Age Of Mass Production Research Articles

Crafted for Mass Production: Imported Spinning Machinery on the Shop Floor, China, 1910s-1920s.

Craft and mechanization are often cast as antithetical. This article questions the facile distinction by examining the customization and modification of American spinning machines to China's diverse local conditions, especially its varieties of cotton. It draws on machine manuals and contracts, engineering textbooks and journals, and correspondence between an American machine firm and its engineers in Shanghai. Engaging with the revisionist scholarship of industrialization that highlights craft continuing into the age of mass production, as well as recent studies challenging Western- and inventioncentered narratives in the history of technology, this article argues that the skills and knowledge that Chinese users of foreign machines possessed were critical elements in mechanization. It establishes the "hand" and the "machine" as mutually constitutive categories on the factory floor, presenting Chinese engineers and technicians as active participants in the coconstruction of global spinning technologies.

Terroir and Tourism in the Age of Mass Production

The concept of terroir has an extensive history in France linking a multitude of agricultural products to climate, soil, and local knowledge. More recently, terroir is used in viticulture to emphasize the distinctiveness of wine with respect to regional natural and cultural resources and in so doing has become important to tourism. This article addresses terroir by pointing to its substantial virtues while unveiling its potential for mystification. In the age of mass production, terroir offers distinction, an essential attribute for touristic appeal. However, in its emphasis on climate and soil in the viticultural domain, terroir conceals important historical processes that in the end speak as much, if not more, to how we rank and regard wine. Moreover, the focus on natural conditions rather than those that are social also masks social relations that are embedded in class privilege and thus give the impression that wine has a life of its own independent of its historical and social contexts.

When the Real Ceases to Exist: Reading the Realm of the Hyperreal in Unni R.’s “Ozhivudivasathe Kali”

In the postmodern condition a sign does not indicate an underlying reality but other signs and thus the whole system becomes ‘simulation’. Jean Baudrillard the French sociologist, cultural critic and postmodern theorist, in his 1981 work Simulacra and Simulations discusses about what is usually known as ‘the loss of the real’. In the contemporary world the distinction between reality and illusion, surface and depth are completely lost. The media mediated world of reality that we perceive today is all a hyperreality. We confront illusions all around us and without which we feel unable to live. What we take in for granted is something that is created for the purpose of to be perceived. All these made up realities become texts as well. In an age of mass production, mass consumption and mass communication the terms ‘hyperreality’ and ‘simulation’ signify the virtual or unreal nature of the present day culture. Baudrillard’s philosophy centers on these concepts. It is a basic part of human existence to simulate, to imagine scenarios and possible outcomes.

'The Aura of Buddhist Material Objects in the Age of Mass-Production'

The article discusses material religion in a commercial setting and sets off this discussion with Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936). Benjamin argues that mechanical reproduction emancipated works of art from religious rituals and evaporated the aura of art. This has resonance among some Tibetan Buddhists in the context of mass-produced Buddhist material objects. Are such objects fit to be given as gifts, implemented in rituals, and worshipped on altars? Based upon ethnographic work at a Tibetan Buddhist market in urban China, the article argues that although objects manufactured in factories for profit are not made or handled according to Buddhist tradition, the aura can be produced in different ways and at different points of an object’s life.

The Force that Sustains

The Wooster Group performers create intermedial works by copying other performers on film through the aid of the monitors that are situated around them and the in-ear receivers they wear. The Wooster Group calls their 2003 production Poor Theatre ‘a series of simulacra’ – a copy without an original. Indeed, The Wooster Group performers are not really copying other performers. What they are looking at are recordings of performers that are transferred then flipped in reverse on the screen. Their scores are copies without originals. Even though the performers often use the word ‘copy’ in describing their technique, what they are trying to achieve is not an exact copy but to capture the soul of the performances; they inhabit the essences of the images they copy. To clarify, I am suggesting that, for example, when The Wooster Group performer Kate Valk copies Rena Mirecka as she sees her image and hears her voice in a video of Jerzy Grotowski’s Akropolis, she incorporates Mirecka’s body into her sensorium. The Wooster Group method is more than a technique for building scores, rehearsing, and performing. The company’s works are not mere representations; the performers acquire the power of the copied material to build a “relationship of perceptual, direct, ‘live’ communion”(Grotowski 2002:19) with the spectators; that is, the unique quality and “aura”(Benjamin 1968) of live performance that will resist its obsolescence in this age of mass production. In their work, theatricality becomes a force that enables a new kind of live performance, one that differentiates it from all of the other arts. I also argue that by involving digital media to achieve such heightened theatricality, The Wooster Group complicates the meaning of live, archival, and memory.

