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Posted 11-9-00
CLEVELAND -- When people check their watches, it's accepted that everyone is using the Greenwich time system. This wasn't always so. Once individuals moved to the rhythms of their own locales, guided basically by the rise and fall of the sun.
The onset of the industrial revolution in the 18th century changed human habits. To create a seamless flow of produce from fields, goods off the production line, and people from home to work, industrialists and policy makers began to devise ways to coordinate people's activities on a much larger scale. Control and control mechanism became a significant part of industrial society's culture.
In Miriam Levin's recently released collection of edited essays -- Cultures of Control -- the associate professor of history at Case Western Reserve University offers a new interpretation of the history of industrial society that differs from the conventional focus on the rise of factories, machine production, and new sources of energy.
Cultures of Control presents 11 studies by a group of international scholars on human efforts to control the environment, human behavior, and machines. As Levin stresses in her preface and essay, industrial society is better explained in terms of the emergence of the belief that humans could scientifically design a world to serve predetermined economic, political, and social ends.
"It's an amazing story about our vision of society as a vast technological system and humans as self-acting machines. This vision is modeled on a notion that nature is a mechanistic system with its own 'natural' controls," she explains.
Its agents have been master designers, economic theorist, social psychologists, government regulators, engineers, and business managers, says Levin. "In our society, control has offered a way to orchestrate people and machines in productive systems without continuous personal supervision or physical punishment as incentives."
The origins, uses, and types of control are some of the themes covered in the essays, which Levin has organized into two sections. The first part ranges from an exploration of the origins of the idea of control to studies on nature out of control, national measurement standards, French automobile club practices, Disney urban design, and Swedish household management. The second part examines technologies of control such as Nazi concentration camp designs, French office forms, Cold War library information systems, airplane guidance systems, and Soviet cybernetics.
The pervasiveness of control is evident by its frequent use in everyday language such as control room, control central, self-control, control freak, and out of control.
The term comes from the Anglo-French word contre-rolle, a master register which medieval officials used to keep tax collectors accountable. Eventually the word took on several meanings, from imposed rules to steering.
"Today we find controls everywhere in society," says Levin, who teaches in CWRU's History of Science, Technology, Environment, and Medicine Program.
She adds, "We have devised traffic signals, office filing systems, measurement standards, automatic telephone dialers, and network browsers to coordinate our very complex society."
Control also became a subject for academic study. Levin points out that communication theory, which Norbert Weiner and other scientists at Massachusetts Institute of Technology developed in the 1950s, established the mathematical basis for equating animal and machine systems.
Institutions like CWRU train engineers to design machines that work in predictable ways -- everything from new "masternets" of internets to the biomedical technologies which assist that human machine, the body. The University has courses in engineering, science, medicine, business management, social science, and humanities that examine the design of systems, control theory, social control, and control mechanisms.
Support to write the book came from CWRU's College of Arts and Sciences for a professional leave for Levin's research, enabling her to spend the fall of 1998 at the Royal Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, where she had an appointment as a visiting professor.
The book is part of Harwood Academic Publishers' Studies in the History of Science, Technology and Medicine Series. Economist Robert Heilbroner called Levin's book "a truly important piece of work" which "both poses and comes up to a challenge of major proportions."