TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 481 Hunt’s article “ ‘Practice vs. Theory’: The British Electrical Debate, 1888—1891” {Isis 74 [1983]: 341—55) or Thomas Hughes’s Networks ofPower (Baltimore, 1983). More seriously, Reader does not make use of A. Michal McMahon’s The Making of a Profession: A Century of Elec trical Engineering in America (New York, 1984). There are a number of nice parallels between McMahon’s account of the evolution of the American electrical engineering societies and Reader’s account of the evolution of those in Britain; for example, the issue of how to deal with electrophysicists in a professional engineering organization. Reader’s account would have profited by bringing in comparative material. Terry S. Reynolds Dr. Reynolds, a professor in the Science, Technology, and Society Program at Michigan Technological University, is the author of a history of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers and of Sault Ste. Marie (1982), a history of one of the early largescale hydroelectric plants in the United States. Monopoly’s Moment: The Organization and Regulation ofCanadian Utilities, 1830—1930. By Christopher Armstrong and Η. V. Nelles. Phila delphia: Temple University Press, 1986. Pp. xvii + 393; tables, notes, index. $34.95. The title confuses. Monopoly’s actual “moment” can be found either at the point in the 1890s when corporate enterprise was largely un challenged by governments or unions (p. 324) or after 1905 in the challenge itself, “. . . when powerful popular and financial interests struggled over the regulation of monopoly. . .” (p. 7). In fact, this fine book, with the unfortunate if alliterative title, is about both monopoly building and control. And it is not about a moment (or moments) but about a process, one, as the subtitle indicates, that occurred over a period of 100 years. This process is identified in a case-by-case and place-by-place study of Canadian utilities: their growth, consolidation, and, especially, reg ulation. The book sets out a Canadian version of a North Atlantic phenomenon, one in which technological innovation and new man agement practices were enfolded into the corporate business form, a form that in turn profoundly disturbed the social and political equi librium of many Western nations. In Canada, equilibrium was recovered in a manner that reflected Canadian practices, values, and systems. That is to say, efforts at con trol ran the gamut from public ownership (Ontario Hydro and Prairie telephones) to practically untrammeled private enterprise (B. C. Elec tric). Canada used both regulation, “the distinctively American ap proach to balancing public and private interests” (as Louis Galambos and Joseph Pratt put it in The Rise of the Corporate Commonwealth: U.S. 482 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Business and Public Policy in the Twentieth Century [New York, 1988]), and public ownership, more typically European. The peculiarly Ca nadian fix on control of utility monopoly, say Christopher Armstrong and H. V. Nelles in their final assertion, “was a conviction that com munity property could be managed with equal satisfaction and legit imacy by both public and private agencies” (p. 328), though their evidence points to both predisposition and experience as leading to such a conviction, not just the latter. Monopoly’s Moment, then, is not primarily a study ofeither technology or business. But assumptions about both inform the text, and the in terplay of technology and culture is central. Nathan Rosenberg’s no tions of technology as contributing to socioeconomic disequilibrium appear to be the operating assumption applied to both new technology and to the corporate forms in which it becomes embedded. Likewise, the Chandler, Galambos, et al. school clearly informs the business side of the book. And in both respects, Armstrong and Nelles are squarely in the liberal consensus school of Canadian history: the disequilibrium created by technology or monopoly is recovered without seriously al tering fundamental forms and relationships. In this area, the authors are not prepared to go even so far as Galambos and Pratt, who see out of the effect of the corporate phenomenon the emergence of a new American “Corporate Commonwealth,” or so far as William H. McNeill, who perceives in Europe and North America a new planned and bu reaucratic order. Even less are they prepared to follow...