Download or read book New Profession Old Order written by Kees Gispen and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2002-07-25 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New Profession, Old Order explores the creative tension between modern technology and preindustrial Germany. It offers an explanation of why the engineering profession is so successful in transforming the physical world, did not achieve the professional power, cohesion, and prestige that its technological accomplishments would seem to have warranted.
Download or read book Broadcasting Fidelity written by Myles W. Jackson and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2024-09-17 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A landmark history of early radio in Germany and the quest for broadcast fidelity When we turn on a radio or stream a playlist, we can usually recognize the instrument we hear, whether it’s a cello, a guitar, or an operatic voice. Such fidelity was not always true of radio. Broadcasting Fidelity shows how the problem of broadcast fidelity pushed German scientists beyond the traditional bounds of their disciplines and led to the creation of one of the most important electronic instruments of the twentieth century. In the early days of radio, acoustical distortions made it hard for even the most discerning musical ears to differentiate instruments and voices. The physicists and engineers of interwar Germany, with the assistance of leading composers and musicians, tackled this daunting technical challenge. Research led to the invention in 1930 of the trautonium, an early electronic instrument capable of imitating the timbres of numerous acoustical instruments and generating novel sounds for many musical genres. Myles Jackson charts the broader political and artistic trajectories of this instrument, tracing how it was embraced by the Nazis and subsequently used to subvert Nazi aesthetics after the war and describing how Alfred Hitchcock commissioned a later version of the trautonium to provide the sounds of birds squawking and flapping their wings in his 1963 thriller The Birds. A splendid work of scholarship by an acclaimed historian of science, Broadcasting Fidelity reveals how the interplay of science, technology, politics, and culture gave rise to new aesthetic concepts, innovative musical genres, and the modern discipline of electroacoustics.
Download or read book Death of the Guilds written by Elliott A. Krause and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1999-02-08 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An analysis of the autonomy and leverage of modern professional groups - medicine, law, university teaching, engineering - in the US and Europe. Finding that each group has experienced a decline in its power, it considers the implications for professionals and those they serve.
Download or read book The Radio Hobby Private Associations and the Challenge of Modernity in Germany written by Bruce B. Campbell and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2019-10-18 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the early twentieth century, the magic of radio was new, revolutionary, and poorly understood. A powerful symbol of modernity, radio was a site where individuals wrestled and came to terms with an often frightening wave of new mass technologies. Radio was the object of scientific investigation, but more importantly, it was the domain of tinkerers, “hackers,” citizen scientists, and hobbyists. This book shows how this wild and mysterious technology was appropriated by ordinary individuals in Germany in the first half of the twentieth century as a leisure activity. Clubs and hobby organizations became the locus of this process, providing many of the social structures within which individuals could come to grips with radio, apart from any media institution or government framework. In so doing, this book uncovers the vital but often overlooked social context in which technological revolutions unfold.
Download or read book Clinical Psychiatry in Imperial Germany written by Eric J. Engstrom and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-07-05 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The psychiatric profession in Germany changed radically from the mid-nineteenth century to the beginning of World War I. In a book that demonstrates his extensive archival knowledge and an impressive command of the primary literature, Eric J. Engstrom investigates the history of university psychiatric clinics in Imperial Germany from 1867 to 1914, emphasizing the clinical practices and professional debates surrounding the development of these institutions and their impact on the course of German psychiatry.The rise of university psychiatric clinics reflects, Engstrom tells us, a shift not only in asylum culture, but also in the ways in which social, political, and economic issues deeply influenced the practice of psychiatry. Equally convincing is Engstrom's argument that psychiatrists were responding to and working to shape the rapidly changing perceptions of madness in Imperial Germany. In a series of case studies, the book focuses on a number of important clinical spaces such as the laboratory, the ward, the lecture hall, and the polyclinic. Engstrom argues that within these spaces clinics developed their own disciplinary economies and that their emergence was inseparably intertwined with jurisdictional contests between competing scientific, administrative, didactic, and sociopolitical agendas.
Download or read book Engineering Labour written by Peter Meiksins and published by Verso. This book was released on 1996-08-17 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Engineers, often perceived as central agents of industrial capitalism, are thought to be the same in all capitalist societies, occupying roughly the same social status and performing similar functions in the capitalist enterprise. What the essays in this volume reveal, however, is that engineers are trained and organized quite distinctly in different national contexts. The book includes case studies of engineers in six major industrial economies: Japan, France, Germany, Sweden, Britain and the United States. Through a comparison of these six cases, the authors develop an approach to national differences which both retains the place of historical diversity in the experience of capitalism and accommodates the forces of convergence from increasing globalisation and economic integration. Contributions from: Boel Berner, Stephen Crawford, Kees Gispen, Kevin McCormick and Peter Whalley.
Download or read book Professional Men Professional Women written by Maria Malatesta and published by SAGE Publications. This book was released on 2010-12-29 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Published in association with the International Sociological Association, and part of the SAGE Studies in International Sociology series, this is a detailed and critical exploration of the history of professionalization in Europe.
