QUOTES

1 " The smooth coordination of cooperative labor requires managers to “command in the name of capitalists” Here we find a form of wage labor, but of a special kind "

― , Prophets of Order: The Rise of the New Class, Technocracy and Socialism in America

3 " The point was made many times that scientific management benefitted workers not at all, perhaps most clearly by a short statement by John P. Frey, editor of the International Molders Journal and participant in a bipartisan survey of the claims of scientific management,

'If generally applied the craftsmen would pass out of existence, and the workers would become dependent for their existence upon the scanty and insignificant industrial knowledge and experience afforded them by their limited opportunities, regulated by those who in addition to their ownership of machinery, had also acquired possession of craft knowledge and the skilled workers’ methods. "

― , Prophets of Order: The Rise of the New Class, Technocracy and Socialism in America

5 " Finally, the legitimization of the corporate holding company [1890] established a business structure that lessened the threat of competition by allowing for the elimination of competitors. The merger movement followed and horizontal combinations of productive capability reorganized industry into large blocks of corporate power. "

― , Prophets of Order: The Rise of the New Class, Technocracy and Socialism in America

7 " Of course, the word machine here is being used in its broadest definition, i.e., as the systematic organization of designs for the transmission of power. And since power can be social as well as mechanical it is important to remember that machines can be institutional in addition to being material. For this reason, we speak of political machines as well as the mechanics of government as comfortably as we discuss how many speakers our stereo contains or how many words per minute we can type. But when the persons who design, implement, and repair these machines, social and mechanical, are thought of as social types, this broader definition of machine often vanishes. Somehow the common usage of the word machine in its many modes does not extend into a consideration of the humans behind the machines. Instead, these persons are sequestered into diverse occupational categories: engineer, economist, radiologist, technician or political scientist. Yet, historically there is a sense in which a segment of this diverse collection of experts attained a uniformity of thought and action sufficient to justify a more unified categorization. And, indeed, it is the intention of this work to demonstrate that there were experts who had in common, from the beginning of the American machine age, the desire to sell society on their expertise by providing plans for systematically organized devices for the transmission of power in production and in politics. "

― , Prophets of Order: The Rise of the New Class, Technocracy and Socialism in America

9 " Yet the machines we encounter remain symbols of a vast human confusion and uneasiness that often skulks through the dim corridors of our thoughts about our life conditions. We know very well how to operate the machines on which our futures depend yet we rarely know how they operate—our knowledge of the internal workings of the machines is almost mystical. "

― , Prophets of Order: The Rise of the New Class, Technocracy and Socialism in America