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More About This Textbook
Overview
Focusing on the design and implementation of computer-based automatic machine tools, David F. Noble challenges the idea that technology has a life of its own. Technology has been both a convenient scapegoat and a universal solution, serving to disarm critics, divert attention, depoliticize debate, and dismiss discussion of the fundamental antagonisms and inequalities that continue to beset America. This provocative study of the postwar automation of the American metal-working industry—the heart of a modern industrial economy—explains how dominant institutions like the great corporations, the universities, and the military, along with the ideology of modern engineering shape, the development of technology.
Noble shows how the system of "numerical control," perfected at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and put into general industrial use, was chosen over competing systems for reasons other than the technical and economic superiority typically advanced by its promoters. Numerical control took shape at an MIT laboratory rather than in a manufacturing setting, and a market for the new technology was created, not by cost-minded producers, but instead by the U. S. Air Force. Competing methods, equally promising, were rejected because they left control of production in the hands of skilled workers, rather than in those of management or programmers.
Noble demonstrates that engineering design is influenced by political, economic, managerial, and sociological considerations, while the deployment of equipment—illustrated by a detailed case history of a large General Electric plant in Massachusetts—can become entangled with such matters as labor classification, shop organization, managerial responsibility, and patterns of authority. In its examination of technology as a human, social process, Forces of Production is a path-breaking contribution to the understanding of this phenomenon in American society.
A provocative study of how automation is a technological as well as a social process that reflects very real divisions and pressures within our society.
Editorial Reviews
From the Publisher
“[P]rovides a new generation of readers access to this important critique of blind adoption of “improvements” and the deeper cultural and economic implications of technology.” —Book News Inc.Book News Inc.
“[P]rovides a new generation of readers access to this important critique of blind adoption of"improvements" and the deeper cultural and economic implications of technology." —Product Details
Related Subjects
Meet the Author
David F. Noble is professor in the department of social and political thought at York University and is best known for his work on the social history of automation. He was the co-founder (with Ralph Nader and Al Meyerhoff) of National Coalition for Universities in the Public Interest. He is also the author of numerous books including Beyond the Promised Land, Digital Diploma Mills, and The Religion of Technology.
David F. Noble is professor in the department of social and political thought at York University and is best known for his work on the social history of automation. He was the co-founder (with Ralph Nader and Al Meyerhoff) of National Coalition for Universities in the Public Interest. He is also the author of numerous books including Beyond the Promised Land, Digital Diploma Mills, and The Religion of Technology.
Table of Contents
Preface to the Transaction Edition ix
Preface xi
Acknowledgments xvii
Part 1 Command and Control
Chapter 1 The Setting: The War Abroad 3
Chapter 2 The Setting: The War at Home 21
Chapter 3 Power and the Power of Ideas 42
Chapter 4 Toward the Automatic Factory 57
Part 2 Social Choice in Machine Design
Chapter 5 By the Numbers I 79
Chapter 6 By the Numbers II 106
Chapter 7 The Road Not Taken 144
Part 3 A New Industrial Revolution: Change without Change
Chapter 8 Development: A Free Lunch 195
Chapter 9 Diffusion: A Glimpse of Reality 212
Chapter 10 Deployment: Power in Numbers 230
Chapter 11 Who's Running the Shop? 265
Epilogue: Another Look at Progress 324
Appendices 355
Notes 367
Index 399