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Author: Jennifer Karns Alexander Publisher: JHU Press ISBN: 9780801886935 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 268
Book Description
Winner, 2010 Edelstein Prize, Society for the History of Technology Efficiency—associated with individual discipline, superior management, and increased profits or productivity—often counts as one of the highest virtues in Western culture. But what does it mean, exactly, to be efficient? How did this concept evolve from a means for evaluating simple machines to the mantra of progress and a prerequisite for success? In this provocative and ambitious study, Jennifer Karns Alexander explores the growing power of efficiency in the post-industrial West. Examining the ways the concept has appeared in modern history—from a benign measure of the thermal economy of a machine to its widespread application to personal behaviors like chewing habits, spending choices, and shop floor movements to its controversial use as a measure of the business success of American slavery—she argues that beneath efficiency's seemingly endless variety lies a common theme: the pursuit of mastery through techniques of surveillance, discipline, and control. Six historical case studies—two from Britain, one each from France and Germany, and two from the United States—illustrate the concept's fascinating development and provide context for the meanings of, and uses for, efficiency today and in the future.
Author: Jennifer Karns Alexander Publisher: JHU Press ISBN: 9780801886935 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 268
Book Description
Winner, 2010 Edelstein Prize, Society for the History of Technology Efficiency—associated with individual discipline, superior management, and increased profits or productivity—often counts as one of the highest virtues in Western culture. But what does it mean, exactly, to be efficient? How did this concept evolve from a means for evaluating simple machines to the mantra of progress and a prerequisite for success? In this provocative and ambitious study, Jennifer Karns Alexander explores the growing power of efficiency in the post-industrial West. Examining the ways the concept has appeared in modern history—from a benign measure of the thermal economy of a machine to its widespread application to personal behaviors like chewing habits, spending choices, and shop floor movements to its controversial use as a measure of the business success of American slavery—she argues that beneath efficiency's seemingly endless variety lies a common theme: the pursuit of mastery through techniques of surveillance, discipline, and control. Six historical case studies—two from Britain, one each from France and Germany, and two from the United States—illustrate the concept's fascinating development and provide context for the meanings of, and uses for, efficiency today and in the future.
Author: Susan Harris Smith Publisher: Duke University Press ISBN: 0822380854 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 487
Book Description
America at the last fin de siècle was in a period of profound societal transition. Industrialization was well under way and with it a burgeoning sense of professionalism and a growing middle class that was becoming increasingly anxious about issues of race, gender, and class. The American 1890s: A Cultural Reader is a wide-ranging anthology of essays, criticism, and fiction first printed in periodicals during those last remarkable years of the nineteenth century, a decade commonly referred to as the “golden age” of periodical culture. To depict the many changes taking place in the United States at this time, Susan Harris Smith and Melanie Dawson have drawn from an eclectic range of periodicals: elite monthlies such as Scribner’s, Harper’s, and the Atlantic Monthly; political magazines such as the North American Review and Forum; magazines for general readers such as Cosmopolitan and McClures; and specialized publications including the Chatauquan, Outing, and Colored American Magazine. Authors represented in the collection include Andrew Carnegie, Edith Wharton, Theodore Roosevelt, Susan B. Anthony, Booker T. Washington, Stephen Crane, W. E. B. DuBois, Jacob Riis, and Frederick Jackson Turner. A general introduction to the period, a brief contextualizing essay for each selection, and a comprehensive bibliography of secondary sources are provided as well. In examining and debating the decade’s momentous political and social developments, the essays, editorials, and stories in this anthology reflect a constantly shifting culture at a time of internal turmoil, unprecedented political expansion, and a renaissance of modern ideas and new technologies. Bringing together a carefully chosen selection of primary sources, The American 1890s presents a remarkable variety of views—nostalgic, protective, imperialist, progressive, egalitarian, and democratic—held by American citizens a century ago.
Author: Martin S. Sheffer Publisher: Lexington Books ISBN: 9780739103661 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 226
Book Description
The America Randolph Silliman Bourne searched for his entire life-but never found-was an America in which the institutions of democratic government remained responsive to the needs of all. A progressive in the age of progressivism, Bourne fully understood John Jay's dictum that the United States "should be governed by the people who own it." The Atlantic Monthly, the New Republic, and the Dial were the forum for Bourne's social commentary during a brief career that lasted from 1912 to 1918. In Search of a Democratic America offers the best of Bourne's writings on politics, religion, education, philosophy, society, and youth. The readings, and commentary, reveal the literary radical and social critic in his true guise as a spokesman for liberal democracy, a democratic theorist who strove for a modern, industrial, multi-ethnic nation peopled by the intelligent, the caring, and the concerned.