Dynamic experiences generated by sensory features through smart material driven design

Materials can be considered the interface of a product as they mediate between user, environment and object (Karana, Pedgley and Rognoli 2014). They characterize the physical world and generate a continuous flow of sensory interactions. In this age of mass production, engineers and designers are in a unique position to use the opportunities presented by materials development and apply them in creative ways to trigger meaningful user experiences.
 Dynamism is considered a very promising material experience in terms of creating meaningful interactions, and, consequently, user attachment to a product (Rognoli, Ferrara and Arquilla 2016). Dynamic products are those that show sensory features that change over time in a proactive and reversible way, activating one or more user’s sensory modalities and aiming at enhancing the user’s experience (Colombo 2016).
 Smart materials could be considered the most suitable candidates to provide dynamic experiences. They react to external stimuli, such as pressure, temperature or the electric field, changing properties such as shape or colour. They are capable of both sensing and responding to the environment, as well as exerting active control of their responses (Addington and Schodek 2004). Compared to understanding traditional materials, smart materials involve additional technical complexity.
 The aim of this paper is to share how the Material Driven Design (MDD) method (Karana et al. 2015) has been applied and to analyse a set of 10 projects, grouped into 5 case studies, developed by students from ELISAVA over the last 3 years to improve ways to implement the method. We have analysed the case studies in terms of the changes observed in the sensory features, using a sensory map proposed by Sara Colombo (Colombo 2016). By comparing different projects, the paper shows how the sensorial aspects are invoked by different smart material properties.
 The 5 case studies have integrated the smart materials into functional prototypes for different application sectors, such as healthcare, energy harvesting or fashion. We have found that only three sensory modalities (sound, sight and touch) were involved in the user experience, with sight being the most predominant sensory perception.
 This study aims to serve as a springboard for other scholars interested in designing dynamic products with smart materials.

The Gospel of Efficiency: Billy Sunday's Revival Bureaucracy and Evangelicalism in the Progressive Era

This essay investigates the roles of Billy Sunday's staff during his urban revivals in the 1910s, especially the committees and departments they administered. Understanding this revival organization is central to understanding Sunday's success. A corporate organization not only allowed Sunday's team to reach urban populations, it also put evangelicalism culturally in step with the times. This committee structure made outpourings of the Holy Spirit predictable and even guaranteed, and it helped Sunday create a revivalism for an age of mass production, one that was palatable to a cross-class and nationwide audience and reproducible in cities across the country. Most scholars of American religion are familiar with the outline of Sunday's career, but the labors of his staff and their contributions remain virtually unexplored. Further, there is a looming historiographical problem with how scholars treat Sunday. His most important years as a revivalist were in the 1910s, before the fundamentalist movement began, but his name is virtually synonymous with fundamentalism. This article challenges scholars to interpret Progressive Era evangelicals not in terms of what they became in the 1920s, but in terms of how they shaped and were shaped by an era of urbanization and consumer capitalism.

