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.
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