In This Issue

Every profession organizes itself, in great part, by defining rules for membership and conditions warranting expulsion. Kara W. Swanson (“The Emergence of the Professional Patent Practitioner”) takes our readers into the heart of the first wave of pervasive professionalizations in the United States, during the last third of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth. Engineers and lawyers were hardly the only groups who established organizations whose increasingly specific field definitions sharpened the gatekeeper focus for accepted members of the profession in question. Swanson studies an amorphous group of people who helped inventors file and/or defend their patents. They were very gradually sorted into those whose claim to legitimacy depended on proven technological expertise (“engineers”) and those who claimed legal expertise. Lawyers and their professional organizations worked intensely to construct a single narrative: “lawyers would be considered ‘good’—that is, reputable, well-trained agents—and nonlawyers would be considered ‘bad’—disreputable, poorly trained agents” (p. 538). Their strategy lumped actual charlatans with non-attorneys who had legitimate technical expertise (often matched with experience in patent office practice). Surprisingly, however, when the lawyer-engineer turf battle came to a head in a 1963 Supreme Court case, the Court rejected the arguments of the bar associations. “The Supreme Court thus gave the country a new narrative of the patent agent, replacing the negative one the bar had attempted to create. The [non-attorney] patent practitioner was vital and rare, a creature of special expertise—expertise that did not come from law school training and bar admittance, but . . . from ‘technical engineering and scientific skill and knowledge’” (p. 547).

Eighteenth-century Sweden, particularly because of its profitable copper mining industry, provides an enlightening example of the period when chemistry began to be rescued from its shady and longstanding association with alchemists and charlatans. Hjalmar Fors (“‘Away! Away to Falun!’: J. G. Gahn and the Application of Enlightenment Chemistry to Smelting”) explores the role of networks and patronage in the lives of ambitious new chemists during the mid-eighteenth century in Sweden. Fors follows the early career of Johan Gottlieb Gahn, concentrating on the tangled and intimate details of Gahn’s introduction to a world of mutual favors which offered an anxious path through the world of the colleagues and friends of his mentor and patron, Torbeen Berman. Fors introduces the reader to a world in which scientific and technical ability is given more than one leg up through the efforts of one’s mentor calling in favors. Ultimately, however, the anxious young Gahn surpassed his mentor by treating academic chemists and on-the-ground smelters with equal respect. “Gahn’s apparent disregard for the social distance separating him from the smelters is not only an attractive trait, but one that paid dividends. In identifying with these workers, he also identified with the group that knew the most about the different smelting processes” (p. 565). Fors summarizes the lessons Gahn can teach the reader: “Gahn thus succeeded where Hermelin [one of his putative patrons] had failed. By immersing himself in local affairs while retaining his place in the scientific community, he brought changes to the Falun mines and their owners, who granted this specialist . . . the right to interpret and reinvent traditional processes and trusted him as both neighbor and expert. Consequently, the authority on how best to conduct smeltings started shifting from artisanal owners to formally educated chemists and metallurgists” (p. 566, emphasis added).

Using the parliamentary debates attending Canada’s novel geosynchronous satellite system and the resulting Telesat Canada Act at the end of the 1960s, Vera Pavri (“What You Say Is What You Get: Policy Discourse and the Regulation of Canada’s First Domestic Communications Satellite System”) tests discourse analysis as a method for explaining why complex technological decisions take the form they do. “Policy analysts studying discourse generally agree that policy outcomes are often determined by threads of argumentation, persuasion, and rhetoric, which are more ideological than logical in structure, and more anecdotal than scientific in their basis” (pp. 570–71). Would the system be perceived by technologically unschooled policymakers as merely a modest extension of the extant microwave network, or as...