Abstract:

This dissertation examines engineers' attempts to reconcile critiques of technology with a progressive ideology of technology. In the years 1957-1973, social theorists and activists across a wide cultural, political, and social spectrum claimed that technology was out of-control in American society. Two broad philosophies were constructed in the period, which portrayed differing conceptions of technology's agency and value in social change. The first position---a theory of technological change---identified technology as a semi-autonomous agent, which produced unintended consequences and outstripped all other factors in social change. Proponents of a theory of technological change asserted that through proper study technology could be managed. The second position---a theory of technological politics---posited that the deleterious characteristics of technology were representative of the values of the society that produced it. As the technological integration of society became more complex and more totalitarian, the ability to alter the values embedded in American technology were increasingly limited, thus the reassertion of control over technology necessitated fundamental changes in the structure of society.

Engineering---a profession whose members crafted their identity on their imagined centrality as technology's creative agents---viewed this intellectual crisis of technology with alarm. In professional societies, alternative political organizations, and collaborations with artists and humanists, engineers appropriated new social theories of technology. The majority adopted a theory of technological change, which absolved engineers of responsibility for technology's negative effects, but undermined the engineer's role as a creative, autonomous agent. A vocal minority embraced a theory of technological politics. These engineers engaged with the ideas of critical social theorists such as Jacques Ellul, Lewis Mumford, and Herbert Marcuse. A few strove to create new structures for the development of a new kind of humane and responsible technology. In multiple case studies this dissertation chronicles the rise of social theories of technological change and technological politics; it studies the creation and fracture of engineering identities; and it explores engineers' responses to the crisis over technology's meaning. It is a history of engineers' search for a normative philosophy that could resurrect on intellectual grounds a progressive ideology of technology. It is therefore a history of engineers' unrealized alternatives.