‘The mine management professions and the dust problem in the Scottish coal mining industry, c.1930-1966’

In their 1975 review of ‘labour in the coalfields’ for the Bulletin of the Society for the Study of Labour History, R. G. Neville and John Benson noted that: ‘the absence of any interpretation of the ‘management revolution’ in the context of the British coal industry as a whole during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries remains a glaring gap in the existing state of our knowledge.’ Since Neville and Benson’s article, there has been scant attention paid to managerial employees in the historiography of the British coal industry. In most cases, managers in the industry have been assumed to be either adjuncts to their employers or local autocrats. There have only been a handful of studies examining managers in the industry. Of these the view that has tended to dominate the literature where managers are concerned was that advanced by Brian McCormick in 1960. Within the last two decades this has been qualified by more detailed studies of managers, such as that of Ina Zweiniger- Bargielowska.