Redactionary Global Modernism: Kisses in Imperial Japan

Redactionary Global Modernism:Kisses in Imperial Japan Jonathan E. Abel (bio) Structuralism, Marxism, post-structuralism and the like are no longer the sexy topics they were. What is sexy instead is sex. On the wilder shores of academia, an interest in French philosophy has given way to a fascination with French kissing. —Terry Eagleton, After Theory Rodin’s “Kiss,” despite its realism, provides no libidinous thought. —André Bazin, “Marginal Notes on Eroticism in Cinema” I shall never forget my first experience in seeing kissing between man and woman. … I cannot express my feelings, but I could not help recalling what my mother said to me just before I started for America: “I have heard, my daughter, that it is the custom of foreign people to lick each other as dogs do.” —Sugimoto Inagaki Etsu, A Daughter of the Samurai (1926) At an exhibition of French modern art in Tokyo on May 31, 1924, Auguste Rodin’s Le Baiser (The Kiss) was confined to a “special room” and displayed behind a bamboo screen by order of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Headquarters.1 This reception of Rodin’s The Kiss in Japan is but one moment in the global offense taken, with the sculpture at the center of obscenity [End Page 201] battles nearly everywhere it went: in Brussels 1887, in Paris 1898, in Chicago 1893, in Lewes, England 1913, in Ottawa, Canada, 1919.2 As a moment in the world history of representations of the kiss more generally, Rodin in Japan serves to highlight several functions of the kiss in global modernity: the kiss connects individuals to others and to the world; the kiss is neither exclusively public nor private; the kiss often signifies through displacement and under erasure. The administration of Rodin’s The Kiss in Tokyo is a useful symbol of the modern story of the pregnant politics of proscribing public performances of sexual behavior in the center of metropoles in contrast to the overly sexualized liminal spaces in the peripheries of the city (such as 1920s Asakusa, where sex, stage, and screen shared a central role as similarly fringe cultures did in 1840s Monmartre, 1930s Alexanderplatz, and 1940s Times Square) and margins of empire. (At the far reaches of the Japanese empire “comfort women” would be expected to perform a public service far exceeding kisses, and as Japan itself would become a sexual center for the American military in the early postwar era.3) If kisses were part of a private world on the fringe of culture, they were also at the same time one of the many sites where the public discourse of the modern nation state (imperial or democratic) sought to influence its subjects. In Japan of the mid-1920s, even as Home Ministry censors began to crack down on cultural material featuring kissing, kissing could be read everywhere. The imperial state’s restrictions of access to and occasional suppression of images of the kiss allow us to see in stark relief not only the failure of a complete and absolute censorship in the age of mass production, but also how obscenity and sedition (the two main categories for censorship in modern Japan) were two sides of the same coin. As the kiss smacked of Zola-ist socialism in Paris, rubbed up against the tightly sealed prudish morals of Victorian England, and pecked at the bourgeois social fabric in Canada, the public kiss was glossed in Japan during the 1920s and 1930s as both the anarchic Western eroticism of ruthless capitalism and the cunning infiltration of Sovietism that could put the ruling classes in jeopardy. After censorship of kiss culture attempted to cultivate and maintain power for the imperial state, the assumption of this same power of the kiss was repurposed by the new regime of a “new Japan” under the Occupation. The history of the kiss in Japan is but one iteration of a world history of a redactionary modernism which both suppressed and publicized kissing. Of course, kisses mean different things as they travel across time and space; yet the kiss remains a convenient ontological flashpoint for comparisons of various acculturations within a wider framework of a “singular modernity.”4 And although, in terms...

ASMENS UGDYMO KLASTA POSTMODERNO AMŽIUJE: GYVAS AR MIRĘS KŪRYBIŠKUMAS?

Straipsnyje analizuojama kūrybiškumo ugdant konceptas, turinys ir perspektyvos, remiantis kelių filosofų: Bergsono, Dewey, Nietzsches, Deleuze’o įžvalgomis. Siekiama parodyti, kaip skirtingai ir kartu laikantis panašių prielaidų suprantama kūrybiškumo fenomeno kiltis ir jo realizavimo asmens lygiu galimybės. Atskleidžiama, kokia yra nesąmoningo instinkto ir, atvirkščiai, – racionalaus intelekto vieta plėtojant kūrybiškumą, kaip jie susiję su estetine intuicija. Tyrėjų įžvalgos aptariamos nūdienos tiražavimo epochos sąlygomis, kai kiekvienas naujas konceptas ir jo vertingas turinys paverčiamas tuščiu, bet gerai parduodamu ženklu (Joas). Remiantis kritinės pedagogikos teoretikais (Freire, McLaren, Giroux) atskleidžiama, kad ugdant kūrybiškumą šalia estetinio ir intuityvaus matmens labai svarbus yra kritiškumas, kuris leidžia atskirti tai, kas natūralu, nuo to, kas tiražuojama, ir nepaversti ugdomo asmens tuščių ženklų įgijimo mašina.

