Технологічні утопії XX століття: методологічний і тематичний аспекти дослідження

What theories or concepts are most useful at explaining socio technical change? How can – or cannot – these be integrated? To provide an answer, this study presents the results from 35 semi-structured research interviews with social science experts who also shared more than two hundred articles, reports and books on the topic of the acceptance, adoption, use, or diffusion of technology. This material led to the identification of 96 theories and conceptual approaches spanning 22 identified disciplines. The article begins by explaining its research terms and methods before honing in on a combination of fourteen theories deemed most relevant and useful by the material. These are: Sociotechnical Transitions, Social Practice Theory, Discourse Theory, Domestication Theory, Large Technical Systems, Social Construction of Technology, Sociotechnical Imaginaries, Actor-Network Theory, Social Justice Theory, Sociology of Expectations, Sustainable Development, Values Beliefs Norms Theory, Lifestyle Theory, and the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology. It then positions these theories in terms of two distinct typologies. Theories can be placed into five general categories of being centered on agency, structure, meaning, relations or norms. They can also be classified based on their assumptions and goals rooted in functionalism, interpretivism, humanism or conflict. The article lays out tips for research methodology before concluding with insights about technology itself, analytical processes associated with technology, and the framing and communication of results. An interdisciplinary theoretical and conceptual inventory has much to offer students, analysts and scholars wanting to study technological change and society.

Frames and inscriptions: tracing a way to understand IT-dependent change projects

This chapter explores four theoretical perspectives on technology and society — technological determinism, social constructivism, actor network theory (ANT), and posthumanism — and situates them within current empirical research on information and communication technologies (ICTs) and family dynamics. Technological determinism theorises the relationship between technological and social change that informs academic, policy and popular accounts about the place of technology in everyday life. Social constructivist approaches to technology include ‘social shaping of technology’, ‘social construction of technology’ and ‘technological systems’ perspectives. The chapter also explains the main assumptions of ANT and posthumanist approaches before proceeding with a discussion of how technological determinism, social constructivism and ANT have implicitly or explicitly shaped empirical research on ICTs and family life. It concludes by considering the implications of posthumanism for research on ICTs and family life.

This article discusses the strengths and limitations of Actor-Network Theory (ANT) as a framework for Science and Technology Studies (STS). While ANT was originally rooted in Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) approaches, ANT has become a theoretical framework commonly used by scholars in numerous disciplines beyond STS, including Information Sciences. Although some scholars consider ANT to be now closer to sociomateriality studies, we claim that ANT differs from sociomateriality in that it suggests a different notion of power. In ANT, power results from actors’ associations enacted into being rather than the sociomateriality claim that power results from existing power structures. We draw from our work on information technologies and social movements to illustrate this important distinction, and to show how ANT can be further strengthened by including the study of histories, memories and trajectories, in order to better understand power relations as associations enacted into being. In this way, we offer a deeper understanding of ANT and its utility for STS research in general, and information studies in particular.