Download or read book Professionalism the Third Logic written by Eliot Freidson and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2001-06 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This new work explores the meaning and implications of professionalism as a form of social organization. Eliot Freidson formalizes professionalism by treating it as an ideal type grounded in the political economy; he presents the concept as a third logic, or a more viable alternative to consumerism and bureaucracy. He asks us to imagine a world where workers with specialized knowledge and the ability to provide society with especially important services can organize and control their own work, without directives from management or the influence of free markets. Freidson then appraises the present status of professionalism, exploring how traditional and national variations in state policy and organization are influencing the power and practice of such professions as medicine and law. Widespread attacks by neoclassical economists and populists, he contends, are obscuring the social value of credentialism and monopolies. The institutions that sustain professionalism in our world are simply too useful to both capital and state to dismiss.
Download or read book Respectability as Moral Map and Public Discourse in the Nineteenth Century written by Woodruff D. Smith and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-20 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite the fact that respectability is universally recognized as a feature of nineteenth-century society, it has seldom been studied as a subject in itself. In this path-breaking book, Woodruff D. Smith interprets respectability as a highly significant cultural phenomenon, incorporating both a moral imaginary or map and a distinctive discourse. Respectability was constructed in the public spheres of Europe and the Americas and eventually came to be an aspect of social life throughout the world. From its origins in the late eighteenth century, it was a conscious response to what were perceived as undesirable aspects of modernity. It became a central feature of concepts of "the modern" itself and an essential part of the processes that, in the twentieth century, came to be called modernization and cultural globalization. Respectability – though typically associated with the bourgeoisie – existed independently of any particular social class, and strongly affected modern constructions of class in general and of gender. Although not an ideology, respectability was overtly embedded in several political discourses, especially those of movements such as antislavery which claimed to transcend politics. While it may no longer be a coherent entity in culture and discourse, respectability continues to affect contemporary public life through a fragmentary legacy.
Download or read book Red Prometheus written by Dolores L. Augustine and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 413 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This analysis of the relationship between science and totalitarian rule in one of the most technically advanced countries in the East bloc examines professional autonomy under dictatorship and the place of technology in Communist ideology. In Cold War-era East Germany, the German tradition of science-based technology merged with a socialist system that made technological progress central to its ideology. Technology became an important part of East German socialist identity--crucial to how Communists saw their system and how citizens saw their state. In Red Prometheus, Dolores Augustine examines the relationship between a dictatorial system and the scientific and engineering communities in East Germany from the end of the Second World War through the 1980s. Drawing on newly opened archives and extensive interviews, Augustine looks in detail at individual scientists' interactions with the East German system, examining the effectiveness of their resistance against the party's totalitarian impulses. She explains why many German scientists and engineers who were deported to the Soviet Union after World War II returned to East Germany rather than defecting to the capitalist West, traces scientists' attempts to hold on to some aspects of professional autonomy, and describes challenges to their professional identity on the factory floor. Augustine examines the quality of science and technology produced under Communist rule, looking at failed research projects and clashing cultures of innovation. She looks at technological myth-building in science fiction and propaganda. She explores individual career strategies, including the role played by gender in high-tech professions, and the ways that both enterprises and individuals responded to increasing state and party control of research during the 1980s. We cannot understand the economic choices made by East Germany, Augustine argues, unless we understand the cultural values reflected in the East German belief in technology as indispensable to progress and industrial development.
Download or read book The Taylorized Beauty of the Mechanical written by Mauro F. Guillén and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-11-10 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The dream of scientific management was a rationalized machine world where life would approach the perfection of an assembly line. But since its early twentieth-century peak this dream has come to seem a dehumanizing nightmare. Henry Ford's assembly lines turned out a quarter of a million cars in 1914, but all of them were black. Forgotten has been the unparalleled new aesthetic beauty once seen in the ideas of Ford and scientific management pioneer Frederick Winslow Taylor. In The Taylorized Beauty of the Mechanical, Mauro Guillén recovers this history and retells the story of the emergence of modernist architecture as a romance with the ideas of scientific management--one that permanently reshaped the profession of architecture. Modernist architecture's pioneers, Guillén shows, found in scientific management the promise of a new, functional, machine-like--and beautiful--architecture, and the prospect of a new role for the architect as technical professional and social reformer. Taylor and Ford had a signal influence on Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius and on Le Corbusier and his Towards a New Architecture, the most important manifesto of modernist architecture. Architects were so enamored with the ideas of scientific management that they adopted them even when there was no functional advantage to do so. Not a traditional architectural history but rather a sociological study of the profession of architecture during its early modernist period, The Taylorized Beauty of the Mechanical provides a new understanding of the degree to which modernist architecture emerged from a tradition of engineering and industrial management.
Download or read book Building the State Architecture Politics and State Formation in Postwar Central Europe written by Virag Molnar and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-08 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The built environment of former socialist countries is often deemed uniform and drab, an apt reflection of a repressive regime. Building the State peeks behind the grey façade to reveal a colourful struggle over competing meanings of the nation, Europe, modernity and the past in a divided continent. Examining how social change is closely intertwined with transformations of the built environment, this volume focuses on the relationship between architecture and state politics in postwar Central Europe using examples from Hungary and Germany. Built around four case studies, the book traces how architecture was politically mobilized in the service of social change, first in socialist modernization programs and then in the postsocialist transition. Building the State does not only offer a comprehensive survey of the diverse political uses of architecture in postwar Central Europe but is the first book to explore how transformations of the built environment can offer a lens into broader processes of state formation and social change.
