Download or read book Technocracy and the American Dream written by William E. Akin and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1977 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study focuses on the genesis and development of the Technocrats' philosophy, and describes the movement's initial popularity in 1932 abd 1933, and its rapid decline as a result of the Technocrats' failure to develop a political philosophy which could reconcile their technological aristocracy with democracy.
Download or read book The New Technocracy written by Esmark, Anders and published by Policy Press. This book was released on 2020-04-08 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The rise of populist parties and movements across the Western hemisphere and their contempt for ‘experts’ has shocked the establishment. This book examines how the ‘post-industrial’ technocratic regime of the 1980’s – of managerialism, depoliticisation and the politics of expertise – sowed the seeds for the backlash against the political elites that is visible today. Populism, Esmark augues, is a sign that the technocratic bluff has finally been called and that technocracy posing as democracy will only serve to exasperate existing problems. This book sets a new benchmark for studies of technocracy, showing that a solution to the challenge of populism will depend as much on a technocratic retreat as democratic innovation.
Download or read book Engineering Trouble US Chinese Experiences of Professional Discontent 1905 1945 written by Thorben Pelzer and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2023-07-31 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the early twentieth century, the first large batch of Chinese civil engineers had graduated from the USA, and together with their American senior colleagues returned to China. They were enthusiastic about reconstructing the young republic by building new railways, highways, and canals, but what the engineers experienced in China, including mismanaged railways, useless highways, and silted canals, did not always meet their expectations and ideals. In this book, Thorben Pelzer makes the stories of these Chinese and American engineers come to life through exploring previously unpublished letters, rare images, maps, and a rich biographical dataset. He argues that the experiences of these engineers include a myriad of contradictions, disillusionment, and discontent, keeping the engineering profession in a constant flux of searching for its meaning and its place in Republican China.
Download or read book The Enchantments of Mammon written by Eugene McCarraher and published by Belknap Press. This book was released on 2019-11-12 with total page 817 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “An extraordinary work of intellectual history as well as a scholarly tour de force, a bracing polemic, and a work of Christian prophecy...McCarraher challenges more than 200 years of post-Enlightenment assumptions about the way we live and work.” —The Observer At least since Max Weber, capitalism has been understood as part of the “disenchantment” of the world, stripping material objects and social relations of their mystery and magic. In this magisterial work, Eugene McCarraher challenges this conventional view. Capitalism, he argues, is full of sacrament, whether one is prepared to acknowledge it or not. First flowering in the fields and factories of England and brought to America by Puritans and evangelicals, whose doctrine made ample room for industry and profit, capitalism has become so thoroughly enmeshed in the fabric of our society that our faith in “the market” has become sacrosanct. Informed by cultural history and theology as well as management theory, The Enchantments of Mammon looks to nineteenth-century Romantics, whose vision of labor combined reason, creativity, and mutual aid, for salvation. In this impassioned challenge to some of our most firmly held assumptions, McCarraher argues that capitalism has hijacked our intrinsic longing for divinity—and urges us to break its hold on our souls. “A majestic achievement...It is a work of great moral and spiritual intelligence, and one that invites contemplation about things we can’t afford not to care about deeply.” —Commonweal “More brilliant, more capacious, and more entertaining, page by page, than his most ardent fans dared hope. The magnitude of his accomplishment—an account of American capitalism as a religion...will stun even skeptical readers.” —Christian Century
Download or read book From Autocracy to Democracy to Technocracy written by Victor N. Shaw and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2020-10-15 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores human polity with respect to its nature, context, and evolution. Specifically, it examines how individual wills translate into political ideologies, investigates what social forces converge to shape governmental operations, and probes whether human polity progresses in focus from individual wills to group interests to social integrations. The book entertains five hypotheses. The first is commonsensical: where there are people there is politics. The second is analogous: humans govern themselves socially in a way that is comparable to how a body regulates itself physically. The third is rational: humans set rules, organize activities, and establish institutions upon facts, following reasons, for the purpose of effectiveness and efficiency. The fourth is random: human affairs take place haphazardly under specific circumstances while they overall exhibit general patterns and trends. The final hypothesis is inevitable: human governance evolves from autocracy to democracy to technocracy. The book presents systematic information about human polity, its form, content, operation, impact, and evolution. It sheds light on multivariate interactions among human wills, rights, and obligations, political thoughts, actions, and mechanisms, and social structures, processes, and order maintenances. Pragmatically, it offers invaluable insights into individuals as agents, groupings as agencies, and polity as structuration across the human sphere.
