This book presents, through an extensive and novel inductive approach, an analysis of the temporal dynamics of postwar Italian strikes in the industrial sector. The author begins by highlighting a set of characteristics in the strike data that call for explanation: the pieces of the puzzle. Then, chapter by chapter, the author uses a broad range of available strike theories - business cycle, economic, hardship, resource mobilization, bargaining structure, political exchange, and Marxist - as clues to assemble the puzzle. The study has the organizational structure of a mystery story, with its...

Focusing on the strategic interaction among workers, employers, and the state, this book examines the temporal movement of postwar Italian strikes. Incorporating several theoretical approaches and based on many forms of empirical evidence (statistical, historical, ethnographic, and survey), The Puzzle of Strikes is unique in its broad concern with a variety of actors, theories, and forms of empirical evidence.

Departing radically from traditional content analysis approaches to the quantitative study of texts, this work is based on a linguistic theory of narrative, rather than the ad hoc approaches of context analysis. The book illustrates a set of tools--story grammars, relational data models, and network models--that can be profitably used for the collection, organization, and analysis of narrative data in socio-historical research (e.g., narratives of strikes, demonstrations, lynchings, and riots).

Departing radically from traditional content analysis approaches to the quantitative study of texts, this work is based on a linguistic theory of narrative, rather than the ad hoc approaches of context analysis. The book illustrates a set of tools--story grammars, relational data models, and network models--that can be profitably used for the collection, organization, and analysis of narrative data in socio-historical research (e.g., narratives of strikes, demonstrations, lynchings, and riots).