Reviewed by: Artefakter: Industrin, vetenskapen och de tekniska nätverken Mikael Hård (bio) Artefakter: Industrin, vetenskapen och de tekniska nätverken. Edited by Sven Widmalm with Hjalmar Fors. Hedemora, Sweden: Gidlunds förlag, 2004. Pp. 395. SEK 178. In the organization of research, the humanities and the social sciences have become increasingly similar to the natural and engineering sciences. European research councils tend to fund "big-science" projects and large, often interdisciplinary graduate schools. It is probably safe to say that most historians are skeptical about this. To many, writing history remains an individual endeavor that cannot meaningfully be pursued in the same way as biochemical research. Artefakter—a collection of essays by researchers and students from the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and Uppsala University—suggests otherwise by summarizing the impressive accomplishments of a ten-year project financed by the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation and called Scientific Research, Technological Change, Industrial Innovation. In his introduction, editor Sven Widmalm argues that artifacts "can be studied along the same lines as individuals or institutions—biographically or as integral parts of networks and systems" (p. 9). Most readers familiar with Wiebe Bijker, Thomas Hughes, and Trevor Pinch's classic volume The Social Construction of Technological Systems (1987) will recognize this approach. Still, it is important to add that none of the contributors to Artefakter use social construction of technology (SCOT), or actor-network theory (ANT), or the large-technical-systems perspective (LTS) as conceptual cookie cutters when approaching historical reality. The strength of the individual essays lies in the richness of the empirical material, including the design of ultracentrifuges, ion valve converters, and nuclear reactors, and from chemical laboratory equipment in the eighteenth century to hydroelectric dams in the twentieth. At least for readers of this journal, there is really no point in flogging the dead horse called "the linear view of research and development." As with most anthologies, one may complain that this one tries to cover too much territory and is too disparate. What holds the book together, however, is the focus on artifacts, human-made objects that have meaning and contribute to the rearrangement of social structures. Take Anders Houltz's discussion of the Borgvik tilt hammer, for example. In the mid-nineteenth century this was installed in an ironmaking plant in the middle [End Page 702] of Sweden, only to be replaced by another type in twenty years. But its history did not end. Many years later, this "beautiful" (p. 320) piece of craftsmanship was rediscovered and transported to Gothenburg, where it was given a central position at the 1923 industrial exhibit. It was also given a completely new meaning. Instead of creating economic surplus value, its purpose was now to produce "symbolic value" (p. 331). Not all contributors place artifacts at the center of their analysis, and the last chapter does not fit into the overall framework. Instead of discussing the embeddedness of artifacts in the social and cultural fabric, Håkan Håkansson and Alexandra Waluszewski introduce an economic discourse in which "effects" and "consequences" are at the center of the analysis (p. 377). If historians of science and technology wish to continue discussing artifacts, they should move in the direction of cultural studies and treat them as part of what anthropologists call "material culture." Economic network theory, SCOT, ANT, and LTS are not the only relevant social theories out there. Mikael Hård Dr. Hård is professor of the history of technology at the University of Technology in Darmstadt. His most recent publication is Hubris and Hybrids: A Cultural History of Technology and Science (2005), coauthored with Andrew Jamison. Copyright © 2006 The Society for the History of Technology

Evolutionary Economics (EE), Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) and Actor-Network Theory (ANT) are often seen in literature on technology as alternative ways of accounting for technological change. Superficially they seem to exclude each other because of contradictory understandings of how technology changes, but in this paper we argue that there are connections between the approaches and that they complement each other in important ways. An initial analysis of each approach separately is followed by an investigation of the opportunities for conceptual and methodological connection or `cross-talk'. As a result of the analysis, we outline the contours of a comprehensive framework for studying technological change. We suggest that such a framework would integrate EE, SCOT and ANT as valuable complements for understanding particular aspects of the emergence and diffusion of new technology. This is illustrated with an empirical example from the early days of computerization in Finland.

Directions for the History of Aviation EMPIRE OF THE AIR: Aviation and the American Ascendancy. By Jenifer Van Vleck. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 2013.THE JET SEX: Airline Stewardesses and the Making of an American Icon. By Victoria Vantoch. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2013.PLANE QUEER: Labor, Sexuality, and AIDS in the History of Male Flight Attendants. By Phil Tiemeyer. Berkeley: University of California Press. 2013.IntroductionThe books under consideration here might justifiably be termed products of the New Aerospace History. This was a term coined by my colleague at the National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, Roger Launius, characterize what he believed was a significant transforma- tion that has been taking place in the field since the 1980s. Specifically, the Aerospace History is intrinsically committed relating the subject larger issues of society, politics, and culture, taking a more sophisticated view of the science, technology, and individual projects than historians previously held. In the past, many writers on aerospace history held a fascination with the machinery, which has been largely anthropomorphized and often seen as 'magical.'1Launius goes on suggest a typology for the history of space exploration. Aerospace history should neither be celebratory nor should it be used to attack the whole enterprise. Among the legitimate inquiries that historians of space exploration should make are those that relate the origins of the space age; civil-military relations in space; national sovereignty in space exploration; the politics of space exploration; space flight and its legacy; the human imperative in space exploration; space and popular culture. Indeed, all of these typological components could be applied directly the study of what might be termed aero history (the initial component of the term aero-space history), or what is known simply as the history of aviation.2Aerospace history, in many respects a branch of the history of technology, has thus become caught up in a larger movement of historical studies about technology. One of these was the Social Construction of Technology (SCOT), first posited by Wiebe E. Bijker, Thomas Hughes, and Trevor Pinch in The Social Construction of Technological Systems (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1989; Anniversary Ed., 2012). The original conception of SCOTS included the study of Large-Scale Technological Systems (LTS) and Actor-Network Theory (ANT), prevalent in what has become known as Science and Technology Studies (STS).These endeavors sought move away from what is termed technological determinism, or, in its most simplistic terms, the idea that technology has a progressive inevitability that is beyond human agency. The editors believed that questioning the fixed boundary between humans and nonhumans, or paying attention the nontechnical aspects when studying the history of technical systems-all three approaches embraced the methodological principle of paying attention how the borders between the social and the technical were drawn by actors, rather than assuming that these borders are pre-given and static. This also brings out the common element of a constructivist perspective. Rather than taking an essentialist view of technologies and their contexts, we all agreed that describing the activities of actors- whether in the form of relevant social groups (SCOT), systems builders (LTS), or actants (ANT)- was more interesting than a promethean history of technology that emphasized how heroic inventors and engineers stole great ideas about technology from the gods and gave them mere mortals.3Another prevalent direction for aerospace history has been cultural history in its multiplicity of meanings. In their introduction The Cultural Turn in U.S. History: Past, Present and Future, the editors, James W. …

