Workshop: Work – Employment – Vocation. The Production of Differences and Hierarchies of Livelihood in the 19th and 20th Centuries

The workshop will deal with the question of how legitimate references of labourmarkets, such as Beruf, were historically produced and established.

At the workshop, questions such as the following should be addressed:
• Can similar struggles to establish a legitimate reference be found in places other than the German-speaking states? Are there terms that functionally correspond to Beruf? Which differences can be identified when making comparisons?
• How were legitimate references put into practice in national labour-markets? To what extent were these successful? Which institutions and organisations were contributing factors (either by consensus or dissent)? How did those persons who now had (or were supposed to have) a Beruf support or counteract these changes?
• What role was played by (changes to) vocational education and training systems?
• How did the establishment of legitimate references counter other ways of finding sustenance? Or put differently (in the case of Beruf): which activities became non-Beruf (like 3 family and leisure time) or anti-Beruf (such as illegal activities practised as a vocation on a continual basis, e.g. Berufsverbrechertum)? How did different activities come together in efforts at vocationalisation (or professionalisation)?
• Which official taxonomies were applied to describe (and thus to produce) labour-markets by employment and occupational statistics on national and international levels, for example?

The workshop is organised by the ERC-starting grant project “The Production of Work: Welfare, Labour-Market, and the Disputed Boundaries of Labour (1880-1938)”, directed by Sigrid Wadauer.

More Information:
http://pow.univie.ac.at
pow.univie.ac.at/fileadmin/user_upload/proj_pow/Workshop3/CfP_Work_Employment_Vocation.pdf