Download or read book Steps toward a Philosophy of Engineering written by Carl Mitcham and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-12-06 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The rise of classic Euro-American philosophy of technology in the 1950s originally emphasized the importance of technologies as material entities and their mediating influence within human experience. Recent decades, however, have witnessed a subtle shift toward reflection on the activity from which these distinctly modern artifacts emerge and through which they are engaged and managed, that is, on engineering. What is engineering? What is the meaning of engineering? How is engineering related to other aspects of human existence? Such basic questions readily engage all major branches of philosophy --- ontology, epistemology, ethics, political philosophy, and aesthetics --- although not always to the same degree. The historico-philosophical and critical reflections collected here record a series of halting steps to think through engineering and the engineered way of life that we all increasingly live in what has been called the Anthropocene. The aim is not to promote an ideology for engineering but to stimulate deeper reflection among engineers and non-engineers alike about some basic challenges of our engineered and engineering lifeworld.
Download or read book Reader s Guide to the History of Science written by Arne Hessenbruch and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-12-16 with total page 986 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Reader's Guide to the History of Science looks at the literature of science in some 550 entries on individuals (Einstein), institutions and disciplines (Mathematics), general themes (Romantic Science) and central concepts (Paradigm and Fact). The history of science is construed widely to include the history of medicine and technology as is reflected in the range of disciplines from which the international team of 200 contributors are drawn.
Download or read book Impossible Missions written by Nina Berman and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2004-01-01 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thisøstudy of the German presence in Africa in the modern period exposes forms of cultural domination that derive from a philosophy of progress and ?good intentions.? The humanitarian belief in development, however, can ultimately lead to the same structural imbalances that an overtly racist model of intervention produces. Berman examines five case studies involving German individuals and their respective ?missions? in Africa: Max Eyth in Egypt, Albert Schweitzer in Gabon, Ernst Udet in East Africa, Bodo Kirchoff in Somalia, and modern-day tourists in Kenya. These engineers, doctors, pilots, soldiers, and tourists believed that their presence and actions would benefit the respective countries and their inhabitants. Nevertheless, their interventions created profound problems for Africans. ø Nina Berman describes the structures of domination that date back to colonialism but did not disappear with decolonization and are, in fact, integral to today?s global economy. She also critiques the avoidance of African material reality in most of the analyses of European images of Africa, which has led to a perpetuation of the old model of Africanism. By highlighting patterns of domination that did not disappear with decolonization, Impossible Missions? disputes previous assumptions about why global inequality has not only persisted but increased.
Download or read book Acolytes of Nature written by Denise Phillips and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2012-05-07 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although many of the practical and intellectual traditions that make up modern science date back centuries, the category of “science” itself is a relative novelty. In the early eighteenth century, the modern German word that would later mean “science,” naturwissenschaft, was not even included in dictionaries. By 1850, however, the term was in use everywhere. Acolytes of Nature follows the emergence of this important new category within German-speaking Europe, tracing its rise from an insignificant eighteenth-century neologism to a defining rallying cry of modern German culture. Today’s notion of a unified natural science has been deemed an invention of the mid-nineteenth century. Yet what Denise Phillips reveals here is that the idea of naturwissenschaft acquired a prominent place in German public life several decades earlier. Phillips uncovers the evolving outlines of the category of natural science and examines why Germans of varied social station and intellectual commitments came to find this label useful. An expanding education system, an increasingly vibrant consumer culture and urban social life, the early stages of industrialization, and the emergence of a liberal political movement all fundamentally altered the world in which educated Germans lived, and also reshaped the way they classified knowledge.
Download or read book Professionalism for the Built Environment written by Simon Foxell and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-09-03 with total page 505 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the aftermath of the Grenfell Tower tragedy, this new book provides thought provoking commentary on the nature of the relationship between society, the prevailing economic system and professionalism in the built environment. It addresses the changing responsibilities of professionals and in particular their obligation to act in the wider public interest. It is both an introduction to and an examination of professionalism and professional bodies in the sector, including a view of the future of professionalism and the organisations serving it. Simon Foxell outlines the history of professionalism in the sector, comparing and contrasting the development of the three major historic professions working in the construction industry: civil engineering, architecture and surveying. He examines how their systems have developed over time, up to the current period dominated by large professional services firms, and looks at some options for the future, whilst asking difficult questions about ethics, training, education, public trust and expectation from within and outside the industry. The book concludes with a six-point plan to help, if not ensure, that the professions remain an effective and essential part of both society and the economy; a part that allows the system to operate smoothly and easily, but also fairly and to the benefit of all. Essential reading for built environment professionals and students doing the professional studies elements of their training or in the process of applying for chartership or registration. The issues and lessons are applicable across all building professions.
