This detailed 1996 study contributes to an expanding field of interest: the social history of industrial employers. Using previously untapped primary sources, Organised Capital explores the emergence of employers' organisations in northern England and analyses their policies during the heyday of collective activity. Arthur McIvor evaluates the impact of trade unionism, state intervention, war, economic recession and changing product markets on these organisations, charting their role and patterns of growth. He challenges notions of a monolithic employer group and crude economic determinism, while also rejecting 'revisionist' accounts of weak and ineffective employers. Instead, he reaches a more balanced appraisal of these institutions' role in capital-labour relations and the pursuit of employers' class interests. This book will be of interest both to historians and to students of industrial relations.

This detailed new study--the first academic monograph on the history of British employers' organizations--develops a much-neglected theme in social history. Using previously untapped primary sources, Organised Capital explores these institutions from a regional, comparative perspective, analyzing their growth and activities during their heyday, and challenging current interpretations of employers' groups. Arthur McIvor's study will be of interest both to historians and to students of industrial relations.

Over the twentieth century Scots' lives changed in fast, dramatic and culturally significant ways. By examining their bodies, homes, working lives, rituals, beliefs and consumption, this volume exposes how the very substance of everyday life was composed, tracing both the intimate and the mass changes that the people endured. Using novel perspectives and methods, chapters range across the experiences of work, art and death, the way Scots conceived of themselves and their homes, and the way the 'old Scotland' of oppressive community rules broke down from mid-century as the country reinvented its everyday life and culture. This volume brings together leading cultural historians of twentieth-century Scotland to study the apparently mundane activities of people's lives, traversing the key spaces where daily experience is composed to expose the controversial personal and national politics that ritual and practice can generate. Key features: *Contains an overview of the material changes experienced by Scots in their everyday lives during the course of the century *Focuses on some of the key areas of change in everyday experience, from the way Scots spent their Sundays to the homes in which they lived, from the work they undertook to the culture they consumed and eventually the way they died. *Pays particular attention to identity as well as experience