Manufacturing Rationality: The Engineering Foundations of the Managerial Revolution (review)

Manufacturing Rationality: The Engineering Foundations of the Managerial Revolution. By Yehouda Shenhav. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Pp. viii+247. $49.95.

This is the kind of book that makes one feel good about being a historian. Its author is a sociologist, and he has produced a work whose style and language make it at times impenetrable to the uninitiated, and always hard going. The fact that Yehouda Shenhav's ordinary idioms are sometimes not those of a first-language user, and that his press has not corrected all his lapses, is the least of his and his reader's problems. It does not help that his book uses the system of scientific citation, so that the reader has to pursue his meaning--a difficult enough task in itself--while being tripped up by one bracketed reference after another.

Nor are these many references especially helpful. Some attribute ideas to a particular secondary work but without any specific page or even chapter reference to enable one to check that their authors' intentions have been accurately understood and reflected. The largest number, to the author's primary sources (articles in the American Machinist and Engineering Magazine, which he has plowed through all the way to 1932 and subjected to a qualitative and quantitative content analysis), include neither authors' names nor titles. There is simply a journal title, date, and page, so that none of the information a reader might need in order to be able to know something more of the character of the data used is available. Crucially, one cannot tell if the item cited or quoted is an example of editorial comment or straight reporting or some other genre.

The book feels much longer than its 221 pages of text would suggest; wading through this glop is a chore, and not for the fainthearted. The task is Sisyphean: you make a heroic effort to understand what Shenhav is saying, think you have almost got it, and then trip over some bit of rubble and the stone rolls right back to the bottom of the hill. Having spent parts of the last several months reading much of the literature of late-nineteenth-century engineering, with its (at best) grace, wit, deep seriousness, originality of mind, and (at least) plainspoken competence, it strikes me as a minor tragedy that a modern scholarly attempt to explore and explain the ideas of this lost world should be such a signal failure of communication.

Well, you might be thinking, we are all professionals here; historians of technology are made of stern stuff, and do not expect to enjoy what they have to read. So why should you read this book? It is not about technology, except in the sense that the techniques of controlling complex organizations in a rational-bureaucratic fashion qualify alongside the other social, intellectual, and material constructions we study (which they certainly do). It draws on, and adds little to, the standard literature on the history of mechanical engineering and its professionalization, the contributions of engineering professionals to the development of systematic and scientific management, the resistance to these tendencies among "practical" manufacturers and from organized labor, and the broader social and ideological ramifications of these patterns of thought and action. The works of Hugh Aitken, Daniel Calhoun, Monte Calvert, Samuel Haber, Samuel Hays, Mariann Jelinek, Leland Jenks, Robert Kanigel, Edwin Layton, Joseph Litterer, Daniel Nelson, Bruce Sinclair, and all the other usual suspects are present in the text. Shenhav seems to have little notion of, or interest in, what mechanical engineers actually did, or what went on within the enterprises where they worked, and there is much secondhand "history" here that is crude and simplistic or, to be charitable, confused.

Shenhav is undoubtedly a very smart man, he has done a lot of work, and many of his findings are interesting if one can trust his interpretation of his data--summarized in neat graphs and tables...