The Second Industrial Divide

Abstract

This is a book unlikely to be read by historians. Or rather, they may read it, but in their capacity as citizens concerned as the book's subtitle puts it about Possibilities for Prosperity. The Second Industrial Divide is indeed a work of contemporary analysis. Like other books this publishing season, it is intended to give us the lowdown about the economic crisis of the 1980s. But this one is also very much a work of history. The book is remarkable in general for its intellectual breadth, but in particular for its reliance on recent scholarship in American social and economic history. More than that, it is deeply historical in perspective and sensitive to the contingent, complex nature of change. Historians are accustomed to draw on the social sciences. In this book, the terms of trade have shifted. Historical scholarship contributes crucially to the making of The Second Industrial Divide. What it offers in return are not the standard commodities of socialscience industry not conceptual and methodological tools that can be appropriated for the historian's use but lessons in the art of sweeping historical analysis and conclusions about the nature of change worth pondering by historians. Michael Piore is a labor economist, well known for his work on labormarket segmentation and labor migration. Charles Sabel, the younger of the two, is the author of Work and Politics: The Division of Labor in Industry (1982), a highly original comparative analysis of shop-floor relations in modern systems. Both are MacArthur Fellows and members of a notable assemblage of MIT social scientists working on relations and technological change. Piore and Sabel can perhaps best be characterized as modern-day institutionalists and, like John R. Commons in his time, contemporary empirical analysis has led them to a serious engagement with history. The key concept of their book is that of industrial divides the moments at which choices are made that fix the future course of develop-