America by Design by David F Noble
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I read this book more than ten years ago, and I'm just reviewing it now. It's one of those books that I found in a bibliography or references cited section of another book I had been reading. That book was probably either a John H. Bodley book (author of Victims of Progress) or some other sociology-related tract. Perhaps, it was Langdon Winner's The Whale and the Reactor, which was another great book that develops a similar theme. In America By Design, Noble describes the co-evolution of technology, science, and, that all-important element of capitalism, the corporation. I don't recall the specifics of Noble's argument, other than to say that he clearly demonstrates that all three of these elements of modern society worked together in their development. They drove each other. It struck me as a very post-modernist kind of argument, as it employed the 'science does not work in a vacuum' theoretical framework, in that business decisions often drove the science and thus, drove the technology. Of course, at other times, the technology is what drove the science decisions, which drove the business decisions, and so forth.
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