America by Design

by David F. Noble

Book Overview

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0394499832
• ISBN13: 9780394499833
• Release Date: May 1977
• Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
• Length: 384 Pages
• Weight: 1.40 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Thirty years later...still provocative

David noble observes that, despite so much apparent change, there is very little real change in American society. This contradiction he attributes to modern engineering that "under the name of management" (xxiv) changed the social order to meet the needs of corporate capitalism He sees the demands of technology as a causative factor in the relationship between capitalism and society. By arguing that the histories of technology and corporate capitalism are intertwined, Noble has received critical acclaim. Noble traces the social implications of technology from the last half of the eighteenth century to the 1920s. Engineers, he argues, came to view their responsibility for the human element in a technological enterprise as a process and, just as their objective was to advance technology for the highest profit, they strove to manage society for the same purpose. The book is divided into two parts. In the first, titled "The Wedding of Science to the Useful Arts," Noble attributes the beginnings of science based industry to the electrical and chemical industries that emerged in the late 1800s. General electric, AT & T, and Dupont set the pattern for applying science industrial applications and "corporate social production steadily became a conscious process...gaining both direction and momentum." (50) New colleges and technical schools produced trained engineers who eventually rose to become corporate leaders who perpetuated the process. Part two is titled "Corporate Reform as Conscious Social Production." Here Noble explains how engineers modified society to serve the goal of capital accumulation. Scientific standardization was the impetus to standardize human activity. Research laboratories, with their need for educated personnel, became a component of the corporate organization. In the engineers view "education was the critical process through which the human parts of the industrial apparatus could be fashioned for specifications." (168) Additionally, American patent law was modified to serve corporate needs. Multiple filings restricted competition and employee inventions became proprietary. Just as engineering streamlined production processes, Noble argues engineers sought to reshape American society to achieve maximum output. Modern management and society were created. Society was "designed" to maximize capital accumulation by the technological elite. Thus, according to Noble, notwithstanding that people see their world changing around them, society does not change commensurably. Nobel is not without his critics. Merritt Roe Smith praises Noble for "a thought-provoking and instructive study that sheds new light on technology as a social process" while noting his book is too "neat" for the "complexities of industrial development." (Reviewed in "The American Historical Review," June, 1978) Glenn Porter praises Noble's summary of secondary literature, but dismisses his thesis as "explicitly political," and only being "important among historia

A big capitalist conspiracy

In "America by Design", David Noble argues that the rise of technology is synonymous with the rise of corporate capitalism in America. Focusing on the period roughly between the 1880s and the end of the 1920s, the book examines how the discoveries of science began to be systematically applied by the "useful arts" of manufacturing for the purpose of increasing productivity and profits. This birth of technology began the process of a gradual change in America as the early corporate capitalists attempted to establish 20th century routine along lines that would satisfy the needs of the new "science-based" industries. As Noble chronicles the activities of these men (including Henry Pritchett, Hollis Godfrey, Frank Vanderlip, and Charles Steinmetz among others), I felt like he considered the history of American technology to be nothing more than a capitalist conspiracy to gain dominance of American society. Interestingly, however, Noble tells the reader at the outset that having a "consciousness of purpose" as these men had is not the same as a conspiracy. He unfortunately failed to explain why.Noble tells us that technology is not the driving force behind social change. Rather, technology merely offers the possibilities that are available; it is up to society to determine which of those possibilities are necessary for its own development. In this regard, a major theme of this book is the emergence of the engineer - that specialist who was able to reconcile the possibilities offered by science with the needs of corporate capitalism. The book describes the early efforts of these engineers to professionalize their status so that they could gain a monopoly over technological knowledge. As a result, from the beginning, progress in technology took on a distinctively corporate appearance. Unlike other professionals such as doctors and lawyers, however, the engineer was a "corporate animal" who did not have a professional identity beyond the corporation that employed him. Noble describes the uncertainties experienced by these early engineers as they attempted to find their new identity in American society.As the first generation of science-trained engineers climbed the corporate ladder into the ranks of management, management itself took on a scientific appearance. The book describes the evolution of modern management with its emphasis upon using psychology and the other social sciences to control the behavior of the worker. It was at this stage that the engineer turned from "the engineering of materials" to "the engineering of men".All in all, "America by Design" offers the reader a lot to think about. I will say that some parts of the book were a bit confusing to read, primarily because of the "alphabet soup" of councils, committees, associations, and societies that David Noble threw in to chronicle the organizing activities of the corporate reformers. Despite this, however, the book was still an eye-opener. I learned that a lot of things th