Download or read book The Mantra of Efficiency written by Jennifer Karns Alexander and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2008-03-03 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner, 2010 Edelstein Prize, Society for the History of Technology Efficiency—associated with individual discipline, superior management, and increased profits or productivity—often counts as one of the highest virtues in Western culture. But what does it mean, exactly, to be efficient? How did this concept evolve from a means for evaluating simple machines to the mantra of progress and a prerequisite for success? In this provocative and ambitious study, Jennifer Karns Alexander explores the growing power of efficiency in the post-industrial West. Examining the ways the concept has appeared in modern history—from a benign measure of the thermal economy of a machine to its widespread application to personal behaviors like chewing habits, spending choices, and shop floor movements to its controversial use as a measure of the business success of American slavery—she argues that beneath efficiency's seemingly endless variety lies a common theme: the pursuit of mastery through techniques of surveillance, discipline, and control. Six historical case studies—two from Britain, one each from France and Germany, and two from the United States—illustrate the concept's fascinating development and provide context for the meanings of, and uses for, efficiency today and in the future.
Download or read book The Mantra of Efficiency written by Jennifer Karns Alexander and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2008-03-03 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner, 2010 Edelstein Prize, Society for the History of Technology Efficiency—associated with individual discipline, superior management, and increased profits or productivity—often counts as one of the highest virtues in Western culture. But what does it mean, exactly, to be efficient? How did this concept evolve from a means for evaluating simple machines to the mantra of progress and a prerequisite for success? In this provocative and ambitious study, Jennifer Karns Alexander explores the growing power of efficiency in the post-industrial West. Examining the ways the concept has appeared in modern history—from a benign measure of the thermal economy of a machine to its widespread application to personal behaviors like chewing habits, spending choices, and shop floor movements to its controversial use as a measure of the business success of American slavery—she argues that beneath efficiency's seemingly endless variety lies a common theme: the pursuit of mastery through techniques of surveillance, discipline, and control. Six historical case studies—two from Britain, one each from France and Germany, and two from the United States—illustrate the concept's fascinating development and provide context for the meanings of, and uses for, efficiency today and in the future.
Download or read book The Cult of Efficiency written by Janice Gross Stein and published by House of Anansi. This book was released on 2002 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This thought-provoking discourse on the unquestioned pursuit of efficiency reveals how the discussion of efficiency in the delivery of public goods, such as education and health care, has risen to prominence in postindustrial society. Stein's provocative argument, reminiscent of the thinking of Lewis Mumford, demonstrates that efficiency can too often be a cloak for political agendas, and that pressure for efficiency can actually be a detrimental rather than a positive force. Citizens in public schools, community clinics, and hospitals are shown engaging directly with such agendas, redrawing the face of the state as they impose new ways of delivering public goods. Stein demonstrates how they are calling not only for efficiency but for accountability and choice as they confront the dilemmas of democratic processes in a global age."
Download or read book Modernism and the Culture of Efficiency written by Evelyn Cobley and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2009-01-01 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cobley's close readings of modernist British fiction by writers as diverse as Aldous Huxley, Joseph Conrad, and E.M. Forster identify characters whose attitudes and behaviour patterns indirectly manifest cultural anxieties that can be traced to the conflicted logic of efficiency.
