Engineering Labour: Technical Workers in Comparative Perspective by Peter Meiksins and Chris Smith

Abstract

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 149 ning with the application of a science to technology and beginning with the intellectually messier and analytically recalcitrant domain of practice itself. There were other tensions that conditioned teach­ ing at Metz: internal tensions between artillerists and military engi­ neers, each with proud traditions and rivals during the 18th century, and external tensions with the Ecole polytechnique and the military corps that recruited their officers from the school. These are dis­ cussed in a paper by Fabrice Hamelin, who looks at the complex administrative and bureaucratic history of the school. The majority ofpolytechnicienswent on to Metz, and the eminence of its faculty often matched that of Polytechnique. Perhaps the most famous was Jean-Victor Poncelet, pioneer of projective geometry and theoretician of hydraulics, whose course on the “science of ma­ chines” is analyzed in detail here by Konstantinos Chatzis. Philippe Prost and Jean-Francois Belhoste deal with the courses in fortifica­ tion and chemistry, respectively. These were considerably more con­ servative in their approach than Poncelet’s. But Metz was more than a school; it was also a focus and stimulant for research in ballistics and explosives. Patrice Bret describes the work at the Ecole de pyrotechnie, also located in the town of Metz, which conducted the most advanced research on black powder tech­ nology in the world. He shows that Metz was in fact the most active site of technological research in the first half of the 19th century in France. Bernard Bru argues in his paper on the theoretical and experimental work on firing accuracy that the Metz school was in love with theory. According to Bru, it was an excessive interest in “theoretically sweet” problems, not any blindness to developments in technology, that caused Metz to neglect the practical problems ofthe battlefield and to display surprisingly little concern for innova­ tion. Janis Fangins Dr. Langins teaches at the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the University ofToronto. He is completing a monograph on the history of French military engineering and fortification during the Enlightenment. Engineering Labour: Technical Workers in Comparative Perspective. By Pe­ ter Meiksins and Chris Smith. Fondon and New York: Verso, 1996. Pp. 296; notes, index. $20.00 (paper). This book, a collection ofessays primarily by sociologists, provides a comparative study of the education, training, and organization of engineers in the United States, Great Britain, France, Germany, Swe­ den, and Japan. As one might guess from the title, the approach is overtly Marxist, defining engineers in terms of their dual position as “agents of industrial capitalism” (p. vii) and “waged labour” (p. 150 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE 13). The book’s central aim is to attack the “widespread assumption that engineers . . . were considered to be the same in all capitalistic societies” (p. vii). While this may be a widespread assumption among Marxist scholars, most historians of technology, trained to think in terms ofcontextual history, will not find the book’s conclusions terri­ bly revolutionary. Many readers also may be put off by the abun­ dance of Marxist rhetoric and terminology, such as the continual reference to the activities of engineers as “engineering labour” (p. 68), but if one can get past some of the rhetoric the book provides some useful comparative analyses of the training and social role of engineers in a variety of national contexts. The most useful parts of the book for historians of technology are the six case studies on the history of engineering education and the professionalization of engineering in the United States, Great Brit­ ain, France, Germany, Sweden, and Japan. In general these are stronger as sociological studies than as historical studies. As one might expect from a Marxist approach, a significant part of every case study concerns attempts to unionize engineers. In fact, a reader might get the impression that a major concern of most modern engi­ neers is unionization and collective bargaining. While the case stud­ ies do a decentjob of surveying some of the important elements of the history of engineering education and the history of the profes­ sionalization ofengineering, they sometimes miss significant and im­ portant research in the history of technology. For example...