International Conference of Labour and Social History (ITH) (Web)

Time: 07.–09.09 2023
Venue: Linz, Upper Austria
Proposals by: 31.12.2023

Industrialization and deindustrialization have been global and combined phenomena ever since the Industrial Revolution. The wave of industrialization associated with England in the late 18th and early 19th centuries formed but one element of a dramatic global restructuring of production which came with the loss and transformation of livelihoods in other parts of the world. India is emblematic for that, as the surge in machine-driven industrialization in England went hand in hand with the decline if not dismantling of the more craft-based textile industries in India. Since then, we have witnessed many waves of deindustrialization, reindustrialization and economic transition around the world. These interconnected processes have been accompanied by often dramatic changes in employment opportunities and the world of work more generally. This conference seeks to explore processes that are often described as ‘deindustrialization’ from a global and historical perspective. It starts from the assumption that the term itself is problematic, as the economic processes leading to deindustrialization at the same time might include processes of reindustrialization. The term itself is also not used widely in different languages: in German ‘Strukturwandel’ is preferred, in Italian there ‘ristruccturazione’ and in French we often hear about ‘modernisation’. The ambivalence of terminology points at the diversity of processes of industrial restructuring: they may be due to shifts of profit expectations between industrial sectors, changing modalities of international capital movements or to the transformation of labour processes and management strategies within a specific industrial sector. Each of these interconnected processes of crisis resolution can result in various forms of spatial relocation, and re-composition of the labour force. Read more … (PDF)

Conference Languages: English and German