Download or read book Technocracy at Work written by Beverly H. Burris and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 1993-01-01 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Technocracy, loosely defined, is "rule by experts." Technocracy at Work focuses on the organizational dimensions and aspects of technocracy. Substantial sociological literatures have analyzed contemporary changes in factories, bureaucracies, and professional organizations. What has not been well investigated is the interrelatedness of these changes and the emergence of technocracy in the workplace. This book fills this gap and analyzes the social and political implications of technocracy, in both particular work organizations as well as the world-wide technocratic system, so as to inform future democratic debate.
Download or read book Zionism and Technocracy written by Derek Jonathan Penslar and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 1991 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Zionism and Technocracy is important reading for anyone seriously interested in the development of the Yishuv during the last decades of Ottoman rule."--Choice "... stimulating and well written... " --Shofar "A pioneering work on the most important aspect of early Zionist history, well researched, well written, highly to be recommended." --Walter Laqueur "Taut and well-written with a fresh approach, Penslar's painstakingly researched study fills an important gap in the literature on the early Yishuv." --The Jerusalem Post Magazine "Penslar has written one of the first 'social histories' of an important aspect of Zionism." --David Sorkin "... Penslar presents an alternative perspective of those early days of Jewish settlement. Instead of a tale of individuals and their efforts, it is history of the organizational efforts to develop the institutions needed to reestablish the Jewish presence on the land." --Midstream The creation of a Jewish homeland in modern Palestine represented a monumental technical achievement. This achievement, and the story of the Jewish technocrats from Central Europe who engineered it, is documented here for the first time--bringing together social, intellectual, and institutional history in a pathbreaking study.
Download or read book Feeling Mediated written by Brenton J. Malin and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2014-03-28 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New technologies, whether text message or telegraph, inevitably raise questions about emotion. New forms of communication bring with them both fear and hope, on one hand allowing us deeper emotional connections and the ability to forge global communities, while on the other prompting anxieties about isolation and over-stimulation. Feeling Mediated investigates the larger context of such concerns, considering both how media technologies intersect with our emotional lives and how our ideas about these intersections influence how we think about and experience emotion and technology themselves. Drawing on extensive archival research, Brenton J. Malin explores the historical roots of much of our recent understanding of mediated feelings, showing how earlier ideas about the telegraph, phonograph, radio, motion pictures, and other once-new technologies continue to inform our contemporary thinking. With insightful analysis, Feeling Mediated explores a series of fascinating arguments about technology and emotion that became especially heated during the early 20th century. These debates, which carried forward and transformed earlier discussions of technology and emotion, culminated in a set of ideas that became institutionalized in the structures of American media production, advertising, social research, and policy, leaving a lasting impact on our everyday lives.
Download or read book The Technocratic Challenge to Democracy written by Eri Bertsou and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-03-09 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book represents the first comprehensive study of how technocracy currently challenges representative democracy and asks how technocratic politics undermines democratic legitimacy. How strong is its challenge to democratic institutions? The book offers a solid theory and conceptualization of technocratic politics and the technocratic challenge is analyzed empirically at all levels of the national and supra-national institutions and actors, such as cabinets, parties, the EU, independent bodies, central banks and direct democratic campaigns in a comparative and policy perspective. It takes an in-depth analysis addressing elitism, meritocracy, de-politicization, efficiency, neutrality, reliance on science and distrust toward party politics and ideologies, and their impact when pitched against democratic responsiveness, accountability, citizens' input and pluralist competition. In the current crisis of democracy, this book assesses the effects of the technocratic critique against representative institutions, which are perceived to be unable to deal with complex and global problems. It analyzes demands for competent and responsible policy making in combination with the simultaneous populist resistance to experts. The book will be of key interest to scholars and students of comparative politics, political theory, policy analysis, multi-level governance as well as practitioners working in bureaucracies, media, think-tanks and policy making.
Download or read book American Modernism and Depression Documentary written by Jeff Allred and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-11-01 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Photos filled with the forlorn faces of hungry and impoverished Americans that came to characterize the desolation of the Great Depression are among the best known artworks of the twentieth century. Captured by the camera's eye, these stark depictions of suffering became iconic markers of a formative period in U.S. history. Although there has been an ample amount of critical inquiry on Depression-era photographs, the bulk of scholarship treats them as isolated art objects. And yet they were often joined together with evocative writing in a genre that flourished amid the period, the documentary book. American Modernism and Depression Documentary looks at the tradition of the hybrid, verbal-visual texts that flourished during a time when U.S. citizens were becoming increasingly conscious of the life of a larger nation. Jeff Allred draws on a range of seminal works to illustrate the convergence of modernism and documentary, two forms often regarded as unrelated. Whereas critics routinely look to James Agee and Walker Evans' Let Us Now Praise Famous Men as the sole instance of the modernist documentary book, Allred turns to such works as Richard Wright's scathing 12 Million Black Voices, and the oft-neglected You Have Seen Their Faces by Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White to open up the critical playing field. And rather than focusing on the ethos of Progressivism and/or the politics and aesthetics of the New Deal, Allred emphasizes the centrality of Life magazine to the consolidation of a novel cultural form.
