ABSTRACT
Technologists—engineers or chemists—view technology as having to do with tools: ploughs, camshafts, airplane propellers. Economists—with few exceptions see technology as a dangerous outsider—akin to hurricanes or earthquakes—an exterior force that plays hob with their nice models of equilibrium. Sociologists and anthropologists, amazingly enough, do not see technology at all. The one major exception was Thorstein Veblen—but Max Weber, for instance, hardly mentioned it. And yet, next to the bond of family and kinship, the work bond is the strongest social bond. The organization of work, fully as much as the organization of kinship and family, shapes community and determines social order. And the organization of work is, in turn, largely determined by technology, by tools, by motive power, by materials. And so the History of Work was intended to view technology as a human, nay a social, phenomenon rather than as a merely "technical" one, and society as shaped by, and formed around, work and work bond.
