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Engineers for Change: Competing Visions of Technology in 1960s America

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An account of conflicts within engineering in the 1960s that helped shape our dominant contemporary understanding of technological change as the driver of history. In the late 1960s an eclectic group of engineers joined the antiwar and civil rights activists of the time in agitating for change. The engineers were fighting to remake their profession, challenging their fellow engineers to embrace a more humane vision of technology. In Engineers for Change, Matthew Wisnioski offers an account of this conflict within engineering, linking it to deep-seated assumptions about technology and American life. The postwar period in America saw a near-utopian belief in technology's beneficence. Beginning in the mid-1960s, however, society--influenced by the antitechnology writings of such thinkers as Jacques Ellul and Lewis Mumford--began to view technology in a more negative light. Engineers themselves were seen as conformist organization men propping up the military-industrial complex. A dissident minority of engineers offered critiques of their profession that appropriated concepts from technology's critics. These dissidents were criticized in turn by conservatives who regarded them as countercultural Luddites. And yet, as Wisnioski shows, the radical minority spurred the professional elite to promote a new understanding of technology as a rapidly accelerating force that our institutions are ill-equipped to handle. The negative consequences of technology spring from its very nature--and not from engineering's failures. "Sociotechnologists" were recruited to help society adjust to its technology. Wisnioski argues that in responding to the challenges posed by critics within their profession, engineers in the 1960s helped shape our dominant contemporary understanding of technological change as the driver of history.OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.

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Detail Information

Series Title

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Call Number

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Publisher

Cambridge, Massachusetts : The MIT Press., 2012

Collation

1 online resource (xvii, 286 pages) :illustrations.

Language

English

ISBN/ISSN

9780262305181

Classification

NONE

Content Type

text

Media Type

computer

Carrier Type

online resource

Edition

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Subject(s)

Technology
Technological forecasting

Specific Detail Info

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Statement of Responsibility

Matthew Wisnioski

Other Information

Cataloger

reva

Source

https://direct.mit.edu/books/monograph/3741/Engineers-for-ChangeCompeting-Visions-of

Validator

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Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/7978.001.0001

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Journal Issue

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