Machine-Age Ideology

Machine-Age Ideology PDF Author: John M. Jordan
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807876038
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 469

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Book Description
In this interdisciplinary work, John Jordan traces the significant influence on American politics of a most unlikely hero: the professional engineer. Jordan shows how technical triumphs--bridges, radio broadcasting, airplanes, automobiles, skyscrapers, and electrical power--inspired social and political reformers to borrow the language and logic of engineering in the early twentieth century, bringing terms like efficiency, technocracy, and social engineering into the political lexicon. Demonstrating that the cultural impact of technology spread far beyond the factory and laboratory, Jordan shows how a panoply of reformers embraced the language of machinery and engineering as metaphors for modern statecraft and social progress. President Herbert Hoover, himself an engineer, became the most powerful of the technocratic progressives. Elsewhere, this vision of social engineering was debated by academics, philanthropists, and commentators of the day--including John Dewey, Thorstein Veblen, Lewis Mumford, Walter Lippmann, and Charles Beard. The result, Jordan argues, was a new way of talking about the state. Originally published in 1994. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

Machine-Age Ideology

Machine-Age Ideology PDF Author: John M. Jordan
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807876038
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 469

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this interdisciplinary work, John Jordan traces the significant influence on American politics of a most unlikely hero: the professional engineer. Jordan shows how technical triumphs--bridges, radio broadcasting, airplanes, automobiles, skyscrapers, and electrical power--inspired social and political reformers to borrow the language and logic of engineering in the early twentieth century, bringing terms like efficiency, technocracy, and social engineering into the political lexicon. Demonstrating that the cultural impact of technology spread far beyond the factory and laboratory, Jordan shows how a panoply of reformers embraced the language of machinery and engineering as metaphors for modern statecraft and social progress. President Herbert Hoover, himself an engineer, became the most powerful of the technocratic progressives. Elsewhere, this vision of social engineering was debated by academics, philanthropists, and commentators of the day--including John Dewey, Thorstein Veblen, Lewis Mumford, Walter Lippmann, and Charles Beard. The result, Jordan argues, was a new way of talking about the state. Originally published in 1994. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

Histories of Human Engineering

Histories of Human Engineering PDF Author: Maarten Derksen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108293549
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description
The dream of control over human behaviour is an old dream, shared by many cultures. This fascinating account of the histories of human engineering describes how technologies of managing individuals and groups were developed from the nineteenth century to the present day, ranging from brainwashing and mind control to Dale Carnegie's art of dealing with people. Derksen reveals that common to all of them is the perpetual tension between the desire to control people's behaviour and the resistance this provokes. Thus to influence other people successfully, technology had to be combined with tact: with a personal touch, with a subtle hint, or with outright deception, manipulations are made palatable or invisible. Combining psychological history and theory with insights from science and technology studies and rhetorical scholarship, Derksen offers a fresh perspective on human engineering that will appeal to those interested in the history of psychology and the history of technology.

The Modernization of Fatherhood

The Modernization of Fatherhood PDF Author: Ralph LaRossa
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226469042
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
The period between World War I and World War II was an important time in the history of gender relations, and of American fatherhood. Revealing the surprising extent to which some of yesterday's fathers were involved with their children, The Modernization of Fatherhood recounts how fatherhood was reshaped during the Machine Age into the configuration we know today. LaRossa explains that during the interwar period the image of the father as economic provider, pal, and male role model, all in one, became institutionalized. Using personal letters and popular magazine and newspaper sources, he explores how the social and economic conditions of the Roaring Twenties and the Great Depression—a period of technical innovation as well as economic hardship—fused these expectations into a cultural ideal. With chapters on the U.S. Children's Bureau, the fathercraft movement, the magazine industry and the development of Parent's Magazine, and the creation of Father's Day, this book is a major addition to the growing literature on masculinity and fatherhood.

Engineering Society

Engineering Society PDF Author: Kerstin Brückweh
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137284501
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
Explaining crime by reference to abnormalities of the brain is just one example of how the human and social sciences have influenced the approach to social problems in Western societies since 1880. Focusing on applications such as penal policy, therapy, and marketing, this volume examines how these sciences have become embedded in society.

Creating Consumers

Creating Consumers PDF Author: Carolyn M. Goldstein
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807872385
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 425

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Book Description
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.

A New Moral Vision

A New Moral Vision PDF Author: Andrea L. Turpin
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501706853
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
In A New Moral Vision, Andrea L. Turpin explores how the entrance of women into U.S. colleges and universities shaped changing ideas about the moral and religious purposes of higher education in unexpected ways, and in turn profoundly shaped American culture. In the decades before the Civil War, evangelical Protestantism provided the main impetus for opening the highest levels of American education to women. Between the Civil War and World War I, however, shifting theological beliefs, a growing cultural pluralism, and a new emphasis on university research led educators to reevaluate how colleges should inculcate an ethical outlook in students—just as the proportion of female collegians swelled. In this environment, Turpin argues, educational leaders articulated a new moral vision for their institutions by positioning them within the new landscape of competing men's, women's, and coeducational colleges and universities. In place of fostering evangelical conversion, religiously liberal educators sought to foster in students a surprisingly more gendered ideal of character and service than had earlier evangelical educators. Because of this moral reorientation, the widespread entrance of women into higher education did not shift the social order in as egalitarian a direction as we might expect. Instead, college graduates—who formed a disproportionate number of the leaders and reformers of the Progressive Era—contributed to the creation of separate male and female cultures within Progressive Era public life and beyond. Drawing on extensive archival research at ten trend-setting men's, women's, and coeducational colleges and universities, A New Moral Vision illuminates the historical intersection of gender ideals, religious beliefs, educational theories, and social change in ways that offer insight into the nature—and cultural consequences—of the moral messages communicated by institutions of higher education today.

