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Business, Economics & LawJune 2024The labour movement in Lebanon
Power on hold
by Lea Bou Khater
The labour movement in Lebanon: Power on hold narrates the history of the Lebanese labour movement from the early twentieth century to today. Bou Khater demonstrates that trade unionism in the country has largely been a failure, for reasons including state interference, tactical co-optation, and the strategic use of sectarianism by an oligarchic elite, together with the structural weakness of a service-based laissez-faire economy. Drawing on a vast body of Arabic-language primary sources and difficult-to-access archives, the book's conclusions are significant not only for trade unionism, but also for new forms of workers' organisations and social movements in Lebanon and beyond. The Lebanese case study presented here holds significant implications for the wider Arab world and for comparative studies of labour. This authoritative history of the labour movement in Lebanon is vital reading for scholars of trade unionism, Lebanese politics, and political economy.
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Humanities & Social SciencesApril 2025The return of the housewife
Why women are still cleaning up
by Emma Casey
An illuminating look at the world of cleanfluencers that asks why the burden of housework still falls on women. Housework is good for you. Housework sparks joy. Housework is beautiful. Housework is glamorous. Housework is key to a happy family. Housework shows that you care. Housework is women's work. Social media is flooded with images of the perfect home. TikTok and Instagram 'cleanfluencers' produce endless photos and videos of women cleaning, tidying and putting things right. Figures such as Marie Kondo and Mrs Hinch have placed housework, with its promise of a life of love and contentment, at the centre of self-care and positive thinking. And yet housework remains one of the world's most unequal institutions. Women, especially poorer women and women of colour, do most low-paid and unpaid domestic labour. In The return of the housewife, Emma Casey asks why these inequalities matter and why they persist after a century of dramatic advances in women's rights. She offers a powerful call to challenge the prevailing myths around housework and the 'naturally competent' woman homemaker.
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Humanities & Social SciencesJuly 2025Threads of labour
Tapestry of an ex-industrial community
by Lisa Taylor
Charting a collaborative art-based project using carpet-making skills and the industrial heritage of the region, the book investigates how a cleaved ex-industrial community used arts methodologies as a cohesion strategy. Drawing on images from the company's archives, the book mines the history of Firths Carpets Limited, a firm that carpeted interiors across the globe from the mid-1800s. Women's labour and tastes were business critical to the production and sale of Firths carpets. Drawing on the author's personal connection to the village, an ethnographic sensibility and novel research techniques, ex-worker responses to a village radically altered by ruination are explored. Ex-workers felt nostalgia for the dignity of work and a sense of homesickness in a village ghosted by industrial spectres of the past. Threads of Labour argues that left-behind deindustrialised places require acts of social re-making if their communities are to survive.
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Humanities & Social SciencesFebruary 2026New Labour, new Britain
How the Blair governments reshaped the country
by Glen O’Hara
A bold and balanced re-appraisal of New Labour in power. Rewriting the story of New Labour, Glen O'Hara challenges the prevailing narrative to present a more balanced and positive assessment. New Labour, new Britain is the first book to examine both the intentions behind New Labour's domestic policies and their real-world effects, moving beyond the entrenched left-right debates that have dominated the party's legacy. The period from 1997 to 2007 marked a pivotal moment in modern British history, as New Labour sought to reshape Britain into a more cohesive and forward-thinking society. It saw the rise of socially liberal attitudes and flourishing public services under a government committed to rebuilding and investing in them. Yet New Labour's track record was far from flawless and its legacy remains complicated and contested. Through interviews with key players and rigorous archival research, O'Hara offers a new perspective on Tony Blair's years in power. Painting a fuller picture of New Labour's successes and challenges, he highlights its lasting impact on Britain and offers a thoughtful reassessment of its place in history.
