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

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis 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.