The Print Review

"Kenney's work is the first major effort to provide a detailed analysis of the birth of the new industrial field of biotechnology and its impact on universities. . . . Kenney's book abounds in rich description and valuable conjectures. It also provides important insights into the structural and institutional aspects of the biotechnological revolution. It is informed by an extensive literature including reports from the financial community, university-industry contracts, trade journals, personal interviews, and company prospectuses."-Sheldon Krimsky, American Scientist "Probably never before has the emergence of a technology-based new industry been so exhaustive covered-while still in its gestation period. . . . An excellent and very readable review."-S. Allen Heininger, Chemical and Engineering News "The author raises important questions about whether the character of this university-industrial complex adequately allows for the kind of public discussion and participation necessary to insure consideration of social, economic, and moral issues in the development of this important new technology."-Harvard Educational Review "A fine description of a vital new field. It deserves wide readership."-David Silbert & Duncan Neuhauser, Ph.D., New England Journal of Medicine

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Frederik (editor): Arthur C. Clarke, O.R. Frisch, William Morrison (Joseph Pohl

"the difference between artificial and natural objects"

In the late 1960s an eclectic group of engineers joined the antiwar and civil rights activists of the time in agitating for change. The engineers were fighting to remake their profession, challenging their fellow engineers to embrace a more humane vision of technology. In Engineers for Change, Matthew Wisnioski offers an account of this conflict within engineering, linking it to deep-seated assumptions about technology and American life. The postwar period in America saw a near-utopian belief in technology's beneficence. Beginning in the mid-1960s, however, society--influenced by the antitechnology writings of such thinkers as Jacques Ellul and Lewis Mumford--began to view technology in a more negative light. Engineers themselves were seen as conformist organization men propping up the military-industrial complex. A dissident minority of engineers offered critiques of their profession that appropriated concepts from technology's critics. These dissidents were criticized in turn by conservatives who regarded them as countercultural Luddites. And yet, as Wisnioski shows, the radical minority spurred the professional elite to promote a new understanding of technology as a rapidly accelerating force that our institutions are ill-equipped to handle. The negative consequences of technology spring from its very nature--and not from engineering's failures. "Sociotechnologists" were recruited to help society adjust to its technology. Wisnioski argues that in responding to the challenges posed by critics within their profession, engineers in the 1960s helped shape our dominant contemporary understanding of technological change as the driver of history.

Signs Taken for Wonders (Radical Thinkers) Franco Moretti

For Marx (Radical Thinkers) Louis Althusser

The Information Bomb (Radical Thinkers) Paul Virilio

Culture and Materialism (Radical Thinkers) Raymond Williams

The System of Objects (Radical Thinkers) Jean Baudrillard

The Politics of Friendship (Radical Thinkers) Jacques Derrida

The Function of Criticism (Radical Thinkers) Terry Eagleton

The Metastases of Enjoyment (Radical Thinkers) Slavoj Zizek

The Return of the Political (Radical Thinkers) Chantal Mouffe

Minima Moralia (Radical Thinkers) Theodor Adorno

Late Marxism (Radical Thinkers) Fredric Jameson

Logics of Disintegration (Radical Thinkers) Peter Dews