Pub Date : 2019-07-03DOI: 10.1080/07341512.2019.1694250
Fred Schulze
ABSTRACT When urban planners from MIT and Harvard University began to design a new city in Venezuela in 1961, euphoria soon gave way to a skeptical appraisal of urban planning. Unrealistic ambitions, inadequate implementation, social tensions, and diverging interests by US American und Venezuelan experts complicated the building of Ciudad Guayana. The evolving city did not live up to initial expectations and remained a work in progress. Tracing the many voices involved including critics within the American team, helps understand the dynamics, challenges, and limitations of knowledge transfers in 1960s modernization programs. Scientific planning knowledge proved an unstable and less powerful commodity than Americans had expected. Problems on the ground took the gloss off the Western hegemonic scientific repertoire. They led to an appropriation of knowledge by Venezuelan experts who harnessed their US American counterparts to advance their own political aims.
{"title":"In search of El Dorado: U.S. experts and the promise of development in the Guayana region of Venezuela","authors":"Fred Schulze","doi":"10.1080/07341512.2019.1694250","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07341512.2019.1694250","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT When urban planners from MIT and Harvard University began to design a new city in Venezuela in 1961, euphoria soon gave way to a skeptical appraisal of urban planning. Unrealistic ambitions, inadequate implementation, social tensions, and diverging interests by US American und Venezuelan experts complicated the building of Ciudad Guayana. The evolving city did not live up to initial expectations and remained a work in progress. Tracing the many voices involved including critics within the American team, helps understand the dynamics, challenges, and limitations of knowledge transfers in 1960s modernization programs. Scientific planning knowledge proved an unstable and less powerful commodity than Americans had expected. Problems on the ground took the gloss off the Western hegemonic scientific repertoire. They led to an appropriation of knowledge by Venezuelan experts who harnessed their US American counterparts to advance their own political aims.","PeriodicalId":45996,"journal":{"name":"History and Technology","volume":"33 1","pages":"338 - 363"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2019-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73545270","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-07-03DOI: 10.1080/07341512.2019.1680143
Jessica Wang
ABSTRACT In the early Twentieth Century officials from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s experiment station in Honolulu and the territorial government’s Board of Commissioners of Agriculture and Forestry contemplated the agricultural tasks that they faced, they sought nothing less than wholesale biological management of the islands. Seed and plant introductions represented efforts to oversee botanical possibility, while quarantine and inspection regimes sought to contain the threat of issnvasive species. When unwanted insect travelers thwarted human oversight, the territorial government dispatched entomologists to distant places, particularly in other colonial regions of the world, to gather parasites that might combat insect pests. The different efforts to manage the island ecosystem in Hawai‘i reflected not just the biological basis of territorial rule, but also its embeddedness in intra-imperial, inter-imperial, and international relationships.
{"title":"Plants, insects, and the biological management of American empire: tropical agriculture in early twentieth-century Hawai‘i","authors":"Jessica Wang","doi":"10.1080/07341512.2019.1680143","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07341512.2019.1680143","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In the early Twentieth Century officials from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s experiment station in Honolulu and the territorial government’s Board of Commissioners of Agriculture and Forestry contemplated the agricultural tasks that they faced, they sought nothing less than wholesale biological management of the islands. Seed and plant introductions represented efforts to oversee botanical possibility, while quarantine and inspection regimes sought to contain the threat of issnvasive species. When unwanted insect travelers thwarted human oversight, the territorial government dispatched entomologists to distant places, particularly in other colonial regions of the world, to gather parasites that might combat insect pests. The different efforts to manage the island ecosystem in Hawai‘i reflected not just the biological basis of territorial rule, but also its embeddedness in intra-imperial, inter-imperial, and international relationships.","PeriodicalId":45996,"journal":{"name":"History and Technology","volume":"31 1","pages":"203 - 236"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2019-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85660736","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-07-03DOI: 10.1080/07341512.2019.1680156
V. Lagendijk
ABSTRACT This article revisits how plans for the development of the Southeast Asian river Mekong took the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) as a template. Existing literature focuses on the role of the United States administration, seeing their TVA-related activities as an internationalization of New Deal policies. This article, however, argues that the role of regional actors like the Mekong Committee, and of international organizations (IOs) such as the United Nations and the World Bank, was also essential. It shows that both regional actors as well as IOs cross-fertilized American knowledge with indigenous and colonial knowledge in plans for developing the Mekong.