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Business, Economics & LawFebruary 2022The labour movement in Lebanon
by Lea Bou Khater, Simon Mabon
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Humanities & Social SciencesApril 2007Labour, the state, social movements and the challenge of neo-liberal globalisation
by Andrew Gamble, Steven Fielding, Steve Ludlam, John Callaghan, Andrew Taylor, Steve Ludlam, Stephen Wood
With the emergence of neo-liberalism in the 1980s as the dominant domestic and international political-economic orthodoxy, labour as both a social category and political movement tended to be written off or ignored by academics, politicians and commentators. However, at a time when the world's working class is growing faster than at any previous time in history and neo-liberalism is widely challenged, this orthodoxy is clearly inadequate. The spread of global production means that to ignore labour, its organisations, interests and politics, is to ignore one of the key components of that process. Labour organisations have not gone away and neither has the state: their relationship remains as significant as ever. The strategic relationship between trade unions and social movements, nationally and internationally, has also developed markedly, especially in the south. New patterns of resistance are emerging to challenge global capital and those who assert that globalisation is irresistible. ;
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Humanities & Social SciencesMay 2021
Critical race theory and inequality in the labour market
by Ebun Joseph
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Humanities & Social SciencesSeptember 2008The Labour governments 1964–1970 volume 3
Economic policy
by Jim Tomlinson
Available in paperback for the first time, this book is the third in the three volume set The Labour governments 1964-1970 and concentrates on Britain's economic policy under the Labour governments in the 1960s. It assesses the origins, development and outcomes of the attempts made by the 1964-1970 Labourgovernments under Harold Wilson to modernise the British economy. This is the first comprehensive and archivally-based work to offer a detailed study of this modernisation project. The book places the project in the context of Labour's economic ideas as they had developed since the 1940s as well as the economic legacy they inherited from the previous thirteen years of Conservative rule. After outlining this context and providing a summary narrative of economic policy over this period, the international aspect of Labour's approach to the economy is analysed. The core of the book then goes on to look in detail at the policies directly concerned with modernisation. Following the agenda set by the national plan of 1965, policies on planning, investment and the firm, technical change, the labour market and the nationalised industries are all analysed. In addition, the productivity campaign of the late 1960s is shown to have encapsulated many of the underlying ideas but also many of the problems of Labour's approach to economic policy. The final section of the book asks how the pursuit of modernisation affected Labour's pursuit of "social justice", before offering an overall assessment of Labour's period of office. The book will be of special interest to contemporary historians, economic historians and those interested in the history of the Labour party. Together with the other books in the series, on domestic policy and international policy, it provides a complete picture of the development of Britain under the premiership of Harold Wilson. ;
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Sociology & anthropologyFebruary 2017Environment, labour and capitalism at sea
'Working the ground' in Scotland
by Penny McCall Howard. Series edited by Alexander Smith
This book explores how fishers make the sea productive through their labour, using technologies ranging from wooden boats to digital GPS plotters to create familiar places in a seemingly hostile environment. It shows how their lives are affected by capitalist forces in the markets they sell to, forces that shape even the relations between fishers on the same boat. Fishers frequently have to make impossible choices between safe seamanship and staying afloat economically, and the book describes the human impact of the high rate of deaths in the fishing industry. The book makes a unique contribution to understanding human-environment relations, examining the places fishers create and name at sea, as well as technologies and navigation practices. It combines phenomenology and political economy to offer new approaches for analyses of human-environment relations and technologies. It contributes to the social studies of fisheries through an analysis of how deeply fishing practices and social relations are shaped by political economy. It will be read in universities by social scientists and anthropologists and also by those with an interest in maritime Scotland.
