The Puzzle of Strikes: Class and State Strategies in Postwar Italy (Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics) - Softcover

Franzosi, Roberto

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0521031230 ISBN 13: 9780521031233

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2008

Synopsis

This book is an attempt to explain the temporal movement of postwar Italian strikes: why and when strikes go up or down and what the strategies of the main actors involved are. In many ways, the book is unique in the social sciences. First, it takes an inductive approach. Rather than start with theories and then use available empirical evidence to test the explanatory power of the theories, the book starts with date. Second, the book is based on a variety of empirical evidence: statistical, historical, ethnographic and survey material. Third, the book considers the strategies of all the actors involved: workers, employers, the state and the radical left. Finally, the book does not simply explain the movement of strikes; more broadly, it attempts to show how strikes, in their turn, deeply affect the economic, institutional and political spheres of society.

About this title

From the Back Cover

This book presents, through an extensive and novel inductive approach, an analysis of the temporal dynamics of postwar Italian strikes in the industrial sector. The author begins by highlighting a set of characteristics in the strike data that call for explanation: the pieces of the puzzle. Then, chapter by chapter, the author uses a broad range of available strike theories - business cycle, economic, hardship, resource mobilization, bargaining structure, political exchange, and Marxist - as clues to assemble the puzzle. The study has the organizational structure of a mystery story, with its sequence of false steps, pat solutions, and unexpected twists and turns. This is characterized in the final chapter of the book, when the causal argument is completely reversed. The book is also novel in its combined use of statistical, historical, ethnographic, and survey material, as well as its view of strikes as the strategic interaction between organized interests. It focuses as much on employers' and state actions as on workers' actions. The book's aim is not merely descriptive, nor does it seek simply to test the explanatory power of existing strike theories. Rather, its goal is more ambitious: to disentangle the causal structure in the historical interaction among the social processes in the economic, institutional, and political arenas.

Edition details

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0521031230
• ISBN 13: 9780521031233
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 532