Work and Politics develops a historical and comparative sociology of workplace relations in industrial capitalist societies. Professor Sabel argues that the system of mass production using specialized machines and mostly unskilled workers was the result of the distribution of power and wealth in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Great Britain and the United States, not of an inexorable logic of technological advance. Once in place, this system created the need for workers with systematically different ideas about the acquisition of skill and the desirability of long-term employment. Professor Sabel shows how capitalists have played on naturally existing division in the workforce in order to match workers with diverse ambitions to jobs in different parts of the labor market. But he also demonstrates the limits, different from work group to work group, of these forms of collaboration.

Ford International Assistant Professor of Social Science in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society, M.I.T., 1977-84. Associate professor of social and political science in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society, M.I.T., 1984-87; professor of social and political science, M.I.T., 1987-90; Ford international professor of social science in the Department of Political Science, M.I.T., 1990-95. MacArthur prize fellow, 1982-87. Publications include "A Quiet Revolution of Democratic Governance: Towards Democratic Experimentalism," in Governance in the 21st Century (2001); "Ratcheting Labor Standards," (with Archon Fung and Dara O'Rourke) in Visions of Ethical Sourcing (Raj Thamotheram, ed., 2000); "Beyond Backyard Environmentalism" (with Archon Fung and Brad Karkkainen) in New Democracy Forum (Josh Cohen and Joel Rogers, eds., 2000); Design, Deliberation and Democracy (1998); "A Constitution of Democratic Experimentalism" (with Michael Dorf) Columbia Law Review (1998); Worlds of Possibility (ed. with J. Zeitlin, 1997); Ireland: Local Partnerships and Social Innovation (with the LEED Programme of the OECD, 1996); The Second Industrial Divide: Possibilities for Prosperity (with M. Priore, 1984); Work and Politics: The Division of Labor in Industry (1982); Ökonomische Krisentendenzen im gegenwärtigen Kapitalismus (with Muller, Rodel, Stille, and Vogt, 1978); and numerous articles on economics and social organization.