‘Non‐Commissioned Officers’: British employers and their supervisory workers, 1880–1920∗

Over the past two decades historians and sociologists have shared a growing interest in the problems of working-class development, differentiation and consciousness. During the 1950S the relative absence of violent social protest and explicit class conflict led sociologists to investigate the claims for political deference, social incorporation and even classlessness.1 Social historians facing similar difficulties in explaining the 'quiescence' of the British working class during the mid-Victorian period reviewed the case for an 'aristocracy of labour' and the nineteenth-century embourgeoisement of the skilled artisans.2 More recent work has demonstrated the ambiguities and limitations of such terms as 'deference', 'respectability' and 'incorporation', stressing the need for a careful contextualization of both concepts and language within a specific period.3 These studies have taken place at a time when such major areas of industrial sociology as technology, organizations, bureaucracy and working-class attitudes have undergone substantial reappraisal and criticism.4 Social history has felt the influence of the sociological imagination without participating in many of the debates on epistemology and method,5 with the result that various 'approaches' have been applied to the study of patriarchal authority