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Conclusion: Servants or Savants? Revaluing the Middle Ground
- Johns Hopkins University Press
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c o n c l u s i o n Servants or Savants? Revaluing the Middle Ground In the late 1990s neurologist and writer Frank Wilson noted the similar, highly developed manual dexterity of a surgeon and a world-class sleight-of-hand magician and then went on to observe parallels in their audiences’ perception of their skills: “The patient in a doctor’s office or in a hospital and the person in an audience watching a magic show . . . participate in a ritual shifting of power and responsibility to another. Conceding helplessness, the patient says to the doctor, ‘I trust you. I know you can heal me.’ The magician is placed on the same kind of pedestal, even if it is only theater. For just a little while he is clairvoyant, wise, and strong. He contains powerful knowledge and can work magic.”1 Yet what happens when we replace the doctor or the magician in this performance with an auto mechanic? (See fig. 31.) The latter, too, displays highly developed dexterity and skill, and the temporary shift of power in his favor remains. But the audience’s unwillingness to trust the mechanic-practitioner converts submissive expectation of healing or pleasant entertainment into fretful anxiety about getting gypped. This book has attempted to understand this puzzle of technology’s middle ground by examining, side by side, the technological and social developments that have shaped the auto mechanic’s occupation over the last century. The history of the auto mechanic’s occupation has been, at root, a story of the creation and maintenance of sociotechnical hierarchies. Such hierarchies are not exclusive to auto repair or to technology’s middle ground.2 Yet studying the auto mechanic’s occupation provides new vistas onto their complex formation, their institutionalization, and their consequences. Looking at very early auto repair confirms that significant technological change can be socially disruptive. The introduction of the horseless carriage upended the established social arrangements of personal transportation which had grown up around horse-drawn vehicles by the late nineteenth century. The disruption came Conclusion 171 not just from the novelty of the technology or the scarcity of experience with it but also from the mechanical complexity of the machinery and the distinction between automotive knowledge and animal husbandry. The reign of chauffeurmechanics proved brief as wealthy urban motorists and their allies drew on their access to deeper, more powerful social structures—courts, legislatures, training programs, surveillance—to regain control and reestablish social order in their favor.3 Still, despite the decisive downward turn in the chauffeur’s status, enthusiasm for the new technology kept many Americans clamoring for mechanical knowledge of automobiles. Widespread use of automobiles—whether by middleand working-class Americans or by the U.S. Army—necessitated molding that enthusiasm into an occupation. As the auto mechanic’s occupation emerged out of multiple sources and niches in the economy, further technological development of automobiles offered fewer opportunities to challenge social norms than had their initial introduction . Some women and African Americans employed automobiles to challenge gender norms and racial stereotypes, but the work of maintaining and repairing automobiles instead grew ever more tightly entwined with prevalent social hierarchies and institutionalized into the status quo of American society. Gender, race, and class segregation in military training, public education, and employment mingled almost inextricably with the visceral nature of early automotive technology, setting auto repair off as one of a number of “culturally segmented epistemological domains.”4 This process gave particular social meanings to specific ways of knowing and interacting with automotive technology. It re- flected and reinforced the mechanic’s position between producers and consumers of automobiles as well as vis-à-vis other occupational and social groups. The resulting sociotechnical ensemble gained considerable power and momentum by mid-century, and the stigma that society attached to the auto mechanic’s occupation led in large measure to the crisis many perceived in the industry by the late 1960s. That crisis in turn contributed to the conditions favoring the development of diagnostic equipment, On-Board Diagnostics, and computerization. Studying the history of those who have repaired cars, as opposed to the history of the Ford Motor Company or the impact of the Model T on rural America, highlights developments that neither production- nor consumption-centered frameworks of analysis can explain well. Such frameworks certainly generate relevant questions and explain many actors’ actions in the automotive service industry.5 Ford, for example, designed its Laboratory Test Set of...