This workshop will investigate how science and/or scholarship (in the broadest sense) from the late 19th to the first half of the 20th century contributed to the historical production of work.

Work has fundamentally changed since the late 19th century. Emerging welfare states did not only start to intervene more systematically in labour relations but they also brought forward new social facts such as work. Overall, work was increasingly normalized as gainful employment that was regular or (at best) skillful. The history of this normalization is the history of varied and omnipresent struggles over what work should be – and how it should be valued. These struggles cannot be understood without accounting for the “scientification of the social” (Lutz Raphael). On the one hand, successfully defining and imposing what could (or could not) pass for work and how work should be organized became linked to successful uses of science/scholarship. On the other hand, any attempt to participate legitimately in such struggles could no longer do without Wissenschaftlichkeit (i.e. making credible reference to science/scholarship). Sciences of labour did not only strive to examine or describe work; they also aimed to form and reform work, thereby producing it. In doing so, the uses made of science/scholarship were manifold: sciences of work were a spectrum of practices.

The workshop will thus present case studies of sciences of work as practices of non-specialists as well as specialists (for instance, experts and/or researchers/scholars in an academic context) in the fields of statistics, labour administration, legal codification, vocational counseling and work psychology (Psychotechnik).