Engineering as a Social Enterprise (1991) / Chapter Skim
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From Deterministic Dynamos to Seamless-Web Systems
From Deterministic Dynamos to Seamless-Web Systems
Pages 7-25
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From page 7... ...
Another objective is to encourage students in engineering schools to broaden and enrich their understanding of technological change through the study of the new history of technology. THE SHIFT AWAY FROM INTERNALISM AND DETERMINISM A quarter century ago, historians of technology were usually presenting earnestly detailed narratives of the development of machines, devices, and processes.
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From page 8... ...
Only rarely do we read or hear that values or social changes shape technology. When I was in engineering school, I often heard my professors dismiss politics as irrational and irrelevant, and identify technology as the root cause of all social improvement.
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From page 9... ...
The intemalist mode assigns plows to the category of food production and ignores social institutions like the medieval manor, so major sociotechnical changes such as the agricultural revolution of the early Middle Ages are overlooked. Our effort to understand technological change and to convey this understanding to others will continue to be severely handicapped if we employ only the internalist mode with its emphasis on individual artifacts evolving outside functional relationships to other artifacts and to social institutions.
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From page 10... ...
As a result, his history portrays complex and encompassing social change caused by evolving, interacting technology components such as plows, ox teams, and harnesses (Figure 1~. White argues that during an era when nine-tenths of the population of medieval Europe was involved in tillage, changes in the mode of plowing modified population, wealth, political relationships, leisure, and cultural expression (White, 1962, p.
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From page 11... ...
In late Roman and early medieval times, as people moved northward from the Italian peninsula, the peasant left the dry sandy earth and relatively dry climate to encounter the heavy alluvial soil of the river valleys and wet weather of northern Europe. In the south had evolved a technological system involving the scratch-plow with two oxen, shallow crossplowing in easily pulverized, moisture-retaining solid, and square fields.
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From page 12... ...
For example, the ship was now filled with magnetic flux from the newly introduced iron hull, and electromagnetic fields generated by its electric motors, which affected the magnetic compass used to guide the wooden ship. Now the magnetic compass responded to these fields in addition to the magnetic field of the earth.
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From page 13... ...
THOMAS P HUGHES 1850-1880 ADVANCING FRONT t ~ ~ HULL WOODEN FIGURE 2 Solving reverse salients.
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From page 14... ...
White's insistence that the multioxen team and deep plow brought about the institution of the manor, which in turn presided over the new technology, finds a counterpart in Chandler's argument that modern large-scale, capital-intensive technology paves the way for the multidivisional corporation which then rationalizes production through management. Chandler demonstrates that the implications of the technology revolution that transpired from about 1880 to 193~the Second Industrial Revolution would not have been realized without managerial, or organizational, innovations.
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From page 15... ...
It was left to other historians to successfully attack the citadel of technological determinism and provide fresh understanding of the nature of technological change. Several decades before White and Chandler, Louis Hunter, an American economic historian, wrote vividly and concretely about the way in which geographic forces shape technology.
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From page 16... ...
The story begins by comparing the backward electric supply system of London with that of Chicago. The Chicago supply had been consolidated into a single system with a high load factor and low cost, supplied by several large turbine-driven power stations, while greater London had 65 electrical utilities, 70 generating stations averaging a little over 5,000 kilowatts in capacity, and 49 different types of supply systems, 10 different frequencies, 32 voltage levels fortransmission and 24 for distribution.
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From page 17... ...
227~. Such was the British electrical industry lag, a cause for concern in an era when electric supply was a symbol of progress and power, political as well as technological.
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From page 18... ...
If, however, the historian looks beyond the confines of the world of technical and scientific affairs, beyond the reach of the internalist and the determinist, clues about the causes of the British electrical industry lag can be found. Original sources reveal that experienced British engineers and managers did look beyond the dynamos, transformers, and motors, all the way to the Houses of Parliament, where since 1882 a series of legislative enactments regulating electrical supply had emerged.
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From page 19... ...
In their essays, the authors identified professional status, education and practical experience, economic and institutional interests, and values among those social forces shaping technology. In essence, social construction holds that technological systems bear the imprint of the social context in which they arise (Pfaffenberger, 1990, p.
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From page 20... ...
From his interviews with engineers in the missile guidance field MacKenzie concludes that there is a rough correlation between how articulate they are on issues involving interactions of technical and nontechnical factors, and their worldly success. He shows how successful system builders such as Charles Stark Draper engineered technical, economic, and political matters simultaneously.
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He explores in depth various aspects of engineering knowledge in the contexts of experimental research, theoretical analysis, and production and design. He is especially interested in discovering whether or not peculiarly technological methodologies exist.
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From page 22... ...
Deterministic dynamos have given way to seamless-web systems. In my writing on the history of electrical technology, I present it as an evolving system of interaction among such components as turbines, dynamos, high-voltage grids, electrical utility management structure, electrical engineering departments in engineering schools, investment banks, regulatory agencies, and the weight of public opinion (Figure 5~.
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From page 24... ...
3. White notes that historians and archaeologists have many exceptions to the rule that the heavy plow brought a system of cultivation, but he believes that this was the typical development.
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From page 25... ...
1962. Medieval Technology and Social Change.
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