Worker resistance and employer conservatism in Britain are said to have combined to retard British economic development and frustrate the emergence of modern managerial structures based on Taylorism and/or Fordism. However, the notion of worker resistance is a deeply unsatisfactory one because it fails to distinguish different forms of resistance and their implications for the labour process. And if British employers were slow to abandon older tools and techniques, they nevertheless did so. Worker resistance secured better terms and conditions of employment but was incapable of altering in any fundamental way the new methods of organizing work and managing production.

The twentieth century was “short”, running only from 1914 to 1990/1991. Even so, it will doubtless enter history as an unprecedented era of dictatorships. The question of how these totalitarian regimes functioned in practice, how and to what extent they were able to realize their power aspirations, has until now been answered empirically at most highly selectively. Extensive comparative research efforts will be required over the coming decades. The police as the key organization in the state monopoly of power is particularly important in this context, since like no other institution it operates at the interface of state and society. Using the example of the Gestapo's activities in the Third Reich, this article analyses collaboration structures between these two spheres, which made possible (either on a voluntary or coercive basis) a penetration of social contexts and hence police action even in shielded areas. It is my thesis that such exchange processes through unsolicited denunciation and informers with double identities will also have been decisive outside Germany in the tracking of dissident behaviour and the detection of conspiratorial practices.

The Mexican state's drive toward industrialization during World War II and the post-war years required the cooperation of organized labor. Central to this policy was the role played by American trade unions, which cooperated with US government agencies in providing financial and logistical support for Mexican trade unionists who complied with state development policy. The interests of American labor leaders, US policymakers and Mexican modernizing elites converged in an attempt to eradicate radical unionism and promote US hegemony in the western hemisphere. This study builds upon works that treat the earlier activities of US labor in Mexico.