Industrial Culture and Bourgeois Society: Business, Labor, and Bureaucracy in Modern Germany, 1800-1918 (review)

Industrial Culture and Bourgeois Society: Business, Labor, and Bureaucracy in Modern Germany, 1800-1918. By Jürgen Kocka. Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books, 1999. Pp. xviii+325. $59.95.

Jürgen Kocka has made major contributions to the study of German business history, white-collar workers, and the bourgeoisie, as well as the latter's relationships to social and political developments in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Kocka now holds a chair for the history of the industrial world at the Free University of Berlin, and the essays in this volume demonstrate the range of his interests. Although he began his career in the 1960s by writing about the Siemens electrical firm, this collection makes no note of when these various essays first appeared.

Kocka places himself in a tradition of social history that stresses "structures and processes over actors and events." Beginning in the 1960s, proponents of this tradition based themselves on "social sciences rather than . . . historical hermeneutics" (p. 276). Using his view of social science, he sets up his essays in a disarmingly simple way. First, he defines the characteristics of traditional manufactories, factories, families, bureaucracies, managerial hierarchies, entrepreneurs, salaried entrepreneurs, the working class, the middle classes, and civil society. He then discusses points of transition and structural interaction over a period of time.

For instance, when Werner Siemens—more an example than an agent of change—established Siemens and Halske in 1847, he could draw on his family for trusted managers and the Prussian bureaucracy for models of organization. He began with hand production and then, in the late 1860s, turned to machine production. Kocka identifies significant impediments to change and turning points. Siemens could have prevented the rise of the electrical manufacturing firm Allgemeine Elektricitäts-Gesellschaft (AEG), but reliance on family prevented a timely turn to managerial hierarchies and financing from banks.

Kocka stresses market relations and interactions among the structures as important engines of change. He also identifies technology as a force for change. "Backward integration" found in heavy industry and chemicals by the late nineteenth century was "driven by technology as well as by defensive market strategy" (p. 164). In addition, during the nineteenth century, technology became science-based. For example, in one essay he describes the transition of electric power from small local systems to large, science-based systems. Although he lauds the work of Thomas P. Hughes, Kocka does not discuss the variety of factors that shaped technology, as do many recent historians and sociologists of technology, including Hughes. Instead, Kocka is concerned "with changes that electricity required as preconditions, and with changes that electricity induced or helped determine as a consequence" (p. 176, Kocka's emphasis).

The real trick, according to Kocka, was correctly to recognize the path to factories, multidivisional companies, and civil society. The challenge was to remove obstacles as quickly as possible. Germans did neither, hence their peculiar path to the present. Kocka imagines real, measurable forms—structures—that exist behind appearances. This kind of approach is meant to provide predictability and control in some disciplines. Kocka (and others) may have chosen this historiographical path as a way around the relativism of earlier German historians. An approach that abstracts empirical measures from social contexts does not really solve that problem. In one essay, Kocka notes that "the future is hard to predict" (p. 291). Asking whether it was really different for our predecessors would, however, raise questions about the contingency of choice. We would need to know more about agents, events, ideas, and politics than Kocka offers.