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Cover -- Table of contents -- Acknowledgements -- Preface -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Secular and purist origins of enlightened capitalism -- 2.1 Introduction -- 2.2 Robert Owen's social reforms -- 2.3 Jeremy Bentham and the National Charity Company -- 2.4 French utopian socialism: François Marie Charles Fourier (1772-1837) -- 2.5 Quakers in England, America, and social reform -- 2.6 Conclusion -- 3. Victorian England -- From Coketown to Port Sunlight, Bournville and the Garden City Movement -- 3.1 Introduction -- 3.2 The Industrial Revolution in England -- 3.3 Cottonpolis, Coketown, Manchester

Since the English Industrial Revolution in the 18th century the industrial novel has played a significant role in industrialized countries by making workers, politicians, policy makers and the general public aware of actual working conditions in industry and services. Also, these novels contributed positively to workers emancipation. Well-known examples are the industrial novels of the English Victorian writers Dickens and Gaskell. Also in other countries the industrial novel developed into a well-known literary genre linked with the process of industrialization. In France Zola's "naturalist" industrial novels had a significant influence on labour policies at the time of the Third Republic. After the turn of the 19th century the industrial novel also became manifest in other industrialized countries: before World War I in the USA, by the Inter-bellum in Germany and the USSR, and after World War II in Italy. Often these novels were based on desk research or empirical research on-site. Therefore, these novels are also expressions of pseudo- or ex-ante sociology, regretfully underestimated in vested industrial sociology. By comparing and juxtaposing industrial novels written in two important European industrial countries in two different time periods, Weimar Germany in the 1920s, and post-war Italy in the 1950s and early 1960s, I will illustrate this.

This article studies research on the Dutch Disability Insurance Act (WAO) of 1967 and its impact on subsequent policy reform. Because of certain unique technical features, the WAO scheme has long operated as a hidden unemployment scheme, which is widely regarded as one of the major socio-economic problems of the Netherlands. From the 1980s onwards (a period of high unemployment for the country), debate about possible reforms was a regular feature on the political agenda and several restrictive changes were in fact implemented. At the same time, extensive research was commissioned. The article surveys the research and selects three particular cases for in-depth analysis. It concludes, in line with standard Knowledge Utilisation literature, that direct policy use of research is very limited, and that the conceptual influence of research on background policy framework, while not negligible, is narrowly circumscribed by political context. However, the assessment also points to the need for a complementary perspective on research as a "lubricant" of the politico-administrative system, which is a significant, albeit perhaps unusual, feature of a Dutch system characterised by a combination, which is atypical in international terms, of extreme consensualism, strong formalism, and extreme pragmatism. Further research is required on the relation between national "policy styles" and research-policy linkages. (Original abstract)