Leading the Future Organisation

The age of mass production with its requirement for high levels of controlled interaction is at an end. The outputs of large, relatively unqualified workforces can now be delivered more quickly and efficiently by technology. The organisation of the twenty first century displays very different characteristics from those of its twentieth century predecessor. The organisation of 2020 will be different again. As we move from the post-industrial age of the knowledge economy into what has been described as the conceptual age organisations are becoming progressively more loosely-knit, constantly reconfiguring entities where a premium is placed on the ability rapidly to adapt to changing competitive environments. Providing leadership to this amorphous entity will be quite a challenge but our models of leadership are still rooted largely in the industrial age and are inappropriate for our current needs, still less our future. Please note this paper was written before the sad death of Steve Jobs.

Coordination and Control in Corporate Networks: United States and Germany in Comparison, 1896-1938

In the late 19th century, a relatively dense network was created among the large public corporations. This corporate network is examined here for the period between 1896 and 1938 in Germany and the United States. Corporate networks served several purposes: they developed into a medium of self-control in managerially run companies; they became an instrument of bank control in capital-intensive companies; furthermore, they were institutions to regulate competition in the age of mass production. In Germany, the density and centralization of the corporate network increased parallel to the growing degree of cartelization within the economy (cooperative capitalism). In the United States, the density of the network decreased in relation to the extent that antitrust laws were enforced (competitive capitalism).

Follow the Image

New York artist Joy Garnett outlines her methods as a painter who works from sampled or found images. She discusses her relationship to her sources, which have included science photographs, declassified military and news media imagery. She describes the challenges she has encountered while working with different types of source material: from technical obstacles (invisible phenomena that require lenses and other optical devices) to socio-political mediation (government secrecy and the search for declassified imagery), to legal encumbrances (accusations of “piracy” and copyright infringement regarding a sampled image). Garnett explains her sense of the continued relevance and critical potential of art in light of these challenges, specifically the uses of painting in an age of mass production and digital technology.

1509 きさげ作業の遠隔技能伝承システムの構築 : 遠隔教育による技能伝承の試み(OS2 技能とマーケット創造)

The 20th century had been the age of products and the age of mass production and the heavy consumption. Engineers had been focusing their attention to produce better quality products in less time, with less cost and less resources. But such a business model of the 20th century is collapsing because of the change in the environment such as diversification of needs and intensification of an international competition. The 21st century is said the age of wisdom, and the creation of new value is requested. The accumulation of the technology and the skill for many years is indispensable to create new value. But hollowing out of industry and skill technician's aging, and lack of an heir caused a serious problem to the skill tradition. Then it paid attention to the distance learning for help of the skill traditional problem. The distance learning has the characteristics which can provide education for more talents beyond the time and the place. In this paper, it proposed the remote skill tradition system corresponding to the knowledge conversion process of the knowledge management as a method of skill tradition between remote places, and it constructed it.

Sociotechnical systems in an age of mass customization

Sociotechnical systems theory (STS) emerged as a design tool for democratizing work in an age of mass production. How should STS be re-thought for the age of mass customization? Linking mass customization to the task of building a learning organization, this article examines the case of redesign of a chemical pilot plant whose purpose was to test new equipment and methods for producing new compounds. The redesign brought into sharp relief the ways in which the changing role of the operator and the primary task of learning, leads us to reconsider such basic STS concepts as “autonomy”, “variance control”, and the redundancy of function. We present a new set of concepts and argue that they are more responsive to the challenges of designing learning organizations. We also suggest that the concept of “meaning” should replace the idea of autonomy to express the moral meaning of STS.

Cuban Sugar in the Age of Mass Production: Technology and the Economics of the Sugar Central, 1899-1929. By Alan Dye. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. Pp. xiii, 343. Illustrations. Notes. Index. $55.00 cloth.