{"title":"Streams of knowledge: river development knowledge and the TVA on the river Mekong","authors":"V. Lagendijk","doi":"10.1080/07341512.2019.1680156","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07341512.2019.1680156","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article revisits how plans for the development of the Southeast Asian river Mekong took the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) as a template. Existing literature focuses on the role of the United States administration, seeing their TVA-related activities as an internationalization of New Deal policies. This article, however, argues that the role of regional actors like the Mekong Committee, and of international organizations (IOs) such as the United Nations and the World Bank, was also essential. It shows that both regional actors as well as IOs cross-fertilized American knowledge with indigenous and colonial knowledge in plans for developing the Mekong.","PeriodicalId":45996,"journal":{"name":"History and Technology","volume":"36 1","pages":"316 - 337"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2019-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90072272","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-04-03DOI: 10.1080/07341512.2019.1652435
Coreen Mcguire
ABSTRACT The telephone in inter-war Britain was an important tool in both the identification and categorisation of individual hearing loss. Between 1912 and 1981, the British Post Office had control over a nationalised telephone system. Linkage between telephony and hearing has long been noted by historians of sound and science, and Post Office engineers in the inter-war period had considerable expertise in both telecommunications and hearing assistive devices. This article first demonstrates how the inter-war Post Office categorised different kinds of hearing loss through standardizing the capacity of its users to engage effectively with the telephone, and secondly investigates how successful it was in doing so. By utilising the substantial but little used material held by BT Archives, we can trace the development of the Post Office’s ‘telephone for deaf subscribers’ and explore how it was used to manage and standardise the variability of hearing and hearing loss within the telephone system.
{"title":"The categorisation of hearing loss through telephony in inter-war Britain","authors":"Coreen Mcguire","doi":"10.1080/07341512.2019.1652435","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07341512.2019.1652435","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The telephone in inter-war Britain was an important tool in both the identification and categorisation of individual hearing loss. Between 1912 and 1981, the British Post Office had control over a nationalised telephone system. Linkage between telephony and hearing has long been noted by historians of sound and science, and Post Office engineers in the inter-war period had considerable expertise in both telecommunications and hearing assistive devices. This article first demonstrates how the inter-war Post Office categorised different kinds of hearing loss through standardizing the capacity of its users to engage effectively with the telephone, and secondly investigates how successful it was in doing so. By utilising the substantial but little used material held by BT Archives, we can trace the development of the Post Office’s ‘telephone for deaf subscribers’ and explore how it was used to manage and standardise the variability of hearing and hearing loss within the telephone system.","PeriodicalId":45996,"journal":{"name":"History and Technology","volume":"42 1","pages":"138 - 155"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2019-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85226331","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-04-03DOI: 10.1080/07341512.2019.1652959
G. Balbi, Christiane Berth
This special issue aims to start a new phase in the historiography of the telephone. This medium has been approached narrowly both by scholars in media studies and technology and, when studied, mainly with a national, mono-medial, and mono-usage perspective. Significantly, histories of the telephone have been narrated as a series of national histories and so many transnational, regional or local histories were not considered. Although telephone networks were mainly controlled and regulated at the national level, transnational exchange always existed, for example through the activities of engineers’ networks, multinational firms, and international organizations. As well, while global history approaches have been applied to the history of the telegraph, for the telephone a similar debate is still missing. Geopolitically, telephone research has remained limited to Europe and North America. There is a scarcity of works dealing with Asian, African or Latin American experiences and a small number of studies on multinational companies and international experts’ networks. Secondly, the majority of telephone histories have focused on the telephone per se, without considering other media or technologies which were affected by and have affected the development of the telephone. There are of course exceptions; the work of Jon Agar on the history of the mobile telephone remains one of the best books on this subject, where the development of the mobile is located in a broader perspective in