Download or read book The Beauty of Detours written by Yoni Van Den Eede and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2019-12-01 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Proposes an innovative, holistic understanding of technology. The Beauty of Detours proposes a new way of understanding and defining technology by reading systems thinker Gregory Bateson in the framework of contemporary philosophy of technology. Although “technology” was not an explicit focus of Bateson’s oeuvre, Yoni Van Den Eede shows that his thought is permeated with insights directly relevant to contemporary technological concerns. This book provides a systematic reading of Bateson that reveals these under-investigated elements of his thought. It also critiques the field of philosophy of technology for still reifying “technology” too much despite its attempt to de-reify it, arguing instead that it should incorporate Bateson’s insights and focus more on processes of human knowing. Sketching a Batesonian philosophy of technology, Van Den Eede calls for greater attentiveness to the purpose of technology and its role in our lives. “This book offers a thorough and well-researched dive into Bateson’s thinking on purpose, instrumentalism, technology, and epistemology. It is an important contribution to the discourse on AI and on the rapid development of the tech sector. Philosophically the book tackles difficult systemic questions about technology and addresses them at a much more sophisticated level than most books of its kind.” — Nora Bateson, The International Bateson Institute
Download or read book When More Is Not Better written by Roger L. Martin and published by Harvard Business Press. This book was released on 2020-09-29 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American democratic capitalism is in danger. How can we save it? For its first two hundred years, the American economy exhibited truly impressive performance. The combination of democratically elected governments and a capitalist system worked, with ever-increasing levels of efficiency spurred by division of labor, international trade, and scientific management of companies. By the nation's bicentennial celebration in 1976, the American economy was the envy of the world. But since then, outcomes have changed dramatically. Growth in the economic prosperity of the average American family has slowed to a crawl, while the wealth of the richest Americans has skyrocketed. This imbalance threatens the American democratic capitalist system and our way of life. In this bracing yet constructive book, world-renowned business thinker Roger Martin starkly outlines the fundamental problem: We have treated the economy as a machine, pursuing ever-greater efficiency as an inherent good. But efficiency has become too much of a good thing. Our obsession with it has inadvertently shifted the shape of our economy, from a large middle class and smaller numbers of rich and poor (think of a bell-shaped curve) to a greater share of benefits accruing to a thin tail of already-rich Americans (a Pareto distribution). With lucid analysis and engaging anecdotes, Martin argues that we must stop treating the economy as a perfectible machine and shift toward viewing it as a complex adaptive system in which we seek a fundamental balance of efficiency with resilience. To achieve this, we need to keep in mind the whole while working on the component parts; pursue improvement, not perfection; and relentlessly tweak instead of attempting to find permanent solutions. Filled with keen economic insight and advice for citizens, executives, policy makers, and educators, When More Is Not Better is the must-read guide for saving democratic capitalism.
Download or read book Scientists Expertise as Performance written by Joris Vandendriessche and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-10-06 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays in this collection explore our reliance on experts within a historical context and across a wide range of fields, including agriculture, engineering, health sciences and labour management. Contributors argue that experts were highly aware of their audiences and used performance to gain both scientific and popular support.
Download or read book Small Medium Large written by Colleen A. Dunlavy and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2024-08-15 with total page 165 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We live in a world of seemingly limitless consumer choice. Yet, as every shopper knows without thinking about it, many everyday goods – from beds to batteries to printer paper – are available in a finite number of “standard sizes.” What makes these sizes “standard” is an agreement among competing firms to make or sell products with the same limited dimensions. But how did firms – often hotly competing firms – reach such collective agreements? In exploring this question, Colleen Dunlavy puts the history of mass production and distribution in an entirely new light. She reveals that, despite the widely publicized model offered by Henry Ford, mass production techniques did not naturally diffuse throughout the U.S. economy. On the contrary, formidable market forces blocked their diffusion. It was only under the cover of collectively agreed-upon, industrywide standard sizes – orchestrated by the federal government – that competing firms were able to break free of market forces and transition to mass production and distribution. Without government promotion of standard sizes, the twentieth-century American variety of capitalism would have looked markedly less “Fordist.” Small, Medium, Large will make all of us think differently about the everyday consumer choices we take for granted.
Download or read book Public Policy Values written by J. Stewart and published by Springer. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More and more policy issues involve issues that are explicitly values-based, yet public policy analysis tends to skirt around the question of values. Public Policy Values overcomes this reluctance by showing how public policies enable values-choices to be made, often without seeming to do so.
