Technological Change: Methods and Themes in the History of Technology ed. by Robert Fox

Abstract

124 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE ist approach to technology studies, while retaining a commitment to the human experience in all its many facets. Other sections of the volume contribute to such an understanding as well. Thus, a symposium discussion is devoted to David Rothenberg’s Hand’s End: Technology and the Limits ofNature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), which argues in part that our experience of nature is socially and philosophically constructed through human technolo­ gies. The work of the lateJacques Ellul, who has been closely associ­ ated with the notion of technological determinism, is the subject of two essays, one in which Joseph Vincenzo compares Aristotle’s idea of political phronesis (prudence) with Ellul’s ideas about technique when applied to the political domain, and a second in which Daryl Wennemann draws on the thought of Karl Mannheim to address the problem of political freedom in technological society. This sec­ tion also includes an extensive 125-page update to Joyce Main Hanks’s comprehensive bibliography on the work of Ellul. Although there is much more of potential interest, this brief en­ capsulation should serve to outline what for me were the most inter­ esting and historically relevant highlights of a constructive contribu­ tion to an important series that belongs on the library shelves of all technology studies programs and institutions. Stephen H. Cutcliffe Dr. Cutcliffe is director of the Science, Technology, and Society Program at Lehigh University and coeditor, with Terry Reynolds, of the two-volume anthology of essays from Technology and Culture titled Technology and the West and Technology and American History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). Technological Change: Methods and Themes in the History of Technology. Edited by Robert Fox. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publish­ ers, 1996. Pp. vii+271; tables, figures, notes, index. $54.00 (hard­ cover) . This collection of fourteen articles and an editor’s introduction represents a selection from the hundred-plus papers given at a 1993 Oxford conference on technological change, designed as a “sequel” to a 1960s assessment of scientific change. Aimed to engage the in­ teraction between theoretical and empirical work in the history of technology and to exemplify present methodological debates, the volume succeeds rather more in separately presenting theories and topical research than in demonstrating productive linkages. Still, its contents are often provocative and always interesting. Fox’s preview highlights several matters worth broader consideration, though only a few contributors pursue them: diversity and wastefulness as “foun­ dations . . . for creativity,” the importance of being “wary of univer­ sal prescriptions,” and the increasing salience of a “flexible eclecti­ TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 125 cism” in the history of technology, a field that exhibits “the gathering strength of both intellectual and institutional initiatives” (pp. 7-9, 15). Divided into four segments, Technological Change com­ mences with theory-intensive articles, then treats medieval, 18th/ 19th-century, and 20th-century issues, closing with what might be termed a metatheoretical commentary on technological artifacts. Space limitations prohibit a detailed review of individual essays, but I would commend to readers Trevor Pinch’s spirited explication and defense of the social construction of technology (SCOT) ap­ proach, which includes clear explanations of key concepts (closure, technological frame, interpretive flexibility) and responds to specific criticisms offered recently. Antoine Picon provides reflections on “the collective mental frames” of technological actors (p. 38), with special attention to the 19th-century transition from geometric to analytic reasoning among engineers, an effort roughly analogous to John Pickstone’s discussion of “knowledge-practices and practicalknowledges ” (p. 61), which sketches the displacement of local/ex­ periential understandings by transmissible, formalized literatures. Joel Mokyr’s somewhat less germane essay on evolution “as a meta­ phor for economic history” might have profited from more robust contact with recent work in the history of technology, for its author, curiously, is concerned to divine “the shape of the normal historical path taken by technological progress . . . and its consequences” (p. 67). In the medieval portion, Bert Hall’s intellectual biography reviews Lynn White’s fascinating path to stressing the significance of “small things” (p. 87) and its links to cultural anthropology, and Richard Holt critically updates White’s “misleading” assessment of waterand windmills. Skillfullydone, these...