Work and Politics develops a historical and comparative sociology of workplace relations in industrial capitalist societies. Professor Sabel argues that the system of mass production using specialized machines and mostly unskilled workers was the result of the distribution of power and wealth in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Great Britain and the United States, not of an inexorable logic of technological advance. Once in place, this system created the need for workers with systematically different ideas about the acquisition of skill and the desirability of long-term employment....

In Search of Stability: Explorations in Historical Political Economy ponders the issue of how Western industrial societies overcame major challenges to political and economic stability in the twentieth century. Successive essays ask: what ideological messages did American influence transmit to Europe after World War I, then again after World War II? Did Nazis and Italian fascists share an economic ideology or impose a unique economic system in the interwar period and during World War II? How do their accomplishments stack up comparatively against those of the liberal democracies? After 1945,...

This book addresses the issue of designing the microstructure of fiber composite materials in order to obtain optimum performance. Besides the systematic treatment of conventional continuous and discontinuous fiber composites, the book also presents the state-of-the-art of the development of textile structural composites as well as the nonlinear elastic finite deformation theory of flexible composites. The author's experience during twenty years of research and teaching on composite materials is reflected in the broad spectrum of topics covered, including laminated composites, statistical...

This book examines the Italy of the 1980s, which represents an unparalleled example of dualistic development - deeply divided between North and South.

An understanding of the nature of advanced industrial economies is derived from this extensive investigation of the ways in which the boundaries of the political have changed in Europe since the 1960s.

The chapters in this volume reconsider fundamental premises about state and society in advanced capitalist countries.

Recent scholarship on the role of the state in designing regulatory policies in industrialized democracies has identified a shift from the increasingly direct role of the state in the 1970s to a diminishing role in the 1980s. The question of the changing role of the state is particularly interesting in the Italian case, where direct state intervention has been extensive but also highly inefficient and susceptible to the pressures of private interests. The essays in this volume provide a systematic analysis of the contemporary means of regulation employed in a range of economic and social...