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Systems, Experts, and Computers
This groundbreaking book charts the origins and spread of the systems movement. After World War II, a systems approach to solving complex problems and managing complex systems came into vogue among engineers, scientists, and managers, fostered in part by the diffusion of digital computing power. Enthusiasm for the approach peaked during the Johnson administration, when it was applied to everything from military command and control systems to poverty in American cities. Although its failure in the social sphere, coupled with increasing skepticism about the role of technology and "experts" in American society, led to a retrenchment, systems methods are still part of modern managerial practice....
Customer Service Games for Training
This title was first published in 2011.After World War II, a systems approach to solving complex problems and managing complex systems came into vogue among engineers, scientists, and managers, fostered in part by the diffusion of digital computing power.Enthusiasm for the approach peaked during the Johnson administration, when it was applied to everything from military command and control systems to poverty in American cities. Although its failure in the social sphere, coupled with increasing skepticism about the role of technology and "experts" in American society, led to a retrenchment, systems methods are still part of modern managerial practice.
The Century's Midnight
The Century's Midnight is an exploration of the literary and political relationships between a number of ideologically sophisticated American and European writers during a mid-twentieth century dominated by the Second World War. Clive Bush offers an account of an intelligent and diverse community of people of good will, transcending national, ideological and cultural barriers. Although structured around five central figures - the novelist Victor Serge, the editors Dwight Macdonald and Dorothy Norman, the cultural critic Lewis Mumford and the poet Muriel Rukeyser - the book examines a wealth of European and American writers including Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, Walter Benjamin, John Dos Passos, André Gide, Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, George Orwell, Boris Pilniak, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Ignacio Silone and Richard Wright. The book's central theme relates politics and literature to time and narrative. The author argues that knowledge of the writers of this period is of inestimable value in attempting to understand our contemporary world.
Political Issues for the Twenty-First Century
Assembling accessible and informative essays on contemporary debates and future issues in politics, this rewarding volume focuses on political developments in UK, European and international issues, and modern theoretical debates and problems. Each essay establishes the historical context before providing a speculative analysis of possible future developments. The collection presents a range of challenging and provocative accounts that deal with some of the most delicate, complex and fundamental issues that affect people living in Western Europe in the twenty-first century.
Lewis Mumford
This collection of essays by leading scholars explores the numerous and brilliant facets of Lewis Mumford's insights into technology and modern culture. Characterized as one of the last of the American public intellectuals, Mumford has written extensively about those issues and problems that are most challenging and troubling for modern society. His Technics and Civilization (1934) and the two-volume The Myth of the Machine (1967 and 1970) still provide an agenda for discussion of technology and culture. Mumford foresightedly warned against simplistic technological determinism by exploring the ways in which values shape technology. He is generally recognized as a seminal figure who laid the foundations for the fields of American Studies and the History of Technology. This compelling portrait of Mumford, written in an accessible style, and exploring highly controversial, timely issues, makes a substantial contribution to the rapidly growing interest in the interaction of technology and culture, and is must reading for students of the history and sociology of science and technology, American studies, and American intellectual and cultural history.
The Grid
The history of the grid, the world's largest interconnected power machine that is North America's electricity infrastructure. The North American power grid has been called the world's largest machine. The grid connects nearly every living soul on the continent; Americans rely utterly on the miracle of electrification. In this book, Julie Cohn tells the history of the grid, from early linkages in the 1890s through the grid's maturity as a networked infrastructure in the 1980s. She focuses on the strategies and technologies used to control power on the grid—in fact made up of four major networks of interconnected power systems—paying particular attention to the work of engineers and system...
The Power of Systems
In The Power of Systems, Eglė Rindzevičiūtė introduces readers to one of the best-kept secrets of the Cold War: the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), an international think tank established by the US and USSR to advance scientific collaboration. From 1972 until the late 1980s, IIASA was one of the very few permanent platforms where policy scientists from both sides of the Cold War could work together to articulate and solve world problems. A rare zone of freedom, communication, and negotiation. East-West scientists co-produced computer simulations of the long-term world future, using global modeling to explore the possible effects of climate change and nuclear winter. Their concern with global issues also became a vehicle for transformation inside the Soviet Union. The Power of Systems explores how computer modeling, cybernetics, and the systems approach challenged Soviet governance by undermining the linear notions of control on which Soviet governance was based and creating new objects and techniques of government.
In Sputnik's Shadow
In Sputnik's Shadow traces the rise and fall of the President's Science Advisory Committee from its ascendance under Eisenhower to its demise during the Nixon years. Zuoyue Wang examines key turning points during the twentieth century, including the beginning of the Cold War, the debates over nuclear weapons, the Sputnik crisis in 1957, the struggle over the Vietnam War, and the eventual end of the Cold War, showing how the involvement of scientists in executive policymaking evolved over time and brings new insights to the intellectual, social, and cultural histories of the era.
Creating Consumers
Home economics emerged at the turn of the twentieth century as a movement to train women to be more efficient household managers. At the same moment, American families began to consume many more goods and services than they produced. To guide women in this transition, professional home economists had two major goals: to teach women to assume their new roles as modern consumers and to communicate homemakers' needs to manufacturers and political leaders. Carolyn M. Goldstein charts the development of the profession from its origins as an educational movement to its identity as a source of consumer expertise in the interwar period to its virtual disappearance by the 1970s. Working for both business and government, home economists walked a fine line between educating and representing consumers while they shaped cultural expectations about consumer goods as well as the goods themselves. Goldstein looks beyond 1970s feminist scholarship that dismissed home economics for its emphasis on domesticity to reveal the movement's complexities, including the extent of its public impact and debates about home economists' relationship to the commercial marketplace.
Consuming Landscapes
What we see through our windshields reflects ideas about our national identity, consumerism, and infrastructure. For better or worse, windshields have become a major frame for viewing the nonhuman world. The view from the road is one of the main ways in which we experience our environments. These vistas are the result of deliberate historical forces, and humans have shaped them as they simultaneously sought to be transformed by them. In Consuming Landscapes, Thomas Zeller explores how what we see while driving reflects how we view our societies and ourselves, the role that consumerism plays in our infrastructure, and ideas about reshaping the environment in the twentieth century. Zeller brea...
