In This Issue

William Boyd opens "Making Meat: Science, Technology, and American Poultry Production" with a question posed by Siegfried Giedion in Mechanization Takes Command: "What happens when mechanization encounters organic substance?" Some scholars have lately pointed up the difficulties in clearly differentiating between nature and technology. In his examination of the system of raising broilers--chickens bred for meat--in the United States over the course of the twentieth century, Boyd follows their lead. The "industrial chicken," he writes, is the product of technoscientific practice, including "key innovations in the areas of environmental control, genetics, nutrition, and disease management"; its biology is now thoroughly "subordinated . . . to the dictates of industrial production." The story of its development, Boyd emphasizes, is "part of a larger process of agro-industrialization, which has not only transformed the social practices of agriculture, food production, and diet . . . but also facilitated a profound restructuring of the relationship between nature and technology." The long-term consequences of that transformation remain unknown, but, as Boyd makes clear, there is ample reason for concern.

Robert Lewis focuses on transformation of quite a different sort, from nineteenth-century mill building into twentieth-century factory. Lewis situates "Redesigning the Workplace: The North American Factory in the Interwar Period" at the intersection of two bodies of literature: one focused on factory design, exemplified by Lindy Biggs's Rational Factory, the other concerned with the diverse production strategies adopted by late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century firms, in which the work of Philip Scranton, Charles Sabel, and Jonathan Zeitlin figures prominently. The modern factory pioneered by "routinized and standardized producers" such as the Ford Motor Company could not suit every production strategy; many manufacturers, Lewis observes, selectively adapted elements of its design when remodeling, replacing, or adding on to existing shops to create work spaces effectively tailored to their circumstances. "Incrementally introducing such changes," Lewis argues, "twentieth-century firms built up a repertoire of design strategies that served a spectrum of production needs."

In "Samuel Phillips and the Taming of Apollo," Stephen Johnson offers a case study in technical management. Project Apollo was "the largest and most famous of a series of large-scale aerospace projects" that remain models for big, high-tech undertakings; as Johnson observes, many have looked to them for "clues to potential solutions for intractable social problems" as well--and always in vain. The style of management pioneered in these massive projects, Johnson writes, "propagated cold-war ideals just as surely as a Titan nuclear warhead," and to the extent that it continues to thrive "the values and institutions of the cold war persist despite that conflict's end." Project Apollo exemplifies "the possibilities of technical management," and a study of the project, particularly of the managerial techniques and organizational innovations brought to it from the air force by Phillips, sheds light on why those successes failed to translate outside the civilian-military hybrid of the aerospace industry.

"Voluntarism and the Fruits of Collaboration," Atsushi Akera's study of the founding of Share, a computer-user group made up of buyers of IBM 704 and, later, 709 mainframes, also addresses a corner of the technology-driven cold war economy. Begun in response to a variety of challenges in the early computer industry ranging from a lack of technical standards to the shortage of programmers, Share's main practical contributions came in the development of operating procedures, operating systems, and the specialty of systems programming. But Share also constituted a crucial stage in the professionalization of computer programming. Professionalization, Akera notes, involves "historically specific strategies," and the early history of Share, in part because of the group's unusual mission and makeup, "provides an opportunity to reexamine traditional narratives of professionalization."

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