New Profession, Old Order
New Profession, Old Order
New Profession, Old Order explores the creative tension between modern technology and preindustrial Germany. It offers an explanation of why the engineering profession is so successful in transforming the physical world, did not achieve the professional power, cohesion, and prestige that its technological accomplishments would seem to have warranted. On the one hand, engineers were agents of modern instrumental rationality, specialization, practical knowledge, and entrepreneurial capitalism - forces antiasthetical to the quasi-aristocratic world of Bildung and bureaucracy that was the life blood of the preindustrial social hierarchy. On the other hand, it was this latter universe in which engineers had to survive and by whose standards they were judged for membership in the educated middle class or for access to prestigious careers. The result was an orientation that combined the old and the new in ways that were at once uniquely German and paradigmatic for modern industrial society.
Product details
July 2002Paperback
9780521526036
368 pages
230 × 154 × 23 mm
0.652kg
Available
Table of Contents
- List of tables
- List of figures
- Preface
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Part I. Emulation: Bildung and the Bureaucratic Order:
- 1. technical education and society before 1850
- 2. Nationalism, industrialization, and technology: the first years of the Verein Deutscher Ingenieure
- 3. The pursuit of Bildung: Grashof and the VDI, 1856–76
- 4. The reform of technical education in Prussia, 1876–9
- Part II. Reorientation: industrial capitalism and a 'practical' profession:
- 5. Reorientation in the engineering industry, 1876–84
- 6. Crisis and renewal in the VDI, 1877–90
- 7. The rebirth of nonacademic engineering education, 1879–1901
- 8. Public authority, private power, and the production of engineering personnel, 1901–14
- Part III. The crucible: technical careers and managerial power, 1900–14:
- 9. Career prospects and the Btib's reform efforts
- 10. The unified employment code and the Patent Law
- 11. Direct action
- 12. The reaction of the VDDI
- Epilogue
- Appendix
- Bibliographical note
- Index.
