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Following the industrial crisis of the 1920s and the Great Depression in the 1930s, consecutive provincial governments in Nova Scotia turned their efforts toward state-led economic development. After the election of Robert Stanfield and the Tories in 1956, a wholesale industrial planning model was unveiled. Indeed, Stanfieldian economic policy in Nova Scotia was predicated upon the belief that direct state-led interventionism was necessary to offset regional inequity. State corporate entities, such as Industrial Estates Limited, and renewed interest in a state-driven industrial relations paradigm were central in the province's efforts to revitalize its flagging economy and offset predicted decline in the Cape Breton coal and steel industries. This article examines the fate of the Clairtone Sound Corporation, one of Nova Scotia's "new industries" that emerged out of these state-led development efforts. A case study of this Stellarton-based firm reveals how structural processes of deindustrialization produced crisis even within sectors that were completely distinct from the province's cornerstone industries of coal and steel. This case includes a reflection on the class composition of the modernist state in Nova Scotia and represents a convergence of the historiographical focus on state-led industrial development in the Maritimes and recent literature found within deindustrialization studies. À la suite de la crise industrielle des années 1920 et de la Grande Dépression des années 1930, les gouvernements provinciaux successifs de la Nouvelle-Écosse ont orienté leurs efforts vers un développement économique dirigé par l›État. Après l›élection de Robert Stanfield et des conservateurs en 1956, un modèle de planification industrielle en gros a été dévoilé. En effet, la politique économique « stanfieldienne » en Nouvelle-Écosse reposait sur la conviction que l›interventionnisme direct dirigé par l›État était nécessaire pour compenser les inégalités régionales. Les sociétés d›État, comme Industrial Estates Limited, et le regain d›intérêt pour un paradigme de relations industrielles dirigé par l›État ont joué un rôle central dans les efforts de la province pour revitaliser son économie chancelante et compenser le déclin prévu des industries du charbon et de l›acier du Cap-Breton. Cet article examine le sort de la Clairtone Sound Corporation, l›une des « nouvelles industries » de la Nouvelle-Écosse qui a émergé de ces efforts de développement menés par l›État. Une étude de cas de cette entreprise basée à Stellarton révèle comment les processus structurels de désindustrialisation ont produit une crise même dans des secteurs complètement distincts des industries phares du charbon et de l›acier de la province. Ce cas comprend une réflexion sur la composition de classe de l›État moderniste en Nouvelle-Écosse et représente une convergence de l›accent historiographique sur le développement industriel dirigé par l›État dans les Maritimes et de la documentation récente trouvée dans les études sur la désindustrialisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gabriel Winant's The Next Shift charts the transformation of Pittsburgh's labor market and political economy from the postwar period through the era of unabashed neoliberalism. During that time, relatively well-paid and unionized employment in steel and metalworking plummeted, while low-wage, precarious, nonunion employment in health care and related sectors surged. The composition of the working class also shifted, from being disproportionately white and male to disproportionately nonwhite and female. While Winant is a labor and social historian, his book has many implications for legal scholars, including those focused on the role of law in neoliberalism. In particular, the book situates both Pittsburgh's evolution and neoliberalism itself in the historical process of capitalist development, or the process through which imperatives of accumulation generate constant technological, economic, and social changes. In Pittsburgh, Winant shows, deindustrialization was an inflection point in that process, generating social crises that were mitigated first by the rise of health care, and then by the suppression of wages among health care workers. This Book Review argues that labor law--or the whole complex of laws constituting and governing work--was transformed by those same structural forces over that same period. Postwar labor law understood employment, at least for relatively privileged industrial workers, as a social relationship jointly constituted by the working class and employers. Under neoliberalism, labor law came to understand employment more as an individual contract between putative equals, a development which enabled profitability in low-productivity service sectors like nursing homes and home care. In that sense, labor law helped to birth today's working class, even as it denies that a working class still exists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]