Download or read book Engineering Identities Epistemologies and Values written by Steen Hyldgaard Christensen and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-05-30 with total page 442 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This second companion volume on engineering studies considers engineering practice including contextual analyses of engineering identity, epistemologies and values. Key overlapping questions examine such issues as an engineering identity, engineering self-understandings enacted in the professional world, distinctive characters of engineering knowledge and how engineering science and engineering design interact in practice. Authors bring with them perspectives from their institutional homes in Europe, North America, Australia\ and Asia. The volume includes 24 contributions by more than 30 authors from engineering, the social sciences and the humanities. Additional issues the chapters scrutinize include prominent norms of engineering, how they interact with the values of efficiency or environmental sustainability. A concluding set of articles considers the meaning of context more generally by asking if engineers create their own contexts or are they created by contexts. Taken as a whole, this collection of original scholarly work is unique in its broad, multidisciplinary consideration of the changing character of engineering practice.
Download or read book Professionals and Policy written by Mike Bottery and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-09-13 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By means of case studies in schools and hospitals, this text describes and evaluates the current issues faced by both education and health professionals. It argues that much can be learned by comparing the experiences of the two groups, and suggests ways in which education and health workers can respond positively to the changes of recent years to ensure that essential services are maintained and improved.
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 Theologies of Failure written by Robert Sirvent and published by BoD – Books on Demand. This book was released on 2020-01-01 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What does failure mean for theology? In the Bible, we find some unsettling answers to this question. We find lastness usurping firstness, and foolishness undoing wisdom. We discover, too, a weakness more potent than strength, and a loss of life that is essential to finding life. Jesus himself offers an array of paradoxes and puzzles through his life and teachings. He even submits himself to humiliation and death to show the cosmos the true meaning of victory. As David Bentley Hart observes, “most of us would find Christians truly cast in the New Testament mold fairly obnoxious: civically reprobate, ideologically unsound, economically destructive, politically irresponsible, socially discreditable, and really just a bit indecent.” By incorporating the work of scholars working with a range of frameworks within the Christian tradition, Theologies of Failure aims to offer a unique and important contribution on understanding and embracing failure as a pivotal theological category. As the various contributors highlight, it is a category with a powerful capacity for illuminating our theological concerns and perspectives. It is a category that frees us to see old ideas in a brand-new light, and helps to foster an awareness of ideas that certain modes of analysis may have obscured from our vision. In short, this book invites readers to consider how both theology and failure can help us ask new questions, discover new possibilities, and refuse the ways of the world.
Download or read book Jacques Ellul and the Technological Society in the 21st Century written by Helena M. Jerónimo and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-07-08 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume rethinks the work of Jacques Ellul (1912-1994) on the centenary of his birth, by presenting an overview of the current debates based on Ellul's insights. As one of the most significant twentieth-century thinkers about technology, Ellul was among the first thinkers to realize the importance of topics such as globalization, terrorism, communication technologies and ecology, and study them from a technological perspective. The book is divided into three sections. The first discusses Ellul’s diagnosis of modern society, and addresses the reception of his work on the technological society, the notion of efficiency, the process of symbolization/de-symbolization, and ecology. The second analyzes communicational and cultural problems, as well as threats and trends in early twenty-first century societies. Many of the issues Ellul saw as crucial – such as energy, propaganda, applied life sciences and communication – continue to be so. In fact they have grown exponentially, on a global scale, producing new forms of risk. Essays in the final section examine the duality of reason and revelation. They pursue an understanding of Ellul in terms of the depth of experience and the traditions of human knowledge, which is to say, on the one hand, the experience of the human being as contained in the rationalist, sociological and philosophical traditions. On the other hand there are the transcendent roots of human existence, as well as “revealed knowledge,” in the mystical and religious traditions. The meeting of these two traditions enables us to look at Ellul’s work as a whole, but above all it opens up a space for examining religious life in the technological society.
