Globalization and Vulnerability: Challenges and Opportunities for SHOT around Its Fiftieth Anniversary

Fifty years ago, SHOT was designed and created—one could say, engineered— in a careful and strategic way.¹ During the subsequent fifty years, SHOT developed into the leading international scholarly society in the history of technology. The maturing of the society and its journal, Technology and Culture, went hand-in-hand with the development of the field of the history of technology. Since the initial breaking-away from the history of science, the history of technology has now acquired all of the characteristics of a well-established scholarly discipline: national and international societies, peer-reviewed journals, book series, newsletters, graduate programs, and professorial chairs.² Where does SHOT stand today? What are the key problems in the current history of technology? Which roles do I see for historians of technology in our contemporary societies? Rather than providing a descriptive review on the basis of, for example, recent issues of Technology and Culture, I will make a perhaps somewhat provocative argument about the challenges and opportunities that SHOT faces now, at this moment of reaching full maturity at its fiftieth anniversary.

Key challenges in the first years centered on defining the subject matter of the history of technology and the methods by which to research it. In his contribution to this set of essays, Tom Hughes recounts discussions on the definition of “technology,” and on appropriate approaches to study its relation to civilization and culture. Though the patriarchs of SHOT explicitly thought about their relation to the engineering community and to general historians, the thrust of the discussions was internally directed. And necessarily so: a new field had to be created. As Brooke Hindle recollected in 1985, it “started with a motley crew of scholars who were but slightly conscious of their common interest in the history of technology. Individually, they thought of themselves first as engineers, business historians, economists, sociologists, historians of science, or general historians who had wandered into a somewhat strange field.”³ John Staudenmaier has described how after some twenty years, this “motley crew” had indeed created a community of scholars.

Staudenmaier traced this development into a scholarly discipline by analyzing the contents of Technology and Culture through its first twenty-five years.⁴ He found a dominating focus on questions that are internal to the development of technology: phases of technical development, technological creativity, the relation between technology and science, the characteristics of technological knowledge, and technology as a cultural phenomenon. This research agenda, I am convinced, was crucial for the constitution of the field, the journal, and the society. The inevitable price was a relative neglect of problems outside the technical realm. Staudenmaier already identifies some of these: socioeconomic development (“the worker perspective”), global development (“cultural conflict in technology transfer” and “non-Western technologies”), and democratization (“critique of capitalism” and “women and technology”).⁵ In this essay, I will make a plea for addressing some of these challenges more centrally, and I will also argue that there are very pertinent opportunities for SHOT to do so now.

Challenges

The challenge for Mel Kranzberg, Tom Hughes, and their colleagues in the early days of SHOT was to create a discipline with a subject matter, a shared set of approaches, and an institutional home. That challenge, we can now conclude, has been met in an extremely successful way. So successful indeed, I will argue, that it is time to move on. Already, since the mid-term review by John Staudenmaier, the windows have been opening and a growing interest in the world outside is evident. Institutional indicators are the increasingly non-American membership of SHOT, the broad range of topics and approaches addressed in SHOT’s annual meetings, and SHOT’s policies to support scholars from developing countries. Technology and Culture has begun to publish articles and essays that explicitly address some of the “gaps” that Staudenmaier identified in 1985, and additional publication channels have been created to relate the work in the history of technology to current societal questions and debates in communities outside SHOT.⁶ On the basis of these recent accomplishments...