This study critically interrogates this emphasis on the continuities of work relations and production regimes in German heavy industry from the Kaiserreich to the Third Reich, by means of a case study of discourses about work and social order in the industrial Saar, the focus of Max Weber’s critique and a common reference point for much subsequent social-historical interpretation. In an attempt to make sense of the new vocabulary of Tille and Leidig and of the wider assumptions that informed their statements at the Mannheim conference, it identi‹es an important discontinuity in industrial discourses or ideologies of workplace and social organization during the Wilhelmine era: namely, the shift from a paternalist discourse of work and social relations, structured in a moralizing and gendered metaphor of a factory “family” and anchored in rigid work rules and extensive company social programs, to a corporatist discourse of industrial social organization, which linked a bioracial schema of technocratic management to a wider vision of sociopolitical order based on representation by occupational groups or “productive estates” (Berufsstände).