Download or read book First Fuel India s Energy Efficiency Journey and a Radical Vision for Sustainability written by Padu Padmanabhan and published by Pan Macmillan. This book was released on 2021-07-23 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ‘A vital read’ Saurabh Kumar, Executive Vice Chairman, Energy Efficiency Services Ltd Group ‘Authoritative’ Arunabha Ghosh, CEO, Council on Energy, Environment and Water, India ‘A must-read’ Ashok Sarkar, Senior energy specialist, World Bank The historic oil crisis of 1973, which permanently altered significant economic policies worldwide, marked a turning point in India’s energy odyssey, putting the country on the path towards energy efficiency. A young energy researcher at the National Productivity Council at the time, Padu Padmanabhan soon found himself at a juncture that would lead him to the many watershed moments of this journey. Drawing on his extensive subsequent experience at the United States Agency for International Development in India and the World Bank, Padu takes us from the Nehruvian years of idealism, through the five-decade-long quest for fuel efficiency and energy conservation that ultimately paved the way for the shift towards energy-efficient practices. Simple yet highly effective, energy efficiency has come to be known as our first fuel – an inexhaustible source of energy that may be one of the most viable means of combating the consequences of climate change and the indiscriminate use of natural resources. Through lessons gleaned from the implementation of past energy-efficient technology, Padu shows us how this ‘fuel’ can be harnessed for a sustainable future. First Fuel is an invaluable account for not only energy-sector professionals but anyone interested in understanding what it takes to achieve energy efficiency and why we need to urgently adopt such practices. It recommends vital policy and regulatory changes and, in so doing, presents a radical new vision for energy and all its users living in the most critical of times.
Download or read book Medicine Health and Being Human written by Lesa Scholl and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-05-11 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Medicine, Health and Being Human begins a conversation to explore how the medical has defined us: that is, the ways in which perspectives of medicine and health have affected cultural understandings of what it means to be human. With chapters that span from the early modern period through to the contemporary world, and are drawn from a range of disciplines, this volume holds that incremental historical and cultural influences have brought about an understanding of humanity in which the medical is ingrained, consciously or unconsciously, usually as a mode of legitimisation. Divided into three parts, the book follows a narrative path from the integrity of the human soul, through to the integrity of the material human body, then finally brought together through engaging with end-of-life responses. Part 1 examines the move from spirituality to psychiatry in terms of the way medical science has influenced cultural understandings of the mind. Part 2 interrogates the role that medicine has played in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in constructing and deconstructing the self and other, including the fusion of visual objectivity and the scientific gaze in constructing perceptions of humanity. Part 3 looks at the limits of medicine when the integrity of one body breaks down. It contends with the ultimate question of the extent to which humanity is confined within the integrity of the human body, and how medicine and the humanities work together toward responding to the finality of death. This is a valuable contribution for all those interested in the medical humanities, history of medicine, history of ideas and the social approaches to health and illness.
Download or read book Greed Is Good and Other Fables written by Tony Osborne and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2012-04-13 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book spans three centuries of popular entertainment and everyday culture, showcasing both mainstream and submerged channels and voices to examine how once reviled business values gained supremacy and poisoned the American spirit. The office in popular culture is often depicted as a topsy-turvy parallel universe where psychological disorders are legitimized as "managerial styles" and comically depraved bosses torment those who do the actual work. During the 1950s, the Beats chose denim and the open road over gray flannel suits and office jobs, but today their grandchildren—Generation Y—aggressively covet desk jobs. "Greed Is Good" and Other Fables: Office Life in Popular Culture examines how office life is both extolled and lampooned in popular culture. The book tracks how business values ascended to cultural dominance in the United States today, revealing our incessant struggle between financial and spiritual goals in the pursuit of "freedom" and the fulfillment of the American dream. By drawing upon sources as varied as books, newspapers, magazines, television shows, movies, blogs, message boards, documentaries, public speeches, corporate training films, and employee newsletters, the author provides compelling insights into the range of competing values and ideals interwoven throughout office life.
