Technologies of Power: Essays in Honor of Thomas Parke Hughes and Agatha Chipley Hughes

(Paperback)

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This collection explores how technologies become forms of power, how people embed their authority in technological systems, and how the machines and the knowledge that make up technical systems strengthen or reshape social, political, and cultural power. The authors suggest ways in which a more nuanced investigation of technology's complex history can enrich our understanding of the changing meanings of modernity. They consider the relationship among the state, espertise and authority; the construction of national identity; changes in the structure and distribution of labour; political ideology and industrial development; and poltical practices during the Cold War. The essays show how insight into the technological aspects of such broad processes can help sysnthesize material and cultural methods of inquiry and how reframing technology's past in broader historical terms can suggest new directions for science and technology studies.

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...[A] tribute to two fascinating people, and it also stands in its own right as a primer for its field....

Author Bio

Michael Thad Allen is Assistant Professor of History, Technology, and Society at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Gabrielle Hecht is Associate Professor of History at the University of Michigan and the author of The Radiance of France: Nuclear Power and National Identity after World War II (MIT Press, 1998).