Who managed large corporations during the first half century of their emergence? How did modernizing firms navigate periods of rapid technological change such as those that swept the U.S. economy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? What role did engineers play in the management of large corporations? This paper draws on an original database of tens of thousands of mining and metallurgical engineers who graduated from universities during this period, examining patterns in their employment records, job descriptions, and career trajectories, matching our data on individual engineers with a linked database of mining and metallurgical corporations. We trace two distinct phases in engineers’ managerial role that corresponded to periods of rapid technological change and technological quiescence in the industry. We argue that explaining the rise of the modern corporation and the historical dynamics of corporate management requires a better understanding of technical expertise in management.

IR scholars increasingly turn to the writings of Existentialists to make sense of the multiple and entangled planetary crises that characterise the twenty-first century. In this article, I argue that two postwar intellectuals, Günther Anders (1902–1992) and J. G. Ballard (1930–2009), offer a rich intellectual ancestry and inspiration to such scholarship. Both authors critically and creatively reworked central Existentialist ideas in the context of postwar technological acceleration and the development of nuclear weapons. To Anders and Ballard, nuclear weapons symbolised, and were the most extreme manifestation of, the pathologies they associated with technological modernity: mass consumption, spectacular violence, a deadening of affect, and an increased inability of humans to psychologically process and grasp the destructive capacities of science and technology. To counter these trends, they both firmly relied on Surrealism to bolster the human imagination as a catalysator for personal and social transformation. I argue that their work offers an opportunity to reconnect the study of nuclear weapons in IR to broader existentialist questions and suggest that their respective attempts to foreground human being in the nuclear age as ‘being-towards-extinction’ holds important lessons for recent attempts to recentre the study of IR around planetary imaginaries of extinction.

The phonograph presented American presidential aspirants with an opportunity to surmount eighteenth-century campaigning standards and meet the challenges of an expanding democracy and electorate. Thomas Edison’s invention—with its corresponding records—arguably was the first mechanical media technology to find its way into political campaigning on a mass scale. By 1908, canned, recorded speeches were poised to become a marketable alternative to soliciting ballots in person while also facilitating a candidate’s direct engagement with voters, thus enabling contenders and media firms like Edison’s National Phonograph Company to curate personas that were sold both commercially and at the polls. As a result, the phonograph’s practical role allowed the public to hear candidates directly and in their own words, marking an important but underrecognized step forward in the democratization of access to information (and the concomitant risk of manipulation and distortion that came along with it) that one finds in today’s social media.

Making healthy food choices is crucial for health promotion and disease prevention. While there are an increasing number of technology-assisted interventions to promote healthy food choices, the underlying mechanism by which consumption behaviours and weight status change remains unclear. Our scoping review and meta-analysis of 17 studies represents 3,988 individuals with mean ages ranging from 19.2 to 54.2 years old and mean body mass index ranging from 24.5kg/m2 to 35.6kg/m2. Six main outcomes were identified namely weight, total calories, vegetables, fruits, healthy food, and fats and other food groups including sugar-sweetened beverages, saturated fats, snacks, whole grains, sodium, proteins, fibre, cholesterol, dairy, carbohydrates, and takeout meals. Technology-assisted interventions were effective for weight loss (g=-0.29; 95% CI=-0.54, -0.04; I2=65.7%, t=-2.83, P=0.03) but not for promoting healthy food choices. This highlights the complexity in creating effective interactive technology-assisted interventions and understanding its mechanisms of influence and change. We also identified that there needs to be greater application of theory to inform the development of technology-assisted interventions in this area as new and improved interventions are being developed.

Drawing from Michel Foucault’s reading of Immanuel Kant’s essay “What is Enlightenment?,” and specifically his definition of ascesis, we associate maturity with a capacity for, and interest in, forming the self. On the basis of an empirical study of making vinyl records following the successful commercialization of digital media, we identify micro-disciplinary techniques of self-forming that emerge as enthusiasts steadily learn the craft of vinyl record manufacturing. It is, we argue, through technology, rather than against it, that organizational immaturity can be resisted. Craftwork involves testing and transforming, rather than just acquiring, traditional skills. Maturity involves an ongoing struggle of selectively and reflectively engaging with technologies via attempts to be the subject of one’s own subjection. The former contributes to the latter.

In line with earlier research, a multi-phase study found a significant positive association between a widely used measure of trait disgust and people’s tendency to favor absolutist (non-consequentialist) restrictions on genetically modified food (GMF). However, a more nuanced high-granularity approach showed that it was individual sensitivity to fear (specifically, a tendency to feel creeped out by strange and subtly deviant events) rather than a tendency to be disgusted (orally inhibited) by these events that was a unique predictor of absolutist opposition to GMF and other types of new technology. This finding is consistent with prior theorizing and research demonstrating fear to be “the major determiner of public perception and acceptance of risk for a wide range of hazards” related to new technology (e.g., nuclear power) (Slovic & Peters, 2006, p. 322). The present study calls attention to the importance of conducting future assessments of disgust (and other affective constructs) in a manner that, among other things, recognizes the substantial disconnect between theoretical and lay meanings of the term and illustrates how a policy-guiding result may arise from a sheer miscommunication between a researcher and a subject.

While the international zoological community is committed to enhancing the welfare of individual animals, researchers have yet to take full advantage of the tools available for non-invasively tracking behavioural and physiological indicators of welfare. We review technology currently being applied in studies of zoo, farm and laboratory animals to regularly monitor welfare status, as well as to evaluate responses to particular stimuli and situations. In terms of behavioural measures, we focus on automated assessments that offer insight into how animals — even those that are nocturnal or elusive — behave when humans are not present. Specifically, we provide an overview of how animal-attached technology (accelerometers, global positioning systems, radio frequency identification systems) can be implemented to generate activity budgets, examine use of space, conduct gait assessments, determine rates of movement and study social dynamics. We also emphasise the value of bioacoustics, as the rate and acoustic structure of certain vocalisations may vary across contexts and reflect an animal's internal state. While it can be challenging to identify non-invasive methods for investigating physiological welfare indicators, we discuss approaches (thermography, tracking measures of heart rate) that may be especially useful for monitoring affective states and psychophysiological functioning. Finally, we make a concerted effort to highlight tools that allow welfare scientists to consider measures of positive welfare. Ultimately, zoos can ensure that each animal has the opportunity to thrive by employing technology to create baseline behavioural and physiological profiles, conduct ongoing monitoring schemes and assess responses to specific conditions, events and stimuli.

The oral performance of history has been common to many societies from Herodotus and the histories of Beowulf, to the griots of West Africa. The lecture in Western history emerged from these histories of orality, with its name showing the close connection in its origins to reading, and to the lecturer's expertise in that domain. From this starting point, lectures grew to be associated with frameworks of academic authority, as well as markers of community and shared academic, religious and civic identity. From the late eighteenth century onwards, the role of the historical lecture widened to involve public education, and was also later incorporated into political contestations by anticolonial orators such as Maya Angelou, Amílcar Cabral and Fidel Castro. In the twenty-first century, the rise of transnational technology has seen the increasing atomisation of the lecture into a space of performative and disembodied information. As technologies change, in the future the knowledge and thematic being explored in historical lectures may change. What is embraced may prove to be demonstration of mastery of the commercial technology involved in a lecture's delivery, as much as the exposition related to the lecture or reading from which knowledge and academic communities historically have built.