everything.study
STS.462

Social and Political Implications of Technology

Graduate · Historical course

Spring 2006

This course is a graduate reading seminar, in which historical and contemporary studies are used to explore the interaction of technology with social and political values. Emphasis is on how technological devices, structures, and systems influence the organization of society and the behavior of its members. Examples are drawn from the technologies of war, transportation, communication, production, and reproduction.

Readings

  • Mumford. Technics and Civilization . pp. 3-106.
    Listed reading
  • Cronon. Nature’s Metropolis. (Complete)
    Listed reading
  • LEC #: 5 · READINGS: Reading period (class does not meet)
    Reading assignment
  • Aitken. Taylorism . (Complete)
    Listed reading
  • LEC #: 7 · READINGS: Fritzsche. Nation of Fliers . (Complete)
    Reading assignment
  • Nye. Electrifying America . (Complete)
    Listed reading
  • Russell. War and Nature . (Complete)
    Listed reading
  • LEC #: 11 · READINGS: Reading period (class does not meet)
    Reading assignment
  • MacKenzie. Inventing Accuracy . (Complete)
    Listed reading
  • LEC #: 13 · READINGS: Reading period (class does not meet)
    Reading assignment
  • LEC #: 14 · READINGS: Maines. Asbestos and Fire . (Complete)
    Reading assignment
  • Smith, Merritt Roe, and Gregory Clancey, eds. Major Problems in the History of American Technology . Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1997. ISBN: 9780669354720.
    Listed reading
  • Mumford, Lewis. Technics and Civilization . San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace, 1963. ISBN: 9780156882545.
    Listed reading
  • Cronon, W. Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West . New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 1992. ISBN: 9780393308730.
    Listed reading
  • Aitken, H. G. J. Scientific Management in Action: Taylorism at the Watertown Arsenal, 1908-1915 . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985. ISBN: 9780691042411.
    Listed reading
  • Fritzsche, Peter. A Nation of Fliers: German Aviation and the Popular Imagination . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994. ISBN: 9780674601222.
    Listed reading
  • Buy at MIT Press Nye, David. Electrifying America . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992. ISBN: 9780262640305. ↗
    Listed reading
  • Russell, Edmund. War and Nature: Fighting Humans and Insects with Chemicals from World War I to Silent Spring . New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2001. ISBN: 9780521799379.
    Listed reading
  • Buy at MIT Press MacKenzie, Donald. Inventing Accuracy: An Historical Sociology of Nuclear Missile Guidance . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993. ISBN: 9780262631471. ↗
    Listed reading
  • Maines, Rachel. Asbestos and Fire: Technological Tradeoffs and the Body at Risk . Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005. ISBN: 9780813535753.
    Listed reading
  • Marx, Leo. “Technology: The Emergence of a Hazardous Concept.” Social Research 64, no. 3 (Fall 1997): 965-88.
    Listed reading
  • Mumford, Lewis. “Authoritarian and Democratic Technics.” Technology and Culture 5 (Winter 1964): 1-8.
    Listed reading
  • Lipartito, Kenneth. “The Historian in the Rose Garden.” Technology and Culture 41 (July 2000): 537-48.
    Listed reading
  • ———. “When Women Were Switches: Technology, Work, and Gender in the Telephone Industry, 1890-1920.” American Historical Review 99 (October 1994): 1074-1111.
    Listed reading
  • Thompson, Edward P. “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism.” Past and Present 38 (1967): 56-97. [Also reprinted in Thompson’s book, Customs in Common (1992).]
    Listed reading
  • Gutman, Herbert. “Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America, 1815-1919.” American Historical Review 78, no. 3 (June 1973): 531-88. [Also reprinted in Gutman’s book, Work, Culture, and Society (1976).]
    Listed reading
  • Cowan, Ruth S. “The ‘Industrial Revolution’ in the Home: Household Technology and Social Change in the 20 th century.” Technology and Culture 17, no. 1 (January 1976): 1-24.
    Listed reading
  • Buy at MIT Press ———. “The Consumption Junction.” In The Social Construction of Technological Systems . Edited by Wiebe Bijker, Thomas Hughes, and Trevor Pinch. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987. ISBN: 9780262022620. ↗
    Listed reading
  • McGaw, Judith A. “No Passive Victims, No Separate Spheres: A Feminist Perspective on Technology’s History.” In In Context: History and the History of Technology . Edited by Stephen H. Cutcliffe and Robert C. Post. Cranbury, NJ: Lehigh University Press, 1989. ISBN: 9780934223034.
    Listed reading
  • Noble, David F. “Social Choice in Machine Design.” In Case Studies on the Labor Process . Edited by Andrew Zimbalist. New York, NY: Monthly Review Press, 1981. ISBN: 9780853455196.
    Listed reading
Sources