Introduction

In this chapter I will compare the five country cases described in this book. The main question is, can or do Modernist industrial novels written in different countries in various time periods (mostly between 1900 and the 1980s) spanning the so-called ‘American Century’, offer new or additional insights to academic industrial sociology? In other words, does it make sense to bring together the fields of literature and (industrial) sociology? When taking the dual transnational and longitudinal perspective, one development stands out that influenced both industrial sociology and Modernist industrial novels more or less equally. That is the Americanization of production processes by introducing scientific management and Fordist work methods, first in the United States and then in more or less adapted forms in the other countries. This implied a focus on the content of the modernist industrial novels dealt with, set in diverse national and time-specific contexts. Apart from that, the ways the underlying empirical research for the novels was carried out by its authors are also relevant, as too are the various ways the results are processed in these novels (See Table 1, Chapter 1).

Cross-country comparison

The flowering of the Modernist industrial novel covers more or less a century between 1900 and the 1980s. In the background of this long period there existed a successive tension in these novels between utopian and dystopian elements. In the first decades of the century utopian view prevailed, perhaps most importantly the shared belief – among entrepreneurs, managers, and workers – in the benefits of efficiency or the Americanization of production processes.