David F. Noble - America by Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism

This is a Borzoi Book
Published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
Copyright 1977 by David F. Noble
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Noble, David F.
America by design.
1. TechnologySocial aspectsUnited States. 2. United StatesHistory. 3. Production (Economic theory). 4. Capitalism. 5. Science and industryUnited States. I. Title.
T14.5.N6 301.243 76-47928
eISBN: 978-0-307-82849-1
v3.1

For Ched

The gains in technics are never registered automatically in society; they require equally adroit inventions and adaptations in politics; and the careless habit of attributing to mechanical improvements a direct role as instruments of culture and civilization puts a demand upon the machine to which it cannot respond.

No matter how completely technics relies upon the objective procedures of the sciences, it does not form an independent system, like the universe; it exists as an element in human culture and it promises well or ill as the social groups that exploit it promise well or ill. The machine itself makes no demands and holds out no promises: it is the human spirit that makes demands and keeps promises.

Lewis Mumford,
Technics and Civilization

The notion of technological determinism has dominated popular understanding of the industrial revolution. Changes in technology are assumed to have been the principal cause of industrialization, and the whole process is seen purely as a technological revolution. Yet new inventions, new processes, and new applications of scientific discoveries do not in themselves dictate changes in production. Unless accompanied by changes in social relations, especially in the organization of labor, technological changes tend to be absorbed into existing social structures; far from revolutionizing society, they merely reinforce the existing distribution of power and privilege.

In the Middle Ages, technical improvements such as the horse collar, the windmill, and the sawmill did not revolutionize production or weaken the domination of the feudal nobility. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, on the other hand, technological changes did have a revolutionary effect because they were part of a political and social revolutionthe overthrow of arbitrary authority, the destruction of mercantilist restraints on trade, the emergence of a landless proletariat, and the separation of the worker from his tools. These upheavals laid the basis of the factory system, rendered handicraft production obsolete, and surrounded the new mode of manufacture with a political climate highly conducive to its development.

The second phase of industrial developmentthe subject of the present study by David F. Noblebegan to unfold when the capitalist, having expropriated the workers property, gradually expropriated his technical knowledge as well, asserting his own mastery over production. Before the fruits of modern science could be applied to industrial production, the work process had to be split up into hundreds of separate operations performed by workers who no longer understood the relation of one operation to another, and who therefore exercised no control over the process. Social innovation thus laid the basis for technical innovation, and the pioneers of industrial technology played a central role in social engineering as well.

It is for these reasons that Noble insists that technology has to be seen as social production, and the professional engineer as an expert not only in applied science but in the management of social relations. Noble shows how the engineering profession emerged from the workshop and the school, how the school culture wing of the profession succeeded in making academic credentials the prerequisite of admission, and how academically trained engineers replaced rule-of-thumb methods with esoteric knowledge over which they themselves had established a monopoly. The professionalization of engineering and the establishment of engineering education as a recognized branch of higher learning forged a link between the corporation and the university that remains unbroken to this day. The corporation thus shifted to the university, an institution partly or wholly financed by the state, such secondary costs of production as personnel training and basic research. Early experiments with in-house research and personnel training, especially in the electrical industry, came under rising criticism and gradually gave way to a cooperative movement in which, as at Antioch, academic and industrial training were combinedthis being itself merely an intermediate step toward the full-fledged assumption of industrial responsibilities by the modern multiversity.

The expropriation of the workers technical knowledge had as a logical consequence the growth of modern management, in which technical knowledge now came to be concentrated. As the scientific management movement split up production into its component procedures, reducing the worker to an appendage of the machine, a great expansion of technical and supervisory personnel took place in order to oversee the productive process as a whole. The old-style entrepreneur, who carried most of his firms operations in his head, gave way to the university-trained industrial manager, often an engineer. Nobles analysis of the movement of engineers into management undercuts any temptation to see engineers and managers as distinct strata. The engineers failed to develop a point of view of their own, as Veblen had hoped when he predicted that the managers quest for profits would increasingly conflict with the engineers devotion to technical efficiency. Instead, the engineers placed their expertise at the service of a productive system efficient in its details but supremely wasteful and irrational in its general tendency.

The industrial systems dependence on military spending and war provides the clearest indication of its overriding irrationality. It is significant that, as Noble shows, engineers regarded the First World War not as a disaster for civilization but as a unique opportunity to put their ideas into practiceto bring the corporations, the universities, and the state into closer partnership. Without moralizing, Noble paints a vivid picture of the unreality of the war which these men fought and the strange lighthearted spirit in which they perceived its horrors; the development of this cult of war is perhaps the most telling indictment of the productive system over which they presided.