This article aims to address an omission in information system research concerning the debate in social science on postmodernism and post-structuralism. It outlines the fundamental arguments of this debate and draw attention to the relevant discussions and disputes. This provides a clear understanding of actor network theory (ANT) as it originates from post-structuralist debates in the field of science and technology studies (STS). It begins by summarizing some of the key debates that are of relevance within poststructuralism and constructivism. The difficulties in using ANT are mentioned and these are due to a lack of exposure to poststructuralism in IS research, as compared with other related disciplines. It draws out a relationship between social shaping of technology, social construction of technology, and ANT. This article further suggests that consideration of efforts in related fields to combine ANT with critical social analysis may be a worthwhile pursuit.

Reviewed by: Technology and Culture Michael Brian Schiffer (bio) Technology and Culture. By Allen W. Batteau. Long Grove, Ill.: Waveland Press, 2009. Pp. ix+148. $15.95. In this slim volume of eight chapters, cultural anthropologist Allen W. Batteau aims to develop the view that “modern technology is so completely interwoven into the texture of modern society that the mutual evolution of modern technology and modern cultural forms cannot be usefully unraveled” (p. 4). Accordingly, the book lacks tools for discerning specific relationships between technology and culture. Rather, it contains an idiosyncratic definition of technology, a hodgepodge of underdeveloped examples, and a number of musings about whether technology makes “a positive contribution to human happiness, freedom, and security” (p. 3). The work’s theoretical underpinnings are an amalgam of idealist cultural anthropology, systems theory, actor-network theory, and the social construction of technology that never solidify into a coherent framework. The villain lurking throughout is “managerial ideology” (p. 3), which promotes rationality and efficiency and treats cultural aspects of technology as irrational. Anthropology’s challenge is to reclaim “the cultural resources to tame the technology that rides mankind” (p. 71). For Batteau, a technology is a complex “large-scale, networked system” (p. 27), built according to “authoritative [written] standards” (p. 98), that represents “an extension of state and corporate power” (p. 51). Technologies are also “autonomous and possess trajectory, momentum, and agency” (p. 12). Thus, to regard mere tools or artifacts as technologies is a “misapprehension” (p. 98). Restricting the definition of technology in this way is a surprisingly un-anthropological move, one that enables Batteau to ignore the substantial literature on traditional technologies and on technological change. Not surprisingly, the author’s expertise concerns the operation of complex sociotechnical systems of the industrial West, which supplies the book’s examples. A simple admission of this understandable bias would have been preferable to a self-serving and off-putting definition of technology. [End Page 816] Although the book emphasizes the consequences of adopting complex sociotechnical systems, the causes of new technologies are said to include “technological exuberance” (p. 9), technology’s “restlessness” (p. 86), “systems builders” (p. 37), and cultural values. Sweeping conclusions about cause tend to be vacuous, such as “The joining of large-scale usefulness, collective will, and modernity created Technology as we understand it today” (p. 24). The only specific social process that Batteau invokes to explain the development of technologies is competition, mainly among nations, as in the missile race between the United States and the former Soviet Union. Batteau offers many provocative propositions about complex socio-technical systems that could stimulate classroom discussions. “The contributions of technology to security,” he claims, “are none” (p. 20). As for health and nutrition, he suggests that “further improvements . . . depend more on institutional—that is, cultural—reform than on technological advance,” and that further technological developments might “generate more infectious diseases and pollution” (p. 20). Indeed, he attends to the negative consequences and hidden costs that technologies can bring, including “massive institutional inflexibility” (p. 132) as well as “degraded working conditions, increased surveillance, or erosion of social ties” (p. 47). “A strong element of magical thinking” (p. 44), he suggests, fosters the belief that any problem can yield to a technological solution. When technologies go awry, system operators are usually blamed, but he contends that designers and managers also contribute greatly to failures. The last chapter, “Technology for Culture,” fails to deliver on the promise to create “a unified, articulated framework” for studying culture and technology (p. 125). Instead, Batteau promotes the panacea of decentralized, appropriate technologies to serve humanity. This can work, he claims, because “For every problem that technology is intended to address . . . there is a nontechnological solution, one that focuses on remaking institutions and reforming the habits of the heart” (p. 132). The remaking of institutions is to be guided not by the requirements of technology, as at present, but by widely shared “civic values” (p. 130), a curious notion that implies cultural and social homogeneity. In our heterogeneous societies, I wonder whose values will prevail, and how reformers will acquire the power to impose their solutions on others. Despite these many shortcomings, Technology and Culture...