Cuban Sugar in the Age of Mass Production: Technology and the Economics of the Sugar Central, 1899-1929. By Alan Dye. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. Pp. xiii, 343. Illustrations. Notes. Index. $55.00 cloth. - Volume 57 Issue 2

Cuban Sugar in the Age of Mass Production: Technology and the Economics of the Sugar Central, 1899–1929. By Allen Dye (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1998) 343 pp. $55.00

<i>Cuban Sugar in the Age of Mass Production: Technology and the Economics of the Sugar Central, 1899–1929</i>. By Allen Dye (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1998) 343 pp. $55.00

Cuban Sugar in the Age of Mass Production: Technology and the Economics of the Sugar Central, 1899–1929. By Alan Dye. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. Pp. vii, 343. $55.00.

Cuban Sugar in the Age of Mass Production: Technology and the Economics of the Sugar Central, 1899–1929. By Alan Dye. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. Pp. vii, 343. $55.00. - Volume 59 Issue 3

The Rational Factory: Architecture, Technology, and Work in America's Age of Mass Production. By Lindy Biggs (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. xiii plus 202pp. $39.95)

The Rational Factory: Architecture, Technology, and Work in America's Age of Mass Production. By Lindy Biggs (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. xiii plus 202pp. $39.95)

Cuban Sugar in the Age of Mass Production: Technology and the Economics of the Sugar Central, 1899-1929

Cuban Sugar in the Age of Mass Production: Technology and the Economics of the Sugar Central, 1899-1929

Book Reviews

Books reviewed in this article:Melville, Elinor G.K. (1997), A Plague of Sheep: Environmental Consequences of the Conquest of MexicoPérez, Louis A. Jr; (1998), The War of 1898: The United States and Cuba in History and Historiography.Topik, Steven C. and Wells, Allen (eds.) (1998), The Second Conquest of Latin America: Coffee, Henequen, and Oil during the Export Boom 1850–1930Berke, Phillip R. and Beatley, Timothy (1997), After the hurricane: linking recovery to sustainable development in the CaribbeanRandall, Stephen, J. and Mount, Graeme, S. (1998), The Caribbean Basin an international historyRichard Wilson (1995), Maya Resurgence in Guatemala: Q'eqchi' ExperiencesJudith N. Zur (1998). Violent Memories: Mayan War Widows in GuatemalaStillwaggon Eileen (1998), Stunted Lives, Stunted Economies: Poverty, Disease and UnderdevelopmentDye, Alan (1998), Cuban Sugar in the Age of Mass Production: Technology and the Economics of the Sugar Central, 1899–1929Dominguez Jorge, I. (1997), Democratic Politics in Latin America and the CaribbeanSimon, J. (1997), Endangered Mexico — An Environment on the EdgeTaylor, L. (1998), Citizenship, Participation and Democracy — Changing Dynamics in Chile and ArgentinaBantjes, Adrian A. (1998) As If Jesus Walked on Earth: Cardenismo, Sonora and the Mexican RevolutionCleary, Edward L. and Stewart‐Gambino, Elizabeth (eds.) (1997), Power, Politics and Pentecostals in Latin AmericaJohn Holloway and Eloina Peláez (eds) (1998), Zapatista! Reinventing Revolution in MexicoMarta Durán de Huerta Patiño and Massimo Boldrini (1998), Acteal: Navidad en el InflernoCarolina Mariá de Jesus (1997), I'm Going to Have a Little House: The Second Diary of Carolina Maria de Jesus: (Casa de Alvenaria: Diario de uma ex‐faveladaGordon, E. (1998), Disparate Diasporas: Identity and Politics in an African–Nicaraguan CommunityTobias, Hecht (1998), At Home In The Street: Street Children of Northeast BrazilDuncan, Green (1998), Hidden Lives: Voices of Children in Latin America and the CaribbeanTorres‐Saillant, S. (ed.) (1997), Caribbean Poetics: Toward an Aesthetic of West Indian LiteratureFolgarait, Leonard (1998), Mural Painting and Social Revolution in MexicoTaylor, Chris (1998), The Beautiful Game: a Journey Through Latin American FootballWilson, Larman C. and Dent, David W. (1998), Historical Dictionary of Inter‐American Organizations