The term industrialization connotes the development of social organizations, generally in nation-states in which large manufacturing enterprises loom large and in which adjunctive legal institutions supporting laissez-faire philosophies of market relationships and providential public and private services grow with them in tandem. Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations became early on, after its appearance in 1776, a kind of founding blueprint for the exploitation of private interests and initiatives in the service of the "general good." Industrial sociological studies accordingly focus on the "causes" or prerequisites for, the correlates of (in family, community, and other social settings), and the consequences of the industrialization process, largely in social systems governed in accord with eighteenth-century liberalism, with its emphases on the economic rights of property owners and their agents.

The key consequences under examination have been the "rights, privileges, and immunities" of parties to labor contracts; the characteristic social and...