The March of Spare Time

The March of Spare Time PDF Author: Susan Currell
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 081220171X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
In The March of Spare Time, Susan Currell explores how and why leisure became an object of such intense interest, concern, and surveillance during the Great Depression. As Americans experienced record high levels of unemployment, leisure was thought by reformers, policy makers, social scientists, physicians, labor unions, and even artists to be both a cause of and a solution to society's most entrenched ills. Of all the problems that faced America in the 1930s, only leisure seemed to offer a panacea for the rest. The problem centered on divided opinions over what constituted proper versus improper use of leisure time. On the one hand, sociologists and reformers excoriated as improper such leisure activities as gambling, loafing, and drinking. On the other, the Works Progress Administration and the newly professionalized recreation experts promoted proper leisure activities such as reading, sports, and arts and crafts. Such attention gave rise to new ideas about how Americans should spend their free time to better themselves and their nation. These ideas were propagated in social science publications and proliferated into the wider cultural sphere. Films, fiction, and radio also engaged with new ideas about leisure, more extensively than has previously been recognized. In examining this wide spectrum of opinion, Currell offers the first full-scale account of the fears and hopes surrounding leisure in the 1930s, one that will be an important addition to the cultural history of the period.

A Perilous Progress

A Perilous Progress PDF Author: Michael Alan Bernstein
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400865085
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 377

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Book Description
The economics profession in twentieth-century America began as a humble quest to understand the "wealth of nations." It grew into a profession of immense public prestige--and now suffers a strangely withered public purpose. Michael Bernstein portrays a profession that has ended up repudiating the state that nurtured it, ignoring distributive justice, and disproportionately privileging private desires in the study of economic life. Intellectual introversion has robbed it, he contends, of the very public influence it coveted and cultivated for so long. With wit and irony he examines how a community of experts now identified with uncritical celebration of ''free market'' virtues was itself shaped, dramatically so, by government and collective action. In arresting and provocative detail Bernstein describes economists' fitful efforts to sway a state apparatus where values and goals could seldom remain separate from means and technique, and how their vocation was ultimately humbled by government itself. Replete with novel research findings, his work also analyzes the historical peculiarities that led the profession to a key role in the contemporary backlash against federal initiatives dating from the 1930s to reform the nation's economic and social life. Interestingly enough, scholars have largely overlooked the history that has shaped this profession. An economist by training, Bernstein brings a historian's sensibilities to his narrative, utilizing extensive archival research to reveal unspoken presumptions that, through the agency of economists themselves, have come to mold and define, and sometimes actually deform, public discourse. This book offers important, even troubling insights to readers interested in the modern economic and political history of the United States and perplexed by recent trends in public policy debate. It also complements a growing literature on the history of the social sciences. Sure to have a lasting impact on its field, A Perilous Progress represents an extraordinary contribution of gritty empirical research and conceptual boldness, of grand narrative breadth and profound analytical depth.

Women, Peace and Welfare

Women, Peace and Welfare PDF Author: Ann Oakley
Publisher: Policy Press
ISBN: 1447332601
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 456

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Book Description
Between 1880 and 1920 many women researched the conditions of social and economic life in Western countries. They were driven by a vision of a society based on welfare and altruism, rather than warfare and competition. Ann Oakley, a leading sociologist, undertook extensive research to uncover this previously hidden cast of forgotten characters. She uses the women’s stories to bring together the histories of social reform, social science, welfare and pacifism. Her fascinating account reveals how their efforts, connected through thriving transnational networks, lie behind many features of modern welfare states and reminds us of their powerful vision of a more humane way of living – a vision that remains relevant today.

The Metaphorical Society

The Metaphorical Society PDF Author: Daniel Rigney
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 0742509389
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
This book introduces the novice reader to modern social theory through the creative exploration of eight major metaphors that have shaped Western understandings of human society. Rigney vividly yet concisely examines each major theoretical perspective in sociology, including functionalism, conflict theory, rational choice, and symbolic interactionism. He shows how each of these theories is rooted in a particular metaphorical tradition. Over decades and centuries, Rigney argues, social theorists have variously likened societies to organisms and living systems, to machines, battlefields, legal systems, marketplaces, games, theatrical productions, and discourses. Most interestingly, Rigney deftly shows how nearly all Western social theories fit with one or more of the metaphors. He emphasizes a humanistic understanding of society with an emphasis on the creative agency of social actors and communities. The book offers students a rich understanding of social theory, yet it is simultaneously concise and broad ranging, allowing instructors to further pursue detailed exploration of any perspectives they choose.