Learning on the Shop Floor: Historical Perspectives on Apprenticeship (review)

This collection seeks to break new ground for the further study of the history of apprenticeship, guild regulation, and the social context of work training. In a narrow sense, the essays presented here collectively contribute toward that goal. There are several interesting insights to be gained as well as important revisions to our understanding of these issues. However, as is more than ably pointed out in coeditor Steven L. Kaplan's concluding essay, this book also leaves many larger questions either insufficiently formulated or entirely untouched.

In part, this apparent weakness is a common result of the collected-essay genre. The essays cover an exceedingly wide range of time periods, a broad swath of geography, and an array of manufacturing trades. Thus a brief case-study of apprenticeship in the late-twentieth-century Japanese confectionery trade shares space with a broad-based discussion of guilds and trades in late-medieval Flanders, which itself shares space with a case study of a brewing firm in late-nineteenth-century England. Such an approach does indeed have its benefits, especially highlighting the common elements shared by apprenticeship practices at different times and in different cultures. However, in this case, one also gets the sense that some of these voices present a distraction from the focus of the book that gravitates toward the ancien régime both in the Netherlands and protoindustrial central Europe.

This imbalance is not terribly surprising considering the fact that, as Kaplan notes, the unstated objective of the book appears to be the repudiation of received notions of work and life in the ganze Haus. The ganze Haus paradigm posits the existence of a pre- and protoindustrial household generally unique to central Europe and distinctly different from the French and British concept of the nuclear family. Unlike the situation in those Western countries, the household and not the family was the basic unit of social organization and, therefore, the ganze Haus denoted the inclusion of servants and apprentices under the authority, care, and guidance of the head of the household. Indeed, it has been argued that the Western notion of "family" did not begin to make its appearance in Germany until the eighteenth century. Moreover, as has been further suggested, the ganze Haus structure played a key role in the promotion of social stability, especially through the transfer of paternalistic and often authoritarian values throughout society.

Several essays in this collection, therefore, are intended to prove either that the stability and paternalism associated with this model of the intimate connection between the transfer of skills and the broader organization of society is more apparent than real, or that the social and economic history of apprenticeship has a much broader and deeper history in the context of the market rather than the home and paternalism. Certainly, two of the more interesting revisions to our historical understanding of apprenticeship are the enormous variations exhibited among different trades and the different forms of mobility that characterized apprenticeships. In contrast to the pre-nineteenth-century British legal standard of seven-year apprenticeships, with trades as diverse as the Antwerp cabinet makers and the English brewers, apprenticeships were often as short as six months and sometimes as long as twelve years. In many cases, the standard apprenticeship hovered between two and three years rather than the English seven. Moreover, as Annemarie Steidl shows here for several Viennese trades, apprenticeships often were terminated before their completion. Among locksmiths, to take the most extreme example, 57 percent of apprenticeships were terminated before their completion date; most termination rates were between 20 and 30 percent. Peter Stabel's essay on late medieval Flanders shows that the success rate for apprentices—that is, those who succeeded in becoming masters—was astonishingly small. In Bruges it was only 22.5 percent.

This apparent volatility in the world of apprentices perhaps was compounded by a closer relationship between masters and markets than heretofore recognized. Coeditor...