Based on several rounds of academic interview and conversations with Trevor Pinch, the book introduces the reader to the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS), and in particular to the social constructionist approach to science, technology and sound. Through the lenses of Pinch’s lifetime work, STS students, and scholars in fields dealing with technological mediation, are provided with an in-depth overview, and with suggestions for further reading, on the most relevant past and ongoing debates in the field. The book starts presenting the approach launched by the Bath School in the early sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK), and follows the development of the field up to the so called “Science wars” of the ‘90s, and to the popularization of the main acquisitions of the field by Trevor Pinch and Harry Collins’ Golem trilogy. Then, it deals with the sociology of technology, and presents the Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) approach, launched by Trevor Pinch and Wiebe Bijker in 1984 and developed in more than 30 years of research, comparing it with alternative approaches like Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network theory. Five issues are addressed in depth: relevant social groups in the social construction of technology; the intertwining of social representations and practices; the importance of tacit knowledge in SCOT’s approach to the nonrepresentational; the controversy over nonhuman agency; and the political implications of SCOT. Finally, it presents the main current debates in STS, in particular in the study of materiality and ontology, and presents Pinch’s more recent work in sound studies.

In the Netherlands, the simultaneous construction of society and network technologies has a long history, yet it is only in the twentieth century that the Netherlands has become a veritable Network Society. Drawing on the vocabulary of the research field of 'large technical systems' and the empirical results of the Dutch national history of technology programme, this article argues that during this century technological, social and even natural landscapes were reshaped in processes of material network building. An investigation of selected cases (the development of the electricity supply, the food chain, the petrochemical industry, and nature conservation) shows a variety of development patterns, motives, interests, conflicts, and negotiations behind the seemingly universal human obsession regarding circulation and network building.

For almost two centuries, the ships and the crews of the VOC navigated their way between the Dutch Republic and Asia. This could not have been achieved without the technology of ship design and ship building, the technology involved with keeping the crew healthy, and the technology of charting a route. Consequently, the VOC itself had to navigate its way through technology, deciding whether to develop, introduce, use, adapt, improve or discontinue certain technologies. This dissertation shows that the “success” or “failure” of such technologies could never be taken for granted; instead, whatever happened to technologies had to be (re)negotiated over and over again. Taking original archival research as its starting point, this study uses insights and methods developed in Science and Technology Studies to interpret and explain the fate of VOC’s technologies. Three approaches have been fruitful in this respect. First is the Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) with its emphasis on how (non)-users matter, the second approach is that of Large-scale Technological Systems (LTS) which helps to explain how the VOC developed into a large (pre)-industrial enterprise during the eighteenth century and – third – the Actor-Network Theory (ANT) makes clear that not only humans took part in the negotiations but also non-humans like contagious diseases, typhoons, profitable trade, and not in the least the ships themselves. During the course of the eighteenth century one sees an increasing drive by the central board of directors of the VOC towards a system of centralized control, also regarding the topic of technology. As a number of suggestions for introducing new or improved technologies originated in one of the six local chambers of the company, came from individual skippers or from personnel serving at outposts of the company, it is not surprising that this led to tensions between those promoting technologies based on local knowledge and the central board of directors in Amsterdam. A more de-central approach might have yielded interesting technological results and it might also have had a profound effect on the chances of survival of the VOC as a company.

