This paper aims to explain the different political trajectories and identities of two sets of industrial workers in the city of Lyon, France during the years immediately preceding the first World War. Silk workers supported reformist socialist parties while metalworkers were pillars of the revolutionary syndicalist current that dominated the prewar CGT. Unlike base and superstructure models or political autonomy explanations, it is argued that the particular industrial structures and social relations within each industry interacted with local and national political opportunity structures in ways that rendered some strategies and forms of collective action more efficacious than others. The programs and strategies proposed by revolutionary syndicalism matched the conditions of metalworkers and attracted their support, while reformist socialism struck a similar chord with silk workers resulting in similar results.

I and my son are bakers and barbers, you and your sons are lapidaries and gardeners, but if you bid one of your sons be barber, a second baker, a third lapidary and a fourth gardener, all is confusion, and how can good come out of it? Furthermore he is no barber nor baker who does not belong to the Guild of the Barbers and the Guild of the Bakers. If your son [does not go] to the peshkadim and rank himself among the apprentices; next to the tehaoosh, to bid him inscribe his name on the rolls; then to the kihaya, to pay him toll, how should he be a member of the guild? Ask of the scheikh if I have not spoken well.

In the past three decades a fair number of historical demographers and family and labour historians have used the concept of “family strategies” as a means to understand better the social behaviour of individuals and families. At the 26th Annual Meeting of the American Social Science History Association (Chicago, November 2001), a session of the Family/Demography Network was devoted to a critical discussion of this concept of family strategies. Given the importance of the issue, we have invited three of the panelists to rework the papers they gave on that occasion. Two of them, Katherine Lynch and Pier Paolo Viazzo, have joined forces here to discuss the matter from a predominantly theoretical perspective with particular attention to the use of the concept in social anthropology, and in medieval and early modern history. Based on recent Dutch empirical studies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Theo Engelen questions the use of the concept of family strategies, given the availability of the broader concept of agency. The riposte to these critiques comes from Jan Kok, who is actively engaged in the application of the concept of family strategies in the research programme of the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam.

In this essay, we consider family history as a common field of substantive and theoretical interest shaped by contacts among several disciplines. These disciplines obviously include social history and population studies, but also – and rather prominently – social anthropology. One major component of the growth of family history has been the increasing amount of attention that historians pay to topics such as marriage, kinship, and the family, which have long been of central significance in the anthropological investigation of social structure. On the other hand, anthropologists have become aware of the serious limitations of synchronic, present-oriented field research, and most of them now probably agree that historical analysis is essential if they are to understand social and cultural processes. This realization has gradually changed many anthropologists from reluctant consumers of historical work into active and often quite enthusiastic producers.

Phyllis Moen and Elaine Wethington were absolutely right when they called family strategies “the intuitively appealing metaphor for family response to structural barriers”. This appeal probably explains the avalanche of studies on the subject since the 1970s and especially since the 1980s. The last contribution, to my knowledge, is a collection of articles edited by Laurence Fontaine and Jurgen Schlumbohm in 2000. I will not even try to outline the vast historiography. This paper focuses on another problem. It is an attempt to show that concepts built on appealing metaphors lose much of their appeal in empirical research for the simple reason that their application tends to be more complicated than expected. In the following pages an example of such an experience is presented. Within the virtual walls of the Dutch National Research Institute for Economic and Social History, the N.W. Posthumus Institute, we have been struggling with family strategies since 1994. Now that we are about to publish the third volume on the subject, it is time to evaluate what we have accomplished.

Is “strategy” merely a sympathetic and convenient phrase, on closer scrutiny devoid of explanatory value as a scientific concept? Have we been beguiled by its appeal and should we now, wiser and sadder, return to less pretentious concepts such as tactics or agency? Or do we need more empirical applications and have we just begun to explore strategy's vistas?