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Humanities & Social SciencesJuly 2020The modernisation of the Labour Party, 1979–97
by Christopher Massey
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Humanities & Social SciencesAugust 2018Labour united and divided from the 1830s to the present
by Yann Béliard, Emmanuelle Avril
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Humanities & Social SciencesJanuary 2012The Second Labour Government
A reappraisal
by John Shepherd
This new edited collection of essays focuses on the history of Labour's second period in office during the 1929-1931 global financial crisis. Contributions by leading historians and younger academics bring fresh perspectives to Labour's domestic problems, electoral and party matters, relations with the Soviet Union and ideological questions. An important range of new historical research provides a much-needed reappraisal of Ramsay MacDonald's second Labour government, which impressed few with its conventional policies for tackling mass unemployment. Oswald Mosley, John Maynard Keynes and Ernest Bevin's alternative economic strategies are critically studied in key essays. A more positive side of the government's policies is also adeptly revealed on consumerism and agriculture. Significant new light is adroitly shed on the 1929 general election, the first fought on a universal franchise. The intricate politics of the Parliamentary Labour Party and the disaffiliation of the Independent Labour Party are convincingly explored. The influence of the Soviet Union on Labour's thoughts and actions is analysed in valuable accounts of Labour's foreign policy and Labour's turn to socialism after 1931. An important fresh account of opposition politics breaks new ground on the reaction of Tory politicians, including Harold Macmillan, to MacDonald's government. The volume concludes with an absorbing analysis of the myths surrounding '1931' in Labour history. This timely volume makes accessible a major reassessment of existing knowledge and new scholarship that will appeal to students and teachers of British political and social history. It is essential reading for sixth form and university courses on twentieth-century history. ;
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Humanities & Social SciencesMarch 2026Soviet materialities
Socialist things, environments and affects
by Mollie Arbuthnot, Christianna Bonin, Gabriella Ferrari
Soviet materialities explores how material transforms our understanding of Soviet culture, from the textures of domestic space in 1960s apartment blocks to Gulag labour on the Moscow canal, and from avant-garde literary theory in the 1920s to conceptual art under perestroika. It starts from the ethos that the material world shapes people and society. Taking a material approach-or a range of material approaches-can therefore illuminate aspects of the cultural production and lived experiences of Soviet socialism that are not reflected in other kinds of historical records. This edited volume brings cutting-edge research by emerging scholars together with the established voices who have broken the ground in this sub-field over the last twenty years and promises to make a major intervention in the study of Soviet history and culture.
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Humanities & Social SciencesSeptember 2021Nostalgia and the post-war Labour Party
by Richard Jobson
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Humanities & Social SciencesJanuary 2019Labour united and divided from the 1830s to the present
by Emmanuelle Avril, Yann Béliard
Spanning a period which stretches from the 19th century to the present day, this book takes a novel look at the British labour movement by examining the interaction between trade unions, the Labour Party, other parties and groups of the Left, and the wider working class, to highlight the dialectic nature of these relationships, marked by consensus and dissention. It shows that, although perceived as a source of weakness, those inner conflicts have also been a source of creative tension, at times generating significant breakthroughs. The book brings together labour historians and political scientists who provide a range of case studies as well as more wide-ranging assessments of recent trends in labour organising. It will therefore be of interest to academics and students of history and politics, as well as to practitioners, in the British Isles and beyond.
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Political partiesSeptember 2008The Labour governments 1964–1970 volume 2
International policy
by John W. Young
This book is the second in the three volume set The Labour governments 1964-1970 and concentrates on Britain's international policy under the Labour governments in the 1960s and is available for the first time in paperback. The coverage ranges from defence policy and the government machine to European integration, NATO and the Vietnam war. Harold Wilson and his ministers have often been accused of betraying the sense of promise that greeted their victory in 1964. Using recently released archival evidence, John Young argues that a more balanced view of the government will recognise the real difficulties that surrounded decision-making, not only on Vietnam, but also on Aden, the Nigerian civil war and Rhodesia. Economic weakness, waning military strength, Cold War tensions and the need to placate allies all placed limits on what a once-great but now clearly declining power could achieve. Furthermore the government proved of pivotal importance in the history of Britain's international role, in that it presided over a major shift from positions East of Suez to a focus on European concerns, a focus that has remained until the present day. The book will be of vital importance to students of British history and international relations during this exciting period. Together with the other books in the series, on domestic policy and economic policy, it provides a complete picture of the development of Britain under the premiership of Harold Wilson.