Within the scope of how technology impacts society, three theoretical models—the social shaping of technology (SST), social construction of technology (SCOT), and the actor-network theory (ANT)—are frameworks that help rethink the embeddedness of technology within society, once each is transformed and transformative of the other. More attention will be given to the ANT approach since it solves the technology/society dualisms unresolved by the previous proposals. This is a flexible epistemological possibility that can reach the ambiguity of contemporary life and the remarkable transformations brought by progress that have drastically changed childhood and children's contemporary lives.

Within the scope of how technology impacts on society three theoretical models: the social shaping of technology (SST), social construction of technology (SCOT) and the Actor-Network theory (ANT) are frameworks that help rethink the embeddedness of technology within society, once each is transformed and transformative of the other. More attention will be given to the ANT approach since it solves the technology/society dualisms unresolved by the previous proposals. This is a flexible epistemological possibility that can reach the ambiguity of contemporary life and the remarkable transformations brought by progress that have changed drastically childhood and children's contemporary lives.

In the spring of 1998, I began work on a history of air pollution control policy, focusing on new mechanisms of local control that more actively included representatives of the public. In Pittsburgh, these new possibilities for local activism had contributed to the rise of the Group Against Smog and Pollution (GASP) in 1969. When I went looking for archival documents that could explain the history, demographics, rhetoric, and strategy of this environmental advocacy group three decades later, I found only strangely scattered pieces. By the late 1990s the leadership of GASP did not know if any material had ever been donated to any local archive; they were several generations removed from the original activists, many of whom had passed on, left the cause, or moved to Florida. Over the next twelve years, I attempted to chase down the records of individuals and the group. I swooped in to claim and sort discarded garbage bags full of paper when the group moved offices, and pursued material that some activists had donated to a library (which did not have any provisions for archival storage) without the knowledge of the rest of the group's leaders (who did not know where the records had gone). The only point in time that all of the records I used to write my dissertation came together in one place, with professional archivists assessing, sorting, and organizing the material, was after I had finished the resulting book—thirteen years after the spring of 1998.1I take this experience as one piece of evidence that the archival records of environmental activism in the 1960s are only now becoming ripe for historians. After all, with the transformation in the archival status of GASP records over the last decade, I can safely say that the book I have just finished would be a very different one if I were to write it today. Simply acquiring and organizing the materials consumed most of my time in the dissertation research. Today, with the same materials now located in professionally managed archives, I could spend more time concentrating on the context in which this organization developed its political responses to changing legal and legislative opportunities. I would also have a significantly different perspective on these materials were I to encounter them as a chronologically or thematically organized set of records inside an archive. While these anecdotal observations feel logical, when I began discussing the point with other scholars I became unsatisfied with my own limited viewpoint. This article results from an attempt to test out these assumptions through journalistic interviews with archivists throughout the Mid-Atlantic region. In so doing, I hope to consider the ways that “archival power” has shaped, and will continue to direct, the future of environmental history in the Mid-Atlantic.2At this moment in the early twenty-first century, the archival records of the modern environmental movement are ripening for use, creating a unique opportunity for new work on the history of environmental politics and policy in the Mid-Atlantic region. These records can be divided into at least three categories, including the documentary evidence of government decisionmaking, the materials produced by environmental organizing in the public sphere, and the records of corporate actions and deliberations. While internal corporate records of the late twentieth century remain comparatively rare, archival records in the other two areas are evolving into a new era of availability. Just as new sources, emphases, and concerns have worked to transform the political history of the civil rights era and of the social revolutions of the long 1960s, these same forces could prompt significant change in the narrative of twentieth-century environmental history. Indeed, the future story of environmental politics and policy in the Mid-Atlantic region depends almost entirely upon the materials that are in the archives now or will be added in the years to come.3Understanding the ebb and flow of archival preservation allows us to understand both the histories that have already been written and those that might be possible only now. Along these lines, historian and theorist Michel-Rolph Trouillot has contemplated the “archival power” or ability of formal institutions to shape history in preserving it. “Archives assemble,” he writes, but “their assembly work is not limited to a more or less passive act of collecting. Rather, it is an active act of production that prepares acts for historical intelligibility.”4 Trouillot is rightly concerned about the silences produced by unquestioned reliance on the purity of historical production, but an active understanding of the process by which records come into archives can also extend our comprehension of the narratives that have, and have not, been told.In the case of environmental history, the impact of archival power on the historical narrative has created a significant silence concerning the political history of organizations