The worker between practise and ideology from the 19th to the 21st century

Abstract

Workers’ culture and the labour movement previously were prominent fields of research. This had to do with their societal influence and to the fact that many scholars regarded a self-conscious labour class as a means to balance capitalism’s negative aspects, if not simply to overcome it as a system. Drawing from this background, the author argues that the common worker has hitherto not been satisfactorily understood as a subject of cultural history. Using investigations among workers at Denmark’s largest enterprise from the 19th to the 21st century, the author reveals the complexity and diversity of everyday working life of industrialism, the relations between workers as well as towards employers and society as a whole. The author argues that, as seen from the overall perspective of the state, the labour population –with varying intensity– played a very strategic role from around 1870 to 1990. During this period consideration for their well-being was understood as a precondition for societal cohesion: whereas, since the end of the Cold War, that understanding has changed. The author draws on the ethnological State-Form and Life-Mode analysis, also known as Life-Mode Analysis.