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.

Machines as the Measure of Men

Machines as the Measure of Men PDF Author: Michael Adas
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801497605
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 452

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Book Description
This new edition of what has become a standard account of Western expansion and technological dominance includes a new preface by the author that discusses how subsequent developments in gender and race studies, as well as global technology and politics, enter into conversation with his original arguments.

Ideology, Power and Prehistory

Ideology, Power and Prehistory PDF Author: Theoretical Archaeology Group (England). Conference
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521255264
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 176

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Book Description
This book starts from the premise that methodology has always dominated archaeology to the detriment of broader social theory.

The Craft Apprentice

The Craft Apprentice PDF Author: W. J. Rorabaugh
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195051890
Category : Apprentices
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
In this examination of the apprentice system in colonial America, W.J. Rorabaugh has woven an intriguing collection of case histories into a narrative that examines the varied experiences of individual apprentices and documents the massive changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution.

Management and Ideology

Management and Ideology PDF Author: Judith A. Merkle
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520312104
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
From its obscure beginning as a system for organizing machine shops, Scientific Management has grown into the major technocratic ideology of the twentieth century. Its development and international diffusion have influenced industrial productivity, the social fabric of industrial society, and even the nature of government. In this study of the movement's growth, Merkle compares the writings of the American, German, French, British, and Soviet vanguards of Scientific Management and finds that those who advocated efficiency engineering were considerably more than pragmatists seeking immediate technical solutions to production problems. Rather, they were visionaries who sought to reconcile class conflict, restructure government, and create a universal technocratic utopia by achieving efficient mass production and rationalized distribution. The call for a "mental revolution," which permeates their writings, found sympathizers among capitalists and socialists alike; that revolution affected not only the structure of modern industrialism but also the organization of the state itself. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1980.

Against the Machine

Against the Machine PDF Author: Lee Siegel
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0385525664
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
From the author hailed by the New York Times Book Review for his “drive-by brilliance” and dubbed by the New York Times Magazine as “one of the country’s most eloquent and acid-tongued critics” comes a ruthless challenge to the conventional wisdom about the most consequential cultural development of our time: the Internet. Of course the Internet is not one thing or another; if anything, its boosters claim, the Web is everything at once. It’s become not only our primary medium for communication and information but also the place we go to shop, to play, to debate, to find love. Lee Siegel argues that our ever-deepening immersion in life online doesn’t just reshape the ordinary rhythms of our days; it also reshapes our minds and culture, in ways with which we haven’t yet reckoned. The web and its cultural correlatives and by-products—such as the dominance of reality television and the rise of the “bourgeois bohemian”—have turned privacy into performance, play into commerce, and confused “self-expression” with art. And even as technology gurus ply their trade using the language of freedom and democracy, we cede more and more control of our freedom and individuality to the needs of the machine—that confluence of business and technology whose boundaries now stretch to encompass almost all human activity. Siegel’s argument isn’t a Luddite intervention against the Internet itself but rather a bracing appeal for us to contend with how it is transforming us all. Dazzlingly erudite, full of startlingly original insights, and buoyed by sharp wit, Against the Machine will force you to see our culture—for better and worse—in an entirely new way.

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.

From Higher Aims to Hired Hands

From Higher Aims to Hired Hands PDF Author: Rakesh Khurana
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400830869
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 542

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Book Description
Is management a profession? Should it be? Can it be? This major work of social and intellectual history reveals how such questions have driven business education and shaped American management and society for more than a century. The book is also a call for reform. Rakesh Khurana shows that university-based business schools were founded to train a professional class of managers in the mold of doctors and lawyers but have effectively retreated from that goal, leaving a gaping moral hole at the center of business education and perhaps in management itself. Khurana begins in the late nineteenth century, when members of an emerging managerial elite, seeking social status to match the wealth and power they had accrued, began working with major universities to establish graduate business education programs paralleling those for medicine and law. Constituting business as a profession, however, required codifying the knowledge relevant for practitioners and developing enforceable standards of conduct. Khurana, drawing on a rich set of archival material from business schools, foundations, and academic associations, traces how business educators confronted these challenges with varying strategies during the Progressive era and the Depression, the postwar boom years, and recent decades of freewheeling capitalism. Today, Khurana argues, business schools have largely capitulated in the battle for professionalism and have become merely purveyors of a product, the MBA, with students treated as consumers. Professional and moral ideals that once animated and inspired business schools have been conquered by a perspective that managers are merely agents of shareholders, beholden only to the cause of share profits. According to Khurana, we should not thus be surprised at the rise of corporate malfeasance. The time has come, he concludes, to rejuvenate intellectually and morally the training of our future business leaders.

Manufacturing Ideology

Manufacturing Ideology PDF Author: William M. Tsutsui
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400822661
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
Japanese industry is the envy of the world for its efficient and humane management practices. Yet, as William Tsutsui argues, the origins and implications of "Japanese-style management" are poorly understood. Contrary to widespread belief, Japan's acclaimed strategies are not particularly novel or even especially Japanese. Tsutsui traces the roots of these practices to Scientific Management, or Taylorism, an American concept that arrived in Japan at the turn of the century. During subsequent decades, this imported model was embraced--and ultimately transformed--in Japan's industrial workshops. Imitation gave rise to innovation as Japanese managers sought a "revised" Taylorism that combined mechanistic efficiency with respect for the humanity of labor. Tsutsui's groundbreaking study charts Taylorism's Japanese incarnation, from the "efficiency movement" of the 1920s, through Depression-era "rationalization" and wartime mobilization, up to postwar "productivity" drives and quality-control campaigns. Taylorism became more than a management tool; its spread beyond the factory was a potent intellectual template in debates over economic growth, social policy, and political authority in modern Japan. Tsutsui's historical and comparative perspectives reveal the centrality of Japanese Taylorism to ongoing discussions of Japan's government-industry relations and the evolution of Fordist mass production. He compels us to rethink what implications Japanese-style management has for Western industries, as well as the future of Japan itself.

Applied Systems Analysis

Applied Systems Analysis PDF Author: F. P. Tarasenko
Publisher: CRC Press
ISBN: 1000088979
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Applied Systems Analysis: Science and Art of Solving Real-Life Problems Subject Guide: Engineering – Industrial and Manufacturing Any activity is aimed at solving certain problems, which means transferring a system from an existing unsatisfactory problematic state to a desired state. The success or failure of the system depends on how its natural properties were implemented during the planning of improvement and intervention state. This book covers the theory and experience of successfully solving problems in a practical and general way. This book includes a general survey of modern systems analysis; offers several original results; presents the latest methodological and technological results of the theory of systems; introduces achievements; and discusses the transition from the ideology of the machine age to the ideology of the systems age. This book will be of interest to both professionals and academicians.