TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 187 Arbeit und Macht im Hilttenwerk: Arbeits- und industrielle Beziehungen in der deutschen und amerikanischen Eisen- und Stahlindustrie von den 1860er bis zu den 1930erJahren. By Thomas Welskopp. Bonn: Dietz Nachfolger, 1994. Pp. 799; tables, notes, bibliography, index. DM 138.00. All those patient enough to read this thick book in its entirety will not fail to find material pertinent to their interests. Labor historians will find descriptions of union organization. Business historians will find graceful accounts of corporate structure informed by a rare sen sitivity to factory-floor supervision. Cultural historians will find rough speech and colorful anecdotes in rich portraits of everyday life. Histo rians of gender will find out how steelwork became known as a “mansize job” (p. 520) and how women’s domestic work conformed to its diurnal rhythms of production. Most salient for historians of technology, Thomas Welskopp has taken pains to root his analysis in the technical systems of steel pro duction. He divides his book into three main sections, each describing an epoch of sweeping industrial change. First come the origins of steady-flow production of iron (1860—80) in puddling mills, which were yoked in linear arrangements to blast furnaces. Second, in the 1880s, big centralized mills began to shove these aside. By coupling the Thomas, Bessemer, or Siemens-Martin processes to partially mechanized rolling mills, companies like Krupp and Carnegie first achieved fast, large-volume production of steel. Third, the technolog ical basis of the steel industry shifted again at the turn of the century when mills electrically automated transport work (formerly done by hand, as illustrated by Frederick Taylor’s famous Schmidt) and, so doing, made output greater, more flexible, and decentralized. Recently, German historians of technology such as Wolfgang Konig and Joachim Radkau have sought narratives that periodize history according to technological epochs, and Welskopp may be doing the same. Perhaps the most widely known schematic of this kind is Lewis Mumford’s periodization according to prime movers, raw materials, and energy resources. Like Mumford, Welskopp’s eras are universal in the sense that they apply equally to Yankee Pennsylvania and the German Ruhr. It is his implicit claim that the nature of the capitalintensive technology needed to make steel—a largely homogeneous, producer commodity—defined the industry more than national styles. Steel firms reaped their profits in marginal gains on huge turn overs in a viciously competitive world market. To stay solvent, they had to adjust swiftly to even small technological advantages of speed, volume production, or cost reduction. This channeled the industry in a relatively uniform developmental track. Is this, then, technological determinism? The answer is clearly no. If Welskopp’s three epochs are defined by technological systems, he names them according to the style of labor and management neces 188 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE sary to control them. All the complexities that human beings can muster play their part: cultural attitudes, ethnicity, personality, as well as macroeconomics, unions, and managerial hierarchy. Puddling is presented as the “team system” in which two or three workers followed a highly skilled master craftsman at each work station. The advent of high-speed, large-volume steel processing is called the “drive system” after the masses of work gangs “driven” to feed the tempo of the machines. Last, fully mechanized flexible production is called the “crew system,” in which highly skilled machine tenders, working as peers, replaced the barking foremen who had lorded over unskilled gangs. In each epoch industrial change was spurred by the need to overcome limitations of both human and technolog ical organization. The mills in Welskopp’s book are living systems. Technology and working communities form a kind of snake gnash ing its own tail. Neither end escapes or captures the other. If Mum ford chose categories of prime movers, energy, and raw materials, Welskopp shows that human organization is equally definitive of tech nological eras. If there is a weakness here it is the lack of visual presentation. It is hard to overstate the importance Welskopp attaches to factory lay out or to the precise place and moment in which people engage their skills to control the whole. Although his...