This is an essay about the reasons industrialists create different kinds of factory jobs, about why workers put up with these jobs when they do, and about what they want when they do not. It shows how workers' ideas of self-interest, born of the principles of honor and dignity they bring to the factory, can be transformed by workplace struggles. And it shows how these struggles, colliding or combining with conflicts in the larger society and between nations, can reshape technologies, markets, and factory hierarchies.

The essay is a work of synthesis. It combines into a single framework research on industrial technology, factory workers, industrial organization, and labor movements from roughly 1850 to the present: the age of mass production, standardized goods, specialized machines, and unskilled workers. It concerns mainly France, Great Britain, Italy, the United States, and West Germany. Wherever possible I have tried to corroborate and supplement the available sources by my own interviews with workers, managers, and academics from these countries.

But the essay is also a work of reconstruction, for to unify the research findings, it is necessary to reinterpret them on the basis of methodological assumptions often radically different from the ones on which they were originally constructed. I try to show that most of the diverse and frequently contradictory studies of factory work and factory workers from different countries and periods form a whole if arranged according to new ideas of the relation between workers' consciousness and the division of labor.