and activists since the 1970s. Since a larger number of historians began writing about environmental concerns in the late twentieth century, the most attractive archival sources facing them were always about events predating the modern environmental era. The records of earlier movements and moments were always far more organized, accessible, and attractive to environmental historians than the comparatively inchoate records of the late twentieth century. This has obviously placed a constraint upon environmental history since its inception, a built-in aversion to writing the history of the politics and organizations of the modern environmental movement.However, this constraint on historical work may be changing, for three reasons. First, the records that are now becoming accessible in archives are the voluminous product of the post–World War II environmental era. The hallmarks of this period include expanding litigation and legislation, an increasing reliance on scientific expertise, and a proliferation of bureaucracies and agencies. All of these developments produced extensive documentation. New technologies of the information revolution—Xerox machines, IBM Selectric typewriters, and magnetic tapes—multiplied and expanded these sources into occasionally ridiculous mountains of jargon-filled 10,000-page reports, comprising what archivist Terry Cook has called an “avalanche of paper.”5 All of this awaits the bleary-eyed historian.Second, the material from the individuals and organizations comprising the modern environmental movement is itself just now becoming available. Apart from the bureaucratic reports of government agencies, the records of the environmental movement are more closely identified with individual activism and counterculture politics, and often consist of personal correspondence, mimeographed newsletters, and alternative newspapers that might not have made it into an archive through any official document-retention policy. Those historians who wish to work in this era must be part archivists themselves—the oral histories of the environmental actors and organizations have not necessarily been created, and many of the records of activists have yet to be guided into archives. This might mean that the political history of the modern environmental movement still awaits its scholar; it is not clear that anyone has successfully completed a synthesis of the nationwide movement based on the documentary records of environmental organizing, at least not since Sam Hays's formative Beauty, Health, and Permanence, published more than two decades ago.6Third, there is a possibility that the modern environmental era fits into a unique moment in the development of the archival materials of the twentieth century. Michael Dabrishus, one archivist interviewed for this project, called it a lens of availability, but another way to think of it is as a python that has swallowed a pig: bulging in the middle, but narrowing at either end.7 There was a proliferation in paper records appropriate for preservation after World War II, and then a post-1980s decrease in archived deliberative correspondence due to the rise of electronic media practices and the deleterious effects of open records laws. In other words, the records of the environmental era coincide with a several-decades-long bulge in useful archived materials. This is both good and bad news: there is a clear increase in bureaucratic, technocratic, and legalistic records that continues into the present, but by the 1990s any personal correspondence or reflection is less likely to be archived due to various constraints, making the signal-to-noise ratio among archived materials particularly troublesome for environmental historians.These observations concerning archives and the history of the environmental movement, of course, stem from my own experience as a researcher. However, the importance of the present moment for collecting the records of environmental activism also became apparent in interviews with archivists and librarians, as illustrated by a story from Michael Dabrishus of the University of Pittsburgh. The story concerns Wyona Coleman, an environmental activist who finished donating her materials to the archives by 2005. Dabrishus noted that these papers document a long career “committed to issues like refuse disposal [and] coal mining; [as well as her] position as a representative of the Sierra Club,” and that Coleman had been “collecting this stuff all of her adult life.” While these materials originated in decades of activism, as Dabrishus observed, Coleman is “now in her seventies or eighties and only now making the decision to conserve her collections.” Indeed, the timing of this archival donation seems to be a pattern with environmental activists. Before the institutionalized environmentalism of the 1980s, these activists often worked out of their own homes and kept their own correspondence, and it is therefore up to them to decide when or if to donate these materials.Similarly, Eben Dennis of the Maryland Historical Society observed that “there's a major problem with advocacy; those people aren't actively thinking about saving their materials,” as they are often caught up in the throes of the temporary crisis that might have brought them into environmental activism in the first place. This oversight is certainly understandable: Dennis, trained as an archivist, noted that while his own father was “general counsel for the Nature Conservancy for decades, and the basement [of his home] is filled with his papers,” it is still “ironic that I have not done anything with them.” Of course, he added, politically involved environmentalists are “very attached to [their papers] when they are active, but they're active throughout their lives, so they only come to donating the materials from earlier decades now.” Cheryl Oakes of the Forest History Society thought this timing makes sense: “that lag time—40 or 50 years—is about the time that you get for any event; it takes a while to get” any documentary records into archival institutions.There is an interestingly ambivalent story here. While some of the papers of the environmental era clearly are not making it into the archives, there are tantalizing examples of useful material for historians in the ones that are preserved. At the University of Pittsburgh's Archives of Industrial