In This Issue

Two of the articles in this issue are inspired by Ruth Schwartz Cowan's concept of the "consumption junction." Onno de Wit, Jan van den Ende, Johan Schot, and Ellen van Oost ("Innovation Junctions: Office Technologies in the Netherlands, 1880-1980") note that "organizationally and geographically distinct spaces" have been key sites of technology development in the twentieth century. They focus on one such site, the office, and propose a conceptual tool to aid in analyzing the development of technology there: the "innovation junction," which they define as "a space in which different sets of heterogeneous technologies are mobilized in support of social and economic activities and in which, as a result of their collocation, interactions and exchanges among these occur," leading to "location-specific innovation patterns." The authors contrast the dynamics of technology development in innovation junctions with those at work in large technical systems. In "A Socialist Consumption Junction: Debating the Mechanization of Housework in East Germany, 1956-1957," Karin Zachmann asks: "Can the concept of the consumption junction be employed to analyze consumer decisions and actor networks in a nationalized economy as well?" Zachmann uses a case study of the Central Working Group on Household Technology in the East German Ministry for General Engineering to explore this question. In the end, she writes, East Germany's "attempt to resolve the contradiction between centralized production and decentralized consumption by constructing a consumption junction in an orderly and planned way" failed--but, she concludes, that failure does not resolve the issue. The individualism inherent in consumption "insured that interaction at the consumption junction occurred spontaneously even in state socialism," a spontaneity that begs for further explanation.

Kenkichiro Koizumi focuses not on consumption but on production in "In Search of Wakon: The Cultural Dynamics of the Rise of Manufacturing Technology in Postwar Japan." As Koizumi notes, numerous explanations have been proposed for the startling fact that Japan, devastated by war in 1945, in little more than two decades acquired a level of manufacturing expertise that seemed to surpass--and threaten--that of every other nation in the industrial world--most notably the United States. Rather than add to this already large body of literature, Koizumi seeks to "explore an important underlying cultural factor" in Japan's rise as a manufacturing power. In the years before the war, the Japanese intelligentsia developed a "mental framework" expressed in the phrase wakon yosai: "Japanese spirit, Western technology." War blasted this framework to pieces, Koizumi writes, and the postwar search for a usable replacement for it created "an important cultural dynamic at work in the rise of world-class manufacturing technology in postwar Japan."

Pierre Claude Reynard's "Public Order and Privilege: Eighteenth-Century French Roots of Environmental Regulation," which leads off this issue, also explores the gradual development of a cultural dynamic, or at least a political one. Reynard uses records of disputes between mining and manufacturing enterprises and a wider public over the effects of industry on local environments to illuminate "the origins of environmental regulation of economic activity." "By the eighteenth century," he writes, "French authorities displayed a distinct willingness . . . to assess the damages inflicted by many economic projects." The mechanisms that evolved under the Old Regime by which the state asserted a right to "interfere with production initiatives" in the name of a public interest in environmental quality "shaped the tools that emerged . . . to temper the environmental costs of industrial production."

With this issue we launch a new occasional feature, Classics Revisited. The name succinctly encapsulates our aim: to ask how certain books--some well known to and highly regarded by readers of T&C, others once greatly admired but now forgotten, perhaps undeservedly--read now. We begin with Lewis Mumford's Technics and Civilization. Other works would probably have made as good a starting point, but none a better one. Look for further contributions to this series in future issues.

Finally, Rosalind Williams concludes this issue with comments composed not long after 11 September 2001. The events of that dark day and of...