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Engineers for Change - Competing Visions of Technology in 1960s America (Paperback)
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Engineers for Change - Competing Visions of Technology in 1960s America (Paperback)
Series: Engineering Studies
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List price R606
Loot Price R231
Discovery Miles 2 310
You Save R375 (62%)
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An account of conflicts within engineering in the 1960s that helped
shape our dominant contemporary understanding of technological
change as the driver of history. In the late 1960s an eclectic
group of engineers joined the antiwar and civil rights activists of
the time in agitating for change. The engineers were fighting to
remake their profession, challenging their fellow engineers to
embrace a more humane vision of technology. In Engineers for
Change, Matthew Wisnioski offers an account of this conflict within
engineering, linking it to deep-seated assumptions about technology
and American life. The postwar period in America saw a near-utopian
belief in technology's beneficence. Beginning in the mid-1960s,
however, society-influenced by the antitechnology writings of such
thinkers as Jacques Ellul and Lewis Mumford-began to view
technology in a more negative light. Engineers themselves were seen
as conformist organization men propping up the military-industrial
complex. A dissident minority of engineers offered critiques of
their profession that appropriated concepts from technology's
critics. These dissidents were criticized in turn by conservatives
who regarded them as countercultural Luddites. And yet, as
Wisnioski shows, the radical minority spurred the professional
elite to promote a new understanding of technology as a rapidly
accelerating force that our institutions are ill-equipped to
handle. The negative consequences of technology spring from its
very nature-and not from engineering's failures.
"Sociotechnologists" were recruited to help society adjust to its
technology. Wisnioski argues that in responding to the challenges
posed by critics within their profession, engineers in the 1960s
helped shape our dominant contemporary understanding of
technological change as the driver of history.
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