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Labour Exchanges and the Labour Reserve in Turn of the Century Social Reform*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2009

Malcolm Mansfield
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Abstract

This article attempts to describe a major debate in turn of the century social reform through a close reading of the published works of Charles Booth, J.A. Hobson, William Beveridge, A.C. Pigou and others. My aim is to reconstruct the emergence and elaboration of a theory of labour market disorganisation, understood as the absence of effective norms governing employment relationships in urban labour markets subject to chronic over-supply. In so doing I shall take issue with a tendency in the historiography of social policy to fragment this debate into the development of two distinct conceptual frameworks corresponding to the social problems of poverty and unemployment more or less as we know them today.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Social Policy , Volume 21 , Issue 4 , October 1992 , pp. 435 - 468
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1992

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