This book develops and applies a new approach to the study of the working group and indeed of productive enterprises more generally. Unlike similar studies, in this volume the human is related back to the technological, and it is the socio-technical system as a whole that is the object of study. The work reported in this book shows how alternative modes of work organization can exist for the same technology, giving the possibility of organizational choice.

This book develops and applies a new approach to the study of the working group and indeed of productive enterprises more generally. Unlike similar studies, in this volume the human is related back to the technological, and it is the socio-technical system as a whole that is the object of study. The work reported in this book shows how alternative modes of work organization can exist for the same technology, giving the possibility of organizational choice.

An optimistic historical revision of the classic concept of childhood and the treatment of children from 1500 to 1900. Drawing from hundreds of English and American diaries and autobiographies, the author reconstructs a genuine picture of childhood in the past.

'The history of childhood is an area so full of errors, distortion and misinterpretation that I thought it vital, if progress were to be made, to supply a clear review of the information on childhood contained in such sources as diaries and autobiographies.' Dr Pollock's statement in her Preface will startle readers who have not questioned the validity of recent theories on the evolution of childhood and the treatment of children, theories which see a movement from a situation where the concept of childhood was almost absent, and children were cruelly treated, to our present western recognition that children are different and should be treated with love and affection. Linda examines this thesis particularly through the close and careful analysis of some hundreds of English and American primary sources. Through these sources, she has been able to reconstruct, probably for the first time, a genuine picture of childhood in the past, and it is a much more humane and optimistic picture than the current stereotype. Her book contains a mass of novel and original material on child-rearing practices and the relations of parents and children, and sets this in the wider framework of developmental psychology, socio-biology and social anthropology. Forgotten Children admirably fulfils the aim of its author. In the face of this scholarly and elegant account of the continuity of parental care, few will now be able to argue for dramatic transformations in the twentieth century.