I conceived this book about social transformation with one set of questions in mind and wrote it guided by another. When the ideas set down here first took shape in the mid-1970s, the strike waves of the 1960s in France, Italy, and West Germany were fresh in mind; but so too was the impression that, measured by many of their explicit ambitions, these movements had failed to revolutionize factory labor. Why had millions of normally cautious workers gone into the streets? Why were they back at their jobs? To understand what happened, I decided to find out as much as I could about the structure of industrial jobs and the demands industrial workers make on them. The naïveté of the questions seemed both a reminder of my ignorance of industry and a way to keep an eye turned to the passionate drama of hope, desperation, and power that is played out in any large conflict.

Visiting factories and reading about them, I convinced myself that workers were neither a homogeneous class united in opposition to management nor a mass of individuals eager for their own reasons to cooperate, even in limited ways, with the bosses. Rather, it seemed that in factory after factory in different countries and times the work force was regularly split along skill lines into distinct groups, perpetuating themselves in different ways. Each had a characteristic definition of its prerogatives and ambitions and little comprehension of those of the others.