which the landline telephone, broadcasting and even rising digital media like the computer are included. Similarly, the telephone has been often seen as a tool to communicate at a distance from one point to another (a one-to-one medium) and this mono-usage perspective has obscured other, alternative histories of the telephone (this is what we call a mono-medial perspective). Indeed, the telephone has been also used as a one-to-many form of communication and, with the so called ‘circular telephone’, listeners could access information, entertainment and different genres via the telephone even before the spread of radio broadcasting. As well, histories of technologies-in-use have shown that social networks, tinkering, resistance and imagination changed both technologies and the character of social life. For example, the historian Ruth Schwartz Cowan introduced a focus on consumers’ perspectives and preferences. According to Cowan, consumers’ decision-making on technologies is embedded in a network of social relations, which she termed the ‘consumption junction’. In fact, this special issue demonstrates how numerous actors decided for or
{"title":"Towards a telephonic history of technology","authors":"G. Balbi, Christiane Berth","doi":"10.1080/07341512.2019.1652959","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07341512.2019.1652959","url":null,"abstract":"This special issue aims to start a new phase in the historiography of the telephone. This medium has been approached narrowly both by scholars in media studies and technology and, when studied, mainly with a national, mono-medial, and mono-usage perspective. Significantly, histories of the telephone have been narrated as a series of national histories and so many transnational, regional or local histories were not considered. Although telephone networks were mainly controlled and regulated at the national level, transnational exchange always existed, for example through the activities of engineers’ networks, multinational firms, and international organizations. As well, while global history approaches have been applied to the history of the telegraph, for the telephone a similar debate is still missing. Geopolitically, telephone research has remained limited to Europe and North America. There is a scarcity of works dealing with Asian, African or Latin American experiences and a small number of studies on multinational companies and international experts’ networks. Secondly, the majority of telephone histories have focused on the telephone per se, without considering other media or technologies which were affected by and have affected the development of the telephone. There are of course exceptions; the work of Jon Agar on the history of the mobile telephone remains one of the best books on this subject, where the development of the mobile is located in a broader perspective in which the landline telephone, broadcasting and even rising digital media like the computer are included. Similarly, the telephone has been often seen as a tool to communicate at a distance from one point to another (a one-to-one medium) and this mono-usage perspective has obscured other, alternative histories of the telephone (this is what we call a mono-medial perspective). Indeed, the telephone has been also used as a one-to-many form of communication and, with the so called ‘circular telephone’, listeners could access information, entertainment and different genres via the telephone even before the spread of radio broadcasting. As well, histories of technologies-in-use have shown that social networks, tinkering, resistance and imagination changed both technologies and the character of social life. For example, the historian Ruth Schwartz Cowan introduced a focus on consumers’ perspectives and preferences. According to Cowan, consumers’ decision-making on technologies is embedded in a network of social relations, which she termed the ‘consumption junction’. In fact, this special issue demonstrates how numerous actors decided for or","PeriodicalId":45996,"journal":{"name":"History and Technology","volume":"25 1","pages":"105 - 114"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2019-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72812272","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-04-03DOI: 10.1080/07341512.2019.1652432
P. Wasiak
ABSTRACT This article analyzes how software pirates who formed the ‘warez scene’ appropriated telephone network infrastructures and Bulletin Board System (or BBS) technology to circulate computer software across national borders. This paper is shedding more light on the roots of contemporary internet-based software piracy by investigating how appropriation of international telephone networks contributed to the globalization of digital software distribution. It also highlights the mundane aspects of the organization of media convergence on the junction between analog and digital technologies. Here I argue that the use of telephone networks as a means of transnational software distribution is an instance of actors setting up a convergent media environment driven by the cultural logic of a specific subculture. My paper provides an overview of BBS technology to demonstrate how it linked analog and digital domains and then outlines its cultural significance, ultimately discussing the appropriation of BBSes and their role in transnational expansion of ‘the scene’.
