact the very focus of social science theory for authors otherwise as different as Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim and Max Weber. As Claus Offe (1985: 2061) puts it:

Wage work, separated from the home and from traditional communitary forms, without political protection and integrated into the capitalist organisation of work, into the impoverishment, the alienation and the rationalisation which have an impact on it, has clearly constituted the center around which all research and all theory in social science have been organised. Together with the forms of economic, political and cultural resistance developed by labour (with or without organisations) or on the contrary the forms for its social integration, all other aspects of society — politics and culture of knowledge, family and moral systems, forms of living and religion — have found their theoretical development there.