Authored between 1972 and 1990, nine previously-published essays (with wry new introductions) explore overt and covert ways by which workers worldwide are simultaneously controlled and seek to resist.

Drawing on extensive experience in Nigeria and the West Indies, Cohen analyzes worker responses in over 15 countries, paying special attention to peasant-workers in developing nations and agricultural workers in the USA.

His stance he defines as a form of "socialist realism," by which he means a focus on workers "without falling into the trap of romanticizing the proletariat or exaggerating the possibilities of it fulfilling its ascribed role as an unfailing and exclusive vanguard for a global revolutionary project." (xii)

Labor education students will find especially valuable five aspects of this challenging book: For one, Cohen, as creator of the New International Labour Studies approach, makes a strong case for its replacing both the industrial relations and orthodox left traditions.

Second, he expands our horizons with his use of novel concepts ( such as "habituation," helot, peasant-worker, and others).

Third, he models a welcome emphasis on specificity ("...it is insufficient to cry 'conspiracy' when talking of employers, 'hegemony' when talking of the state, and 'revolution' when referring to the workers.") (15).

Fourth, he is refreshingly frank discussing revealing divisions among acrimonious schools of thought (modernization theorists versus classical Marxists versus world system types versus Fanonists versus developmentalists, and so on).

Finally, there is much to appreciate in Cohen's willingness to take positions in controversial matters (such as the very limited prospects of the lumpenproletariat or of international worker organizations he judges "ineffective and out of date."). (16).

Thoroughly demanding as is the best of British scholarship, the volume is also occasionally droll and witty, another characteristic strength of such work. Refreshingly original, it is also soundly grounded in the classics.

It merits a close reading from all intrigued by the evolving international division of labour, especially those who hear, as does Cohen, in the often "hesitant and uncertain" voice of working people an "intimation of an alternative future."

Contested Domains: Debates in International Labour Studies. By Robert Cohen (including chapters with Jeff Henderson and David Michael) London: Zed Books Ltd, 1991. 165 pp. paper.