Among the various methodological prescriptions of Anthony Giddens, perhaps the most useful for labor history are his advisories on social change, on the anxieties and tensions attending a society's transition from one geographical scale to another. 1 Labor's experience in the United States offers a case in point. The nation's transformation from a preindustrial to an industrial society entailed, in addition to the inexorables of accelerated urbanization, industrial expansion, and market

more »

... n, certain fundamental changes in the conditions of labor. Industrialization restructured the geography of labor markets, revised principles of wage determination, fomented sectarian division in the ranks of labor, and soured the relations between labor and capital. These structural changes led, in turn, to the inevitable responses of, among others, worker combination, protest, industrial violence, and a splintering in the ranks of labor. Although the contours of these momentous social changes are well known, thanks to the diligence of labor historians, we know next to nothing about their geographical particulars, about the evolving geography of labor and labor markets. 2 And for good reason since the methodological directives of American labor history have privileged one or another of two scalar extremes. These directives fasten inquiry either on microscale case studies of community and locale or on macroscale studies of national institutions -the axis, not coincidentally, of older and newer approaches to institutional and social labour history, respectively. 3 Only on rare occa-Any synthesis of the sort attempted here does a disservice to the literatures on which it depends for the simple reason that space precludes comprehensive citation. I trust, therefore, that my abridged set of references offers a hint of the richness of this literature and of my rather sizable debt to historians, sociologists, economists, and geographers, cited and not.