The industrious revolution, the industriousness discourse, and the development of modern economies

ABSTRACTThe idea of industriousness has been an ever-recurring issue since Max Weber launched it as a putative explanation of the advent of economic modernity. The notion of ‘industrious revolution’ has provoked a renewed flourishing of publications focusing on this issue. Although most historians agree on the emergence of industriousness in seventeenth-century Europe, there is no consensus regarding the chronology, hence the real causes, of this mental and discursive shift. This article emphasizes the problematic role played by literary evidences in these social and cultural models of diffusion of new consumer values and desires. It then establishes the timing of the emergence of the ‘industriousness discourse’ using an original approach to diffusion based both on the quantitative analysis of very large corpora and a close reading of seventeenth-century economic pamphlets and educational literature. It concludes first that there was not one but several competing discourses on industriousness. It then identifies two crucial hinges which closely match the chronology proposed by Allen and Muldrew, but refutes that championed by de Vries and McCloskey. The industrious revolution as described by these authors would have happened both too late to fit its intellectual roots and too early to signal the beginning of a ‘consumer revolution’.This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research CouncilThis is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Cambridge University Press via https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X1300052

Creating Creative Technologists: playing with(in) education

Since the industrial revolution, the organization of knowledge into distinct scientific, technical or creative categories has resulted in educational systems designed to produce and validate particular occupations. The methods by which students are exposed to different kinds of knowledge are critical in creating and reproducing individual, professional or cultural identities. (“I am an Engineer. You are an Artist”). The emergence of more open, creative and socialised technologies generates challenges for discipline-based education. At the same time, the term “Creative Technologies” also suggests a new occupational category (“I am a Creative Technologist”). This chapter presents a case-study of an evolving ‘anti-disciplinary’ project-based degree that challenges traditional degree structures to stimulate new forms of connective, imaginative and explorative learning, and to equip students to respond to a changing world. Learning is conceived as an emergent process; self-managed by students through critique and open peer review. We focus on ‘playfulness’ as a methodology for achieving multi-modal learning across the boundaries of art, design, computer science, engineering, games and entrepreneurship. In this new cultural moment, playfulness also re-frames the institutional identities of teacher and learner in response to new expectations for learning

Critical realism, dialectics, and qualitative research methods

Critical realism has been an important advance in social science methodology because it develops a qualitative theory of causality which avoids some of the pitfalls of empiricist theories of causality. But while there has been ample work exploring the relationship between critical realism and qualitative research methods there has been noticeably less work exploring the relationship between dialectical critical realism and qualitative research methods. This seems strange especially since the founder of the philosophy of critical realism, Roy Bhaskar, employs and develops a range of dialectical concepts in his later work in order to extend the main tenets of critical realism. The aim of this paper is to draw on Bhaskar’s later work, as well as Marxism, to reorient a critical realist methodology towards a dialectical approach for qualitative research. In particular, the paper demonstrates how dialectical critical realism can begin to provide answers to three common criticisms made against original critical realist methodology: that the qualitative theory of causal powers and structures developed by critical realists is problematic; that critical realist methodology contains values which prove damaging to empirical research; and that critical realists often have difficulties in researching everyday qualitative dilemmas that people face in their daily lives

Toward a popular political economy: The Knights of Labor and the rise of critical economic consciousness.

This study contends that scholarship on nineteenth century working-class politics, guided by class formation theory and its concern for the emergence of class consciousness, has insufficiently examined and inaccurately characterized the critical economic consciousness expressed by the Knights of Labor. Through an examination of the Knights' writings in their Journal of United Labor from 1883--1886, I show the value of a new framework and set of questions. I incorporate and extend thinking within narrative theory, social movement theory, cultural history, and the sociology of historical memory to develop a multi-layered analysis of their movement consciousness. Doing so points to three newly theorized layers of consciousness: an implicit social theory, a narrative ideology, and a historical metanarrative. Together these reveal that the Knights' consciousness---creatively constructed out of existing cultural traditions---was not centered on class conflict but nevertheless contained a broad and multi-faceted critique of the capitalist political economy.Ph.D.American historyAmerican studiesSocial SciencesSociologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/124632/2/3150164.pd