Work in a Modern Society: The German Historical Experience in Comparative Perspective ed. by Jürgen Kocka (review)

Seemingly elementary concepts often turn out to have unanticipatedly complex meanings that change over time. The concept “work” seems to be a straightforward one, but its history indeed reflects the cultural histories of the societies in which it takes place. It overlaps with, but is not identical to, the history of “labor” because of its differing emphasis on the nonquantitative, more cultural aspects of production. This collection of ten essays discusses the idea of “work” by focusing primarily on modern Germany, but ranges temporally and geographically from early modern Germany to modern Japan.

The volume includes a variety of new perspectives, topics, and approaches. Jürgen Kocka, the editor, begins with a conceptual essay about the history of the word itself to show how the concept has evolved over the past centuries. Several of the articles address the history of “work” from the same conceptual approach, noting that modern ideas about “work” were neither as recent as often assumed nor as exclusively rooted in Europe. Joseph Ehmer, in “Discourses on Work and Labour in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Germany,” argues, for example, that the idea that “work” had dignity and honor did not originate with the Protestant work ethic; nor, it seems, did Europeans in previous centuries hold quite as much disdain for work as conventionally thought. Likewise, Thomas Welskopp, in “The Vision(s) of Work in the Nineteenth-Century German Labour Movement,” notes that German workers, rather than taking their cue from Karl Marx about class consciousness, took it instead initially from guild and artisanal ideas about “work.” Their class consciousness came about, in short, from the loss of a community rather than from the development of one. Ute Frevert’s “Trust as Work,” a more abstract article about the role of “trust” in the creation of “work,” argues that the creation of trust was in fact part of “work.”

Other articles in the collection are more historiographical in nature. Gerd Spittler’s “Beginnings of the Anthropology of Work: Nineteenth-Century Social Scientists and Their Influence on Ethnography” argues that German social scientists derived their ideas about “work” through the examination of non-European societies. These ideas then gradually became central concepts in their scholarly pursuits: applied specifically to Germany, they lost their original comparative context. Karin Hausen’s “Work in Gender, Gender in Work: The German Case in Comparative Perspective” reminds us that gender history, because of its overlap with labor history and the history of “work,” has often provided the conceptual tools that the other approaches employ.

Two other articles discuss more recent perspectives on “work” and the elasticity of the concept in military circumstances. Alf Lüdtke, in “Soldiering and Working: Almost the Same?,” notes the similarities of German cultural attitudes toward military service and work. Soldiers “produced” services in their own way, and workers “destroyed” in their own way. In “Forced Labour in the Second World War: The German Case and Responsibility,” the late Klaus Tenfelde describes the various ways in which German authorities used forced labor, noting the distinctions made with other forms of coerced (but paid) labor.

Finally, two of the articles attempt to put “work” (and “labor”) into a global context. Andreas Eckert’s “What Is Global Labour History Good For?” argues that the globalization of labor is introducing new, more globally comparative issues. Demonstrating this point, Sebastian Conrad’s essay compares the origins of “work ethics” across cultures. In “Work, Max Weber, Confucianism: The Confucian Ethic and the Spirit of Japanese Capitalism,” he argues against the existence of an actual “Confucian work ethic,” suggesting instead that it was a false projection of current attitudes toward work aimed at making the history of East Asian industrialization resemble its European counterpart. To the degree that the other essays in this volume broaden and deepen the context of the concept of “work,” this article narrows it again, making the “work...