{"title":"Telephone networks, BBSes, and the emergence of the transnational ‘warez scene’","authors":"P. Wasiak","doi":"10.1080/07341512.2019.1652432","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07341512.2019.1652432","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article analyzes how software pirates who formed the ‘warez scene’ appropriated telephone network infrastructures and Bulletin Board System (or BBS) technology to circulate computer software across national borders. This paper is shedding more light on the roots of contemporary internet-based software piracy by investigating how appropriation of international telephone networks contributed to the globalization of digital software distribution. It also highlights the mundane aspects of the organization of media convergence on the junction between analog and digital technologies. Here I argue that the use of telephone networks as a means of transnational software distribution is an instance of actors setting up a convergent media environment driven by the cultural logic of a specific subculture. My paper provides an overview of BBS technology to demonstrate how it linked analog and digital domains and then outlines its cultural significance, ultimately discussing the appropriation of BBSes and their role in transnational expansion of ‘the scene’.","PeriodicalId":45996,"journal":{"name":"History and Technology","volume":"32 1","pages":"177 - 194"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2019-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75783771","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-04-03DOI: 10.1080/07341512.2019.1652960
Richard R. John, Léonard Laborie
ABSTRACT This essay contends that the US Signal Corps’ wartime network had major consequences for the postwar development of the political economy of the telephone in the United States, France, and Europe. Our approach is transnational. In contrast to previous scholarship, which is mostly top-down, nation-centric, and preoccupied with the internal configuration of telephone networks that are typically studied inside the walls of discrete national containers, we widen the lens to explore a broad array of influences on network evolution, including those that originated from within individual operating companies and beyond national borders. Among the themes that we explore is transnational standard-setting. And among the agents of change that we emphasize is the influence of military conflict on personal networks, technical protocols, and international organizations. From such a vantage point, the First World War emerges as a constitutive moment in the making of the information infrastructure in the modern world.
{"title":"‘Circuits of Victory’: how the First World War shaped the political economy of the telephone in the United States and France","authors":"Richard R. John, Léonard Laborie","doi":"10.1080/07341512.2019.1652960","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07341512.2019.1652960","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This essay contends that the US Signal Corps’ wartime network had major consequences for the postwar development of the political economy of the telephone in the United States, France, and Europe. Our approach is transnational. In contrast to previous scholarship, which is mostly top-down, nation-centric, and preoccupied with the internal configuration of telephone networks that are typically studied inside the walls of discrete national containers, we widen the lens to explore a broad array of influences on network evolution, including those that originated from within individual operating companies and beyond national borders. Among the themes that we explore is transnational standard-setting. And among the agents of change that we emphasize is the influence of military conflict on personal networks, technical protocols, and international organizations. From such a vantage point, the First World War emerges as a constitutive moment in the making of the information infrastructure in the modern world.","PeriodicalId":45996,"journal":{"name":"History and Technology","volume":"9 1","pages":"115 - 137"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2019-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82106466","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-04-03DOI: 10.1080/07341512.2019.1652434
H. Weber
ABSTRACT In the 1970s and 1980s, Citizen Band (CB) radio users explored novel mobile, fluid and network-based forms of wireless communication. This article describes the case of West Germany and places the appropriation of CB radio in its inter-medial and inter-technological contexts. Many CB radio users invented creative uses for the medium, and an engaged and predominantly male subgroup of CB radio amateurs even defined CB as participatory ‘civic radio’. In an increasingly mobile society, CB radio helped people to stay in touch with each other and to micro-coordinate their everyday lives with friends and family. This multi-dimensional analysis of CB radio use also provides a corrective to the standard narrative of a ‘mobile’ revolution that took place around the turn of the millennium, triggered by cell phones and social media applications. Mobile communication culture has a longer history, and CB radio constitutes an essential part of it.
