Cultures of Control / Edition 1

by Miriam R. Levin

Overview

This collection of essays explores the history of control by looking at a variety of cultural forms, practices, and beliefs. These ideas are examined critically, not only in the light of the possibilities which control technologies seem to offer for resolving human problems, but also the contradictory moral, political, and economic consequences they have had. The discussion takes into account the important modes in which humans have cast their organizational efforts: political, social, sychological, economic, and legal. It also takes a longue durée view of the history of control, looking back to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and establishes the continuities in the twentieth century as a transatlantic phenomenon.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9789058230133
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	05/17/2000
Series:	Routledge Studies in the History of Science, Technology and Medicine
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	294
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)
Age Range:	18 Years

Table of Contents

List of Figures, Preface, List of Contributors, Acknowledgements, Introduction, Part 1: Conventional Notions of Culture and Original Modes of Control, Part 2: Managing Machines, Index

Editorial Reviews

Cultures of Control serves as an index of the advance of science and technology studies. These fine, informative and often path-breaking essays explore how technology and culture mutually interact and form each other. The older conundrums of technological determinism and idealism are considerably surpassed in a set of essays that is remarkably coherent given the disciplinary diversity of the authors, and yet fruitfully integrates these two terms in concrete analyses of specific technologies and specific cultural formations. Anyone interested in the history of technology or its empirical relation to culture ought to take a look at Levin's collection.

Mark Poster

Miriam Levin and the other authors in Cultures of Control show that 'control' and 'technology' have similar connotations and are nearly interchangeable.

Thomas P. Hughes