ABSTRACT
This chapter indicates how the specific design and selection from among technological alternatives is controlled decisively by the industrial managers, private and governmental, on whose behalf technologies are researched, developed, and produced. Industrial managers and their engineer surrogates selected those means of production which best satisfied the capitalist economic criteria for the operation of their enterprises. The chapter illustrates the pattern of development by drawing on comparative international productivity. It finds that the variation in mechanization could be accounted for by the accompanying variation in the relative cost of labor to machinery in some countries. The chapter focuses on the internal decision-making processes of workers and managers in the factories of the Standard Motor Company in Coventry, England. It explores the mystique of technology which holds not only that society is powerfully affected by technology, but also that man and society have become the creatures of the machine.