{"title":"Everyman’s radio-telephone: how CB radio users mobilized West Germany’s communication culture","authors":"H. Weber","doi":"10.1080/07341512.2019.1652434","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07341512.2019.1652434","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In the 1970s and 1980s, Citizen Band (CB) radio users explored novel mobile, fluid and network-based forms of wireless communication. This article describes the case of West Germany and places the appropriation of CB radio in its inter-medial and inter-technological contexts. Many CB radio users invented creative uses for the medium, and an engaged and predominantly male subgroup of CB radio amateurs even defined CB as participatory ‘civic radio’. In an increasingly mobile society, CB radio helped people to stay in touch with each other and to micro-coordinate their everyday lives with friends and family. This multi-dimensional analysis of CB radio use also provides a corrective to the standard narrative of a ‘mobile’ revolution that took place around the turn of the millennium, triggered by cell phones and social media applications. Mobile communication culture has a longer history, and CB radio constitutes an essential part of it.","PeriodicalId":45996,"journal":{"name":"History and Technology","volume":"90 1","pages":"156 - 176"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2019-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83963007","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-01-02DOI: 10.1080/07341512.2019.1608082
E. Ash
ABSTRACT The idea of expertise in early modern Europe has attracted significant attention from historians of science and technology in recent years. Some find the term useful in describing the rise of a productive and flexible combination of practical and theoretical knowledge, for which a contemporary word did not yet exist. Others criticize the term as a pernicious anachronism that not only distorts our understanding of the pre-modern past, but also serves to promote a neo-modernization theory of the history of early industrialization. The goal of this article is to ask whether an admittedly anachronistic term such as ‘expertise’ can be a useful and illuminating concept in studying early modern history; whether it can do so without warping our view of the past beyond recognition; and whether it can be decoupled from current versions of modernization theory and other whiggish historical notions.
{"title":"By any other name: early modern expertise and the problem of anachronism","authors":"E. Ash","doi":"10.1080/07341512.2019.1608082","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07341512.2019.1608082","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The idea of expertise in early modern Europe has attracted significant attention from historians of science and technology in recent years. Some find the term useful in describing the rise of a productive and flexible combination of practical and theoretical knowledge, for which a contemporary word did not yet exist. Others criticize the term as a pernicious anachronism that not only distorts our understanding of the pre-modern past, but also serves to promote a neo-modernization theory of the history of early industrialization. The goal of this article is to ask whether an admittedly anachronistic term such as ‘expertise’ can be a useful and illuminating concept in studying early modern history; whether it can do so without warping our view of the past beyond recognition; and whether it can be decoupled from current versions of modernization theory and other whiggish historical notions.","PeriodicalId":45996,"journal":{"name":"History and Technology","volume":"46 1","pages":"3 - 30"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2019-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90638968","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-01-02DOI: 10.1080/07341512.2019.1621424
I. Paris
ABSTRACT The impact of Frederick Taylor’s theories upon household management was dramatic. Terms such as efficiency and scientific management had already become commonplace amongst US home economists during the first decade of the twentieth century, but precisely the fact that these principles were applied so quickly to the complex working environment of the home shows that it was an environment which was ready to receive such ideas. This article seeks to show how the domestic context had already undergone profound change in that direction in the second half of the 1800s, primarily thanks to the work of Home Economics theorists such as Catharine Beecher. Her approach was characterized by an efficiency-oriented push, which aimed to save labor and space by reorganizing both. These changes also involved the concept of comfort and the structure of the American middle-class home, thus preparing the ground for many of the changes which became fully consolidated during the 1900s.
{"title":"Between efficiency and comfort: the organization of domestic work and space from home economics to scientific management, 1841–1913","authors":"I. Paris","doi":"10.1080/07341512.2019.1621424","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07341512.2019.1621424","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The impact of Frederick Taylor’s theories upon household management was dramatic. Terms such as efficiency and scientific management had already become commonplace amongst US home economists during the first decade of the twentieth century, but precisely the fact that these principles were applied so quickly to the complex working environment of the home shows that it was an environment which was ready to receive such ideas. This article seeks to show how the domestic context had already undergone profound change in that direction in the second half of the 1800s, primarily thanks to the work of Home Economics theorists such as Catharine Beecher. Her approach was characterized by an efficiency-oriented push, which aimed to save labor and space by reorganizing both. These changes also involved the concept of comfort and the structure of the American middle-class home, thus preparing the ground for many of the changes which became fully consolidated during the 1900s.","PeriodicalId":45996,"journal":{"name":"History and Technology","volume":"67 1","pages":"104 - 81"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2019-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75966345","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
京公网安备 11010802042870号
京ICP备2023020795号-1
扫码关注我们
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：