Download or read book International Organization as Technocratic Utopia written by Jens Steffek and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume examines the development of the idea of 'technocratic internationalism': the promotion of the involvement of experts in the workings of international relations, especially in international organizations such as the United Nations and European Union.
Download or read book Not So Fast written by Doug Hill and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There's a well-known story about an older fish who swims by two younger fish and asks, "How's the water?" The younger fish are puzzled. "What's water?" they ask. Many of us today might ask a similar question: What's technology? Technology defines the world we live in, yet we're so immersed in it, so encompassed by it, that we mostly take it for granted. Seldom, if ever, do we stop to ask what technology is. Failing to ask that question, we fail to perceive all the ways it might be shaping us. Usually when we hear the word "technology," we automatically think of digital de- vices and their myriad applications. As revolutionary as smartphones, online shop- ping, and social networks may seem, however, they t into long-standing, deeply entrenched patterns of technological thought as well as practice. Generations of skeptics have questioned how well served we are by those patterns of thought and practice, even as generations of enthusiasts have promised that the latest innovations will deliver us, soon, to Paradise. We're not there yet, but the cyber utopians of Silicon Valley keep telling us it's right around the corner. What is technology, and how is it shaping us? In search of answers to those crucial questions, Not So Fast draws on the insights of dozens of scholars and artists who have thought deeply about the meanings of machines. The book explores such dynamics as technological drift, technological momentum, technological disequilibrium, and technological autonomy to help us understand the interconnected, inter- woven, and interdependent phenomena of our technological world. In the course of that exploration, Doug Hill poses penetrating questions of his own, among them: Do we have as much control over our machines as we think? And who can we rely on to guide the technological forces that will determine the future of the planet?
Download or read book Nazi Volksgemeinschaft Technology written by John C. Guse and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-10-26 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book traces how Gottfried Feder and Fritz Todt made technology essential to the Nazi ‘world view’. They groomed engineers with a racist technical ideology that prepared them to later supervise slave labor and the Holocaust. Their concepts evolved from völkisch technocracy to an idealized harmony of man, machine and nature, and were eclipsed by Albert Speer’s total war. Partially due to willing ‘self-coordination’ from engineers, they gained political control over the engineering profession. Destined to be pillars of the Volksgemeinschaft, engineers were indoctrinated with Nazi principles of Aryan superiority at the Reich School of Technology, the Plassenburg. Nazi propaganda announced a bright future through technology, furthering a sense of normalcy in Germany, despite the ruthless exclusion of those unwanted.
Download or read book Politics of Last Resort written by Jonathan White and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book examines how a certain way of governing, invoking exceptional measures for exceptional times, has become central to the workings of the European Union.
Download or read book Technocratic Ministers and Political Leadership in European Democracies written by António Costa Pinto and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-09-12 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides an in-depth analysis of the ‘technocratic shift’ in ministerial recruitment, measuring its extent and variations over time in fourteen European countries. It addresses the question: who governs in European democratic regimes? Just a few decades ago, the answer would have been straightforward: party-men and (fewer) party-women. More recently, however, and in varying degrees across Europe, a greater proportion of non-politicians or experts have been recruited to government, as exemplified by the 2017 election of Emmanuel Macron to the French Presidency. These experts, frequently labelled “technocrats”, increasingly occupy key executive positions and have emerged as powerful actors in the decision-making process. This edited collection explores the contemporary debates surrounding the relationship between technocracy, democracy and political leadership, and will appeal to scholars and advanced students interested in these fields.
Download or read book Forged Consensus written by David M. Hart and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This is a subtly argued work well versed in the existing literature and deeply immersed in the historical sources. The author's balance between theory and narrative will be attractive both to political scientists and to historians, and the book does a fine job of using history to inform current policy."---Kenneth Lipertuo, University of Houston --Book Jacket.
Download or read book The Spivak Reader written by Gayatri Spivak and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-18 with total page 498 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Among the foremost feminist critics to have emerged to international eminence over the last fifteen years, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has relentlessly challenged the high ground of established theoretical discourse in literary and cultural studies. Although her rigorous reading of various authors has often rendered her work difficult terrain for those unfamiliar with poststructuralism, this collection makes significant strides in explicating Spivak's complicated theories of reading.
