In This Issue

Should case studies concentrate on emergent technologies--inventors, development teams, marketing and production engineers, and the relevant contextual factors which shape the results of their work? Many historians of technology continue to find a focus on innovative behavior fruitful. Over the past two decades, however, a growing body of scholarship has explored the insights revealed when the narrative frame shifts from technological origins to technological practice: from inventors, developers, and investors to users. Building on the work of Joy Parr, Wiebe Bijker, Karin Bijsterveld, and others, Edward W. Constant II ("A Tale of Two Bonanzas: How Knowledgeable Communities Think about Technology") studies the pilot-owners of the legendary V-tail Beechcraft Bonanza monoplane in the early 1980s, when it became ominously clear that the V-tails suffered in-flight disasters at a statistically significant higher rate than Beech's nearly identical straight-tail aircraft. Using price data from the market for used V- and straight-tail airplanes, Constant finds that the market value of V-tails declined nearly 25 percent compared to straight tails after news of the elevated crash rates circulated through the network of owner-pilots, only to rebound to pre-crisis levels after Beech's technical fix was confirmed by pilot experience. Constant finds that this user community, "a vivacious and knowledgeable community, interacting, arguing, fretting . . . and assessing evidence," responded with careful deliberation. Constant argues the heuristic value of economic theory and data to investigate technologically knowledgeable communities for insight into consumers as smart and influential technological actors.

Jennifer Karns Alexander ("Efficiency and Pathology: Mechanical Discipline and Efficient Worker Seating in Germany, 1929­1932") studies an exhibition on work spaces and seating, created by the German Bureau of Economy and Efficiency in the waning years of the Weimar Republic. She focuses on the Elmo-workstool, which may well remind T&C readers of the ergonomic chair on which they sit as they read the article. For Alexander, the Elmo chair provides a key for distinguishing between two modes of worker control during the interwar heyday of industrial rationalization. Control of worker behavior has been famously pursued through detailed work rules, training programs, time management, and industrial psychology, all aimed at what Alexander describes as the goal of worker "willingness, whether freely or grudgingly given, to conform to behavior prescribed by a regulating authority." The Elmo chair is a very different, though related, matter. Its designers created a structure to constrain those bodily motions which had been identified as inefficient, to situate the worker's body in a physical frame which made wasted movements obvious deviations from the prescribed norm. Unlike programs which required a worker's compliance, the Elmo chair's physical structure defined proscribed motions, the unplanned and spontaneous play of the human body, as pathological. The chair's constraints therefore provided the therapy for this pathology in an era focussed on extending rational control to all aspects of human work.

Like Constant, Mark Aldrich blends historical and economic analysis. In his "From Forest Conservation to Market Preservation: Invention and Diffusion of Wood-Preserving Technology, 1880­1939," Aldrich explores the evolution of wood-preservation technologies in the United States over a sixty-year time frame. The story begins with railroads. With their voracious appetite for wooden ties (as well as bridge timbers, wooden buildings, and rolling stock) railroad management wrestled with the economic trade-offs of treated and non-treated ties. Through the 1920s, the carriers adopted preservation only sporadically. Preservation techniques were multi-factored: multiple chemical recipes for preservatives and competing techniques for infusing them into wood all suffered from a lean theoretical base and a culture which frequently fostered fraudulent claims. In addition, controlled studies could not demonstrate improved tie longevity for years after treatment. Thus, corporate decision makers were reluctant to increase their front-end costs for the uncertain prospect of reducing tie-replacement costs later. Gradually, however, an array of new insti-tutions--a "loose public­private alliance of producers, users, and researchers"--addressed the challenges of credible research, effective vehicles for technical communication, and emergent industry standards. Early in the twentieth century, demand for wood products appeared to threaten deforestation and led to calls for...