Society, the papers of the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy—a group with a hand in seemingly every regional environmental issue in the last fifty years—have only recently become fully accessioned. Similarly, John Suter of the New York State Archives reported significant success from an organized effort to encourage preservation of the records of environmental activism throughout the state, noting that the state has funded efforts “to concentrate on the Storm King controversy; that material is now all at Marist College—building it into a center of archived materials on Scenic Hudson in only the last five years.”8As a part of the same project, SUNY Albany has received funding to collect materials of local environmental organizing, resulting in significant collections from environmental activism in recent decades—for example, sizable collections of records from the Atlantic States Legal Foundation (120 cubic feet), the Citizens' Environmental Coalition (44 cf), Environmental Advocates of New York (91 cf), and New York City journalist Matthew Reiss's Urban Documentation Project (30 cf).9 At the Maryland Historical Society, the records of the turn-of-the-century Fresh Air Society of Maryland were a recent surprise donation, and were rushed to the top of the processing queue. As Eben Dennis noted, although “we have a ten to fifteen year backlog of unprocessed materials, the Fresh Air Society is a high priority because it fills an underrepresented gap in our collection.” Due to both increased donations and meaningful efforts on the part of institutions to collect environmental materials, the records of environmental activism thus might be more accessible and prominent for future scholars.Dennis's comment on the backlog of processing also indicates a complication: the moment that records of environmental activists might be coming into the archives is also a time of economic austerity for all. As Elizabeth Novara of the University of Maryland archives put it, “we have not actively been pursuing this area for numerous reasons, including reduction in staff and resources.” Similarly, Dennis noted that “at historical societies, we're chronically underfunded: we need to keep the lights on and keep patrons happy—and while we do limited outreach, we don't actively seek out collections.” This ill-timed financial pressure might make it unlikely that historical societies will be broadly successful in guiding the records of aging activists into archives at this time. Indeed, the late twentieth-century environmental movement was driven both by activists and by academics, and several archivists indicated concern that even the papers of these professionals were not being actively prepared or sought for preservation. Maryland State Archivist Ed Papenfuse lamented that “most major institutions don't pay attention to the working materials of their professors” and thus lose the opportunity to preserve the very work that takes place on their own campuses. Archival institutions are rarely top budget priorities, but the early twenty-first century is obviously a time of increased peril; it is simply ironic that records of the modern environmental movement are ripening at this precise moment.Another anecdote from my own research indicates the precarious nature of this transition period for the records of the environmental era. An important find for my project was a 1972 Allegheny County court case pitting the giant U.S. Steel Corporation against local governments and activists attempting to regulate emissions from the infamous Clairton Coke Works. However, gaining access to the primary documents in the case file was a byzantine nightmare as they were held by an obscure county row office intended to provide access for lawyers, not for historians. While I knew these papers existed, getting even a brief look at them took me years, and some scheming. I finally got a few days to read and take notes from these papers in 2009, but since then the county government office that holds them was renamed and reorganized. I recently contacted the office and have been told not only that this case file does not exist, but also that they do not track pre-1980 civil complaints, and that no files were donated to any archive. So the records related to a very important case in Pittsburgh's environmental history are missing in action. There is no guarantee that they will ever make it into an archive and every reason to think that they will not.10In comparison to Allegheny County and Pittsburgh municipal government records of the 1960s, the Pennsylvania State Archives appears quite a bit more organized, indicative of the type of state-mandated documents preservation schedule also evident in Maryland, New York, and Virginia. Nearly every public hearing on successive state environmental statutes in the last half of the twentieth century was collected in the Pennsylvania State Archives, and they preserve the names, organizations, and statements of the public in absolutely exhausting detail. While this is certainly commendable, it is also evidence of the near-overwhelming bulge in bureaucratic paper records. There are fewer records before the late twentieth-century information revolution and environmental legislation that required public hearings, produced lengthy impact statements, and spawned litigation. This mountain of useful and available paper reaches a peak by the early 1990s and then trails off. That peak is difficult for archives to handle, leading to some lag between donations and availability: the “bureaucracy of the twentieth century leads to massive collections—they take up space, and that costs money” to both process and store, Dennis explained. Because of those financial constraints, he notes, “we're still working on processing the masses of paper from the twentieth century.” John Suter from New York described how quickly these demands upon resources can appear, seemingly out of nowhere: “A few years ago, the Department of Environmental Conservation in New York moved their offices, and there was a sudden and intense interest on their part to donate materials to us.” The resulting massive donation demanded significant financial and logistical resources on very short notice.While the flood of paper records from bureaucratic sources is noticeable, the trailing-off of useful materials is also noteworthy. As