Fabbriche, sistemi, organizzazioni: Storia dell'ingegneria industriale (review)

In a strictly diachronic perspective, Ana Millán Gasca's book traces the history of both science and technology from the preindustrial era to the present. Its peculiarity is reflected in an approach focused on the relationship between the engineer and the problems met in production management. From this point of view, the engineer plays a key role in those technological and organizational innovation processes characterizing evolution in technoeconomic systems. The book is characterized as a historical narrative of the engineer's role in all its versatility, someone able to play a prominent part in all technological fields.

After a brief introduction outlining the relationship between invention and innovation, Fabbriche, sistemi, organizzazioni is divided into three parts: the preindustrial era, the beginning of the industrialization process and roots of modern engineering, and industrial engineering in the twentieth century. The first part, divided into three chapters, is concerned with technical changes in Europe from the Middle Ages until modern times; it is also focused on the evolution of relationships among science, technology, and philosophical thought from ancient Greece to the Renaissance. The second part (six chapters) represents the core, the full achievement of that technoengineering culture leading to the Industrial Revolution. It therefore highlights the key passage from the British production system to the rise of the American system of manufactures, which affected the striking change of leadership in world economics.

The third part (four chapters) reviews technological and organizational changes occurring in the twentieth century. First it outlines technological paths during the Second Industrial Revolution, following both the emergence of big firms and a growing complexity in company management. This section is particularly focused on transformations in mathematics which led to remarkable consequences for production. It also addresses those problems—both theoretical and empirical—related to the creation of large technical systems. From this perspective the author discusses different approaches to systems control as well as the close relationship between the military and industry. Each chapter is followed by some readings—from David Landes, Jacques Le Goff, and Adam Smith, for example—selected in order to illustrate the above-mentioned phenomena.

As this brief summary shows, the book maintains an educational approach, which is also fulfilled by numerous sidebars scattered throughout. In fact, the main purpose is to provide students, particularly those attending engineering schools, with a cultural grounding in the importance of technology during succeeding historical epochs. The author's more or less explicit goal is to strengthen the awareness of young scholars in the crucial role played by the engineer. This approach is responsible for both the book's strengths and its weaknesses. Its main virtue lies in the remarkable extent of the issues it examines: in fact, the author succeeds in merging the insights of different disciplinary fields, ranging from history of technology to economic theory, from mathematics to business history, from the history of economic thought to managerial engineering. A second virtue is the broad temporal range. A third lies in the abundance of information, matched with well-chosen examples as well as with bibliographic references.

However, the book's wide range, together with its multidisciplinary approach, results in certain difficulties in thoroughly addressing key issues far from the author's main areas of research. For example, in Gasca's treatment of the ideas of Alfred Chandler Jr., there are no references to Joel Mokyr, whose The Lever of Riches (1990) and The Gifts of Athena (2002) might have been useful for understanding the relationship between technology and economics. A second weakness concerns the book's rather poor analysis of transformations following the introduction of information and communications technology. A final weakness is the volume's overall lack of interpretation, although this is in many ways offset by the vast amount of information it presents. Indeed, on balance, Gasca's work is well worth reading, for it does provide a valuable and comprehensive overview of the complex interaction between science and technology.