Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Preface
- 1 Resistance to new technology and its effects on nuclear power, information technology and biotechnology
- PART I Conceptual issues
- PART II Case studies
- 6 Patterns of resistance to new technologies in Scandinavia: an historical perspective
- 7 Henry Ford's relationship to ‘Fordism’: ambiguity as a modality of technological resistance
- 8 Resistance to nuclear technology: optimists, opportunists and opposition in Australian nuclear history
- 9 New technology in Fleet Street, 1975–80
- 10 The impact of resistance to biotechnology in Switzerland: a sociological view of the recent referendum
- PART III International comparisons
- PART IV Comparisons of different technologies
- PART V Afterword
- Index
7 - Henry Ford's relationship to ‘Fordism’: ambiguity as a modality of technological resistance
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 July 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Preface
- 1 Resistance to new technology and its effects on nuclear power, information technology and biotechnology
- PART I Conceptual issues
- PART II Case studies
- 6 Patterns of resistance to new technologies in Scandinavia: an historical perspective
- 7 Henry Ford's relationship to ‘Fordism’: ambiguity as a modality of technological resistance
- 8 Resistance to nuclear technology: optimists, opportunists and opposition in Australian nuclear history
- 9 New technology in Fleet Street, 1975–80
- 10 The impact of resistance to biotechnology in Switzerland: a sociological view of the recent referendum
- PART III International comparisons
- PART IV Comparisons of different technologies
- PART V Afterword
- Index
Summary
Historiographical observations about resistance to technology
Emphasizing resistance to new technologies, as this conference at the Science Museum has, highlights technological creativity, the process of defining a goal and then trying to achieve it. For some centuries now such projects have fascinated, even mesmerized, Western storytellers and social theorists alike. And it is a great story: that a person, or team, or institution would cast an imaginative eye out onto the broad field of the existing order and conceive a plan to insert something new into that field, that such an agent would have the intelligence and power to gather resources and shape them according to the imagined plan so that, one day, the agent could take a deep breath and exult, ‘It works!’
It is a powerful idea to be sure, and legitimately so. Technological creativity has been central to most of the creative work in the history of technology for decades. It is over-simple but still helpful to distinguish historians of technology as tending toward one or the other of two paradigmatic descriptions of technology. Traditionally, technology has been understood in terms of rational achievement. Recently, however, other scholars have begun to describe technology in terms of conflict, as an arena wherein one group wins by succeeding in designing a technology representing its values and vested interests, while other groups lose that same struggle. Those who see technology as primarily rational see the unknown and the uncertain as the main form of resistance.
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- Resistance to New TechnologyNuclear Power, Information Technology and Biotechnology, pp. 147 - 164Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1995
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