Pennsylvania State Archivist David Haury said, since archivists now know that historians are interested in environmental matters, if records are not being collected “it's about business practices or electronic media.” In other words, agencies conduct a great deal of day-to-day business on email, but efforts to capture these correspondences are rarely attempted and generally difficult. Haury notes: “I think the shift became pronounced in the mid-'90s. Before then, you didn't have email—the documents were created on computers in the '80s, but then they were printed out and distributed on paper.” It is only with a 1990s-era increase in electronic-only distribution and correspondence that the paper records disappeared entirely. Archivists have been discussing this transition to what they call “born digital” records for quite some time, with both hope and trepidation. Ed Papenfuse of Maryland flatly declared the great fear of archivists and the problem for future historians: “There are no records management policies for email,” he observed, at least not in comparison to the extensive and established policies for paper records of government agencies. However, it is not just the shift to email that has had the effect of bleeding archives of significant records. As one archivist said, for currently operating government agencies, “anything that is pre-decisional or deliberative is not a public record. [Pennsylvania's] three-year-old right-to-know law excludes those, and requires access only to the final policy or action.” In other words, archives in the new century might lose the ability to preserve records that will be of particular use to historians of environmental politics and policy, even as the quantity of all archived materials increases.11This structuring of the archives does not change the fact that environmental topics are very much on the minds of individuals working in primary sources at this very moment. One Pennsylvania archivist noted that “we are totally inundated with researchers … interested in Marcellus shale—we have people going through William records to out for have been in our papers for looking to out rights Michael Dabrishus that like just this year to us some of their which had been kept new sources on are becoming including records on the of the History in Pittsburgh another transition in archives that will future noting that archivists are currently working to and records that might be of interest to environmental historians. used the records of the Allegheny on a business as an say that there an environmental the … been as an and so those not find it. this is a an environmental historian know said, the of to the as archivists what is already these collections might on the of environmental understand the likely impact of these ripening archives on future it is to consider the of the project of writing a political history of the modern environmental era. Hays's Beauty, Health, and is the work in the of the environmental politics of the late twentieth century, but its and archival can also us to understand the future of the It is a historians that Hays's in that work was to to the and of every environmental organization throughout the from the late on, and to use these sources to environmental and When he made for those to be in the University of Pittsburgh's archives, a for an expanding related to environmental history. It is to that Beauty, Health, and Permanence, which came out of a personal of future work will be based on materials organized and made accessible by That is to and future histories of the environmental movement will be based on archival much that has come and it is likely that the in sources will in new and concerns in the transformation is The of the records of twentieth-century organizations, and environmental activists is in the of the Environmental The Forest History Society a of environmental and are reported in the The Forest History Society notes both when archival collections of environmental concern are being made and also when are being as being of interest to environmental Since the is created by scholars who the available materials of archives, these occasionally collections.” As Cheryl Oakes of the Forest History Society noted, “it's one of the that we continue to at the archival because we always the even if the did These might continue to be by the archives even after the Forest History Society them the don't know that we're this to observed how scholars these materials, it is clear that increasing of records from recent environmental activism are becoming in the issue the archival noted the New York State recently papers of the Society from and the papers of the the University of Maryland an of papers from years of the Environmental and two related to the Maryland Conservation and the Maryland Environmental These materials extensive and for future scholars to write histories of environmental activism based upon of primary the is not all good as in the preservation of legal records both and the one the many to legal records on case law and any archival provisions for or archival Ed Papenfuse was particularly concerned about the future of case that is if there is any effort to and preserve those court and the is … the that there is any public is on the other the proliferation of of case law indicates case management like to and are all making the obscure legal records of the twentieth century available with the of a and and like it are to making records The is more legal records be for or will they simply be more numerous while to preserve useful most from this concerns the aging of the who or the modern environmental As the of World War II for example, one last to preserve oral histories and was to capture that In a it seems that now is the time to on the modern environmental movement, and to actively the records of that era into archives in a meaningful do is an act of environmental as well as an of Michel-Rolph “archival the records of environmental to environmental concern at a moment when new and this clearly to environmental historians. As Maryland State Archivist Ed Papenfuse put it, for the most part are of the they are not of the The people that the most in environmental topics aren't making the case for the preservation and of the archival It is clearly time for historians and other environmental scholars to make that