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Engineering Labour
Engineers, often perceived as central agents of industrial capitalism, are thought to be the same in all capitalist societies, occupying roughly the same social status and performing similar functions in the capitalist enterprise. What the essays in this volume reveal, however, is that engineers are trained and organized quite distinctly in different national contexts. The book includes case studies of engineers in six major industrial economies: Japan, France, Germany, Sweden, Britain and the United States. Through a comparison of these six cases, the authors develop an approach to national differences which both retains the place of historical diversity in the experience of capitalism and accommodates the forces of convergence from increasing globalisation and economic integration. Contributions from: Boel Berner, Stephen Crawford, Kees Gispen, Kevin McCormick and Peter Whalley.
Planning the French Canals
Finally, in a comparative framework, the debate over the canals led to an examination of the inadequacy of a British model and to a rehearsal of the arguments about state economic policy that the next generation would revive.
Constructing a Bridge
A historical look at styles of technological research and design.
The Politics of Invisibility
Lessons from the massive Chernobyl nuclear accident about how we deal with modern hazards that are largely imperceptible. Before Fukushima, the most notorious large-scale nuclear accident the world had seen was Chernobyl in 1986. The fallout from Chernobyl covered vast areas in the Northern Hemisphere, especially in Europe. Belarus, at the time a Soviet republic, suffered heavily: nearly a quarter of its territory was covered with long-lasting radionuclides. Yet the damage from the massive fallout was largely imperceptible; contaminated communities looked exactly like noncontaminated ones. It could be known only through constructed representations of it. In The Politics of Invisibility, Olga...
Materialising Identity
Since 1882, the Gotthard Railway, with its fifteen-kilometerlong tunnel under the Gotthard Mountains, has provided a crucialinternational link through the Swiss Alps, between North-WesternEurope and Italy. Its symbolic meaning has never sunk into oblivion.In Swiss society today, references to the railway evoke images of atechnological railway project, with allusions to Swiss history, alpinenature, and national identity. Reading this book helps us understandcontemporary discussions about the future of the Gotthard Railway,the region in which it lies, and the Swiss national identity.To illustrate to what extent historical actors co-constructedthe railway and Swiss identity, the book starts wit...
Steps toward a Philosophy of Engineering
The rise of classic Euro-American philosophy of technology in the 1950s originally emphasized the importance of technologies as material entities and their mediating influence within human experience. Recent decades, however, have witnessed a subtle shift toward reflection on the activity from which these distinctly modern artifacts emerge and through which they are engaged and managed, that is, on engineering. What is engineering? What is the meaning of engineering? How is engineering related to other aspects of human existence? Such basic questions readily engage all major branches of philosophy --- ontology, epistemology, ethics, political philosophy, and aesthetics --- although not always to the same degree. The historico-philosophical and critical reflections collected here record a series of halting steps to think through engineering and the engineered way of life that we all increasingly live in what has been called the Anthropocene. The aim is not to promote an ideology for engineering but to stimulate deeper reflection among engineers and non-engineers alike about some basic challenges of our engineered and engineering lifeworld.
Beyond the Cultural Turn
Nothing has generated more controversy in the social sciences than the turn toward culture, variously known as the linguistic turn, culturalism, or postmodernism. This book examines the impact of the cultural turn on two prominent social science disciplines, history and sociology, and proposes new directions in the theory and practice of historical research. The editors provide an introduction analyzing the origins and implications of the cultural turn and its postmodernist critiques of knowledge. Essays by leading historians and historical sociologists reflect on the uses of cultural theories and show both their promise and their limitations. The afterword by Hayden White provides an assess...
Trading Zones and Interactional Expertise
A proposal for a new framework for fostering collaborations across disciplines, addressing both theory and practical applications. Cross-disciplinary collaboration increasingly characterizes today's science and engineering research. The problems and opportunities facing society do not come neatly sorted by discipline. Difficulties arise when researchers from disciplines as different as engineering and the humanities work together and find that they speak largely different languages. This book explores a new framework for fostering collaborations among existing disciplines and expertise communities. The framework unites two ideas to emerge from recent work in STS: trading zones, in which scie...
Transformations of Retailing in Europe after 1945
After World War II, structures, practices and the culture of retailing in most West European countries went through a period of rapid change. The post-war economic boom, the emergence of a mass consumer society, and the adaptation of innovations which already had been implemented in the USA during the interwar period, revolutionized the world of getting and spending. But the implementation of self-service and the supermarket, the spread of the department store and the mail order business were not only elements of a transatlantic catch up process of 'Americanization' of retailing. National patterns of the retail trade and specific cultures of consumption remained crucial, and long term processes of change, starting in the 1920s or 1930s, also had an impact on the transformation of retailing in post-war Europe. This volume presents a series of case-studies looking at transformations of retailing in several European countries, offering new insights into the structural preconditions of the emerging mass consumer societies and also into the consequences consumerism had on the practices of retailing.
Patently Contestable
An examination of the fierce disputes that arose in Britain in the decades around 1900 concerning patents for electrical power and telecommunications. Late nineteenth-century Britain saw an extraordinary surge in patent disputes over the new technologies of electrical power, lighting, telephony, and radio. These battles played out in the twin tribunals of the courtroom and the press. In Patently Contestable, Stathis Arapostathis and Graeme Gooday examine how Britain's patent laws and associated cultures changed from the 1870s to the 1920s. They consider how patent rights came to be so widely disputed and how the identification of apparently solo heroic inventors was the contingent outcome of...
