The State of SHOT: Organizational Capacity in a Volunteer-based Organization

A community is like a ship; everyone ought to be prepared to take the helm.

—Henrik Ibsen, An Enemy of the People (1882), act 1

Those who can, do. Those who can do more, volunteer.

—Unknown

Presidential addresses for scholarly organizations are a curious form of presentation. I am deeply honored to have the opportunity to add my own talk to the roster, and I explored several prior addresses in thinking about my approach. If there is a tradition within SHOT about these events, most presidents use the occasion to suggest underdeveloped or missing dimensions in our scholarship on the history of technology (a state-of-the-field review) or to propose ways that our research might be made more congruent with the wider intellectual currents of our time.¹ Occasionally, as exemplified by the 1998 address of Bruce Sinclair, a president focuses his or her talk on the health or initiatives of the society itself.² My address falls into this latter category, for I wish to examine the state of SHOT from the specific perspective of the society’s organizational capability as a professional organization that depends on the efforts of volunteers.

It is not an accident that I have come to focus on this question, although I never envisioned discussing SHOT as an organization when entering graduate school as a Hagley Fellow at the University of Delaware in 1975. My topic stems in large part from my experiences at Delaware with Eugene Ferguson, who showed his students by example that every scholar owes a commitment of time and energy to the organizations upon which we build professional careers. For Gene, the Society for the History of Technology certainly was a central focus, and he clearly envisioned that our commitment should involve more than attending SHOT’s annual meeting. My attempts to honor his example explain the unanticipated paths my career has followed.

A key branch in that pathway came at the 1989 annual meeting in Sacramento, when Alex Roland informed me of my election to succeed him as SHOT’s secretary. During the next six years in that office, I discovered rather surprisingly the temperament and skills of an administrator, even while learning that serving as secretary could shape and inform my scholarship. I doubt, for example, if I would have chosen to explore SHOT’s early history had I not been curious about the work of other secretaries, especially SHOT’s founder, Mel Kranzberg.³ Gene’s example also influenced my decision to serve as the National Science Foundation’s program director for science and technology studies from 2000 to 2002. After I had the good fortune to receive a dissertation improvement grant from NSF in 1979, Gene had made sure I understood my indebtedness to NSF. But once again, this administrative position opened important opportunities for my intellectual and scholarly activities.⁴ The bottom line is that SHOT started me down the particular path of combining academic administration with being a historian of technology. The route culminated in my acceptance of positions as chair of the Department of Social Sciences and then as dean of the College of Science and Arts, both at Michigan Tech. Taken together, these various opportunities and experiences have prompted me to focus my energy over the last two years on SHOT as an organization. So as my presidential term comes to a close, I wish to share with SHOT’s members my thoughts on this question.

Attention to the state of SHOT may not be as common as conversation about the state of our field. But when such a discussion breaks out, it tends toward consideration of the excitement and stimulation of the papers at the annual meetings, the vibrancy of SHOT’s special-interest groups, and the quality of the papers in Technology and Culture.⁵ Something along these lines began again in 2013 when a group of dedicated members, including Gabrielle Hecht and Atsushi Akera, urged the executive council to take steps to ensure that SHOT was connected and contributed to the most exciting currents related to...