Author: Thomas D. Lynch Publisher: CRC Press ISBN: 1420026437 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 905
Book Description
Few subjects are more influenced by philosophy than the form of governance that guides and administers public affairs, yet much of the literature about public administration remains silent about this connection. Handbook of Organization Theory and Management: The Philosophical Approach, Second Edition identifies and discusses many of the mos
Author: Brigid Hains Publisher: Melbourne Univ. Publishing ISBN: 9780522850369 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 272
Book Description
An elegant, original and very well written book, luminous with meaning, full of superb cameos and suggestive arguments ... the central figures are both charismatic, articulate and iconic: they are central to any estimation of twentieth-century Australian cultural and environmental history.-Dr Tom Griffiths, Australian National University This is a path-breaking work ... the environmental aspect of the work is powerful, and there are some wonderful ideas about what is 'civilised' and what is 'wilderness'. Brigid Hains has reinvigorated the tradition of 'frontier studies'. -Dr Jane Carruthers, University of South Africa The frontier mythology of the early twentieth century laid the groundwork for the wilderness cult of contemporary Australian life. It became etched in the Australian imagination through the image of folk heroes such as Douglas Mawson and John Flynn, promising national renewal through virile heroism and an encounter with 'wild' nature. Most frontier histories in Australia have focused on race relations; this is among the first to focus on the frontier as an ecological phenomenon. It draws on rich primary sources, many of which have never been published, including Antarctic diaries, and the letters and journalism of John Flynn. In this superb account Brigid Hains offers: -a new interpretation of two Australian folk heroes and their iconic status in Australian culture -a fresh approach to frontier history that focuses on the landscape rather than on racial conflict, and -an explanation of the origins of wilderness conservation in Australia. Mawson's Antarctic exploration and Flynn's Australian Inland Mission both drew on imperial and trans-Pacific influences, such as imperial adventure literature, the cult of polar exploration, the rural life movement, population theory and eugenics. The Ice and the Inland compares these two Australian folk heroes and analyses the reasons for their popularity. It raises a number of topical issues, including the role of Australia in the international management of Antarctica; Flynn's treatment of Aboriginal people; the reasons for conservation of Australia's wild places, from the arid Centre to the frozen wastes of Antarctica; and relationships between the country and the bush, and between the metropolis and the frontier.
Author: Daniela Rossini Publisher: Harvard University Press ISBN: 9780674028241 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 284
Book Description
In 1918, Wilson's image as leader of the free world and the image of America as dispenser of democracy spread through Italy, filling an ideological void. Rossini sets the Italian-American political confrontation in the context of the countries' cultural perceptions of each other, different war experiences, and ideas about participatory democracy.
Author: Norton Garfinkle Publisher: Yale University Press ISBN: 030013780X Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 240
Book Description
Norton Garfinkle paints a disquieting picture of America today: a nation increasingly divided between economic winners and losers, a nation in which the middle-class American Dream seems more and more elusive. Recent government policies reflect a commitment to a new supply-side winner-take-all Gospel of Wealth. Garfinkle warns that this supply-side economic vision favors the privileged few over the majority of American citizens striving to better their economic condition. Garfinkle employs historical insight and data-based economic analysis to demonstrate compellingly the sharp departure of the supply-side Gospel of Wealth from an American ideal that dates back to Abraham Lincoln—the vision of America as a society in which ordinary, hard-working individuals can get ahead and attain a middle-class living, and in which government plays an active role in expanding opportunities and ensuring against economic exploitation. Supply-side economic policies increase economic disparities and, Garfinkle insists, they fail on technical, factual, moral, and political grounds. He outlines a fresh economic vision, consonant with the great American tradition of ensuring strong economic growth, while preserving the middle-class American Dream.
Author: Gregory M. Tobin Publisher: University of Texas Press ISBN: 0292769458 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 205
Book Description
Walter Prescott Webb became one of the best known interpreters of the American West following the publication of The Great Plains in 1931. That book remained one of the outstanding studies of the region for decades and attracted considerable attention over the years for its unusual emphasis on the impact of geographic factors on the process of settlement. Using manuscript sources, some of which had not previously been available, Gregory M. Tobin has traced the elements that went into the planning and writing of The Great Plains and that account for its distinctive approach to the writing of a regional history. Tobin emphasizes two aspects of Webb's life that molded the historian's outlook: his early family life and community connections in West Texas and his admiration for the ideas of scholar Lindley Miller Keasbey. Webb reacted strongly against the assumption that the only cultural values of any real worth emanated from the urban and sophisticated East; he was determined to write the history of his own people in a way that would reveal the scale of their anonymous contribution to American civilization. By reverting to Keasbey's stress on the relationship between natural environment and social institutions, Webb broadened his study to take in what he believed to be a distinct geographic environment. The result was The Great Plains, an assertion of individual and regional identity by a man with a personal stake in establishing the image of a distinctive Plains civilization. Although The Making of a History is not a full biography of Walter Prescott Webb, it is the first biographically oriented study of a man regarded as one of the twentieth century's major western historians. It places his development within the framework of his intellectual and social setting and, in a sense, subjects his career to the same type of scrutiny that he advocated as the basis of the study of evolving cultures.
Author: Leslie Gale Parr Publisher: University of Georgia Press ISBN: 0820336319 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 268
Book Description
The decades between the Progressive Era of the 1920s and the civil rights struggles of the 1960s were a period of profound change in the lives of southern women. The life of Sarah Towles Reed (1882–1978) illuminates and parallels many of these transformations. Over the course of her long public life as a teacher, labor union lobbyist, and activist for the rights of public school teachers, Reed emerged as a groundbreaking leader, unafraid of taking on the educational and political hierarchies of the South. A Will of Her Own is the life story of a woman who had a lasting impact on her times as well as the story of the times themselves. Reed engaged the most significant concerns of the liberal reformers during the first half of the twentieth century—the struggle for economic independence for women and the fight for women's rights, the effort to maintain intellectual freedom in the face of cold war paranoia, and the pursuit of racial justice. Her successes, as well as her failures, lend a personal perspective to these national trends. Her career also helps to clarify what it meant to be a southern liberal in the twentieth century and how the region's peculiar circumstances shaped the politics and strategies of southern reformers.
Author: Jennifer Karns Alexander
Author: Jennifer Karns Alexander
Author: Susan Harris Smith
Author: Martin S. Sheffer
Author: Thomas D. Lynch
Author: Brigid Hains
Author: Daniela Rossini
Author: Norton Garfinkle
Author: Gregory M. Tobin
Author: Edward C. Rafferty
Author: Leslie Gale Parr