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

Franzosi, Roberto

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0521452872 ISBN 13: 9780521452878

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 1995

Synopsis

Focusing on the strategic interaction among workers, employers, and the state, this book examines the temporal movement of postwar Italian strikes. Incorporating several theoretical approaches and based on many forms of empirical evidence (statistical, historical, ethnographic, and survey), The Puzzle of Strikes is unique in its broad concern with a variety of actors, theories, and forms of empirical evidence.

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: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0521452872
• ISBN 13: 9780521452878
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 530