Technology and Culture

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 619 Brown’s choice of subjects. Rather than focus on individuals who figured prominently in the communications revolution—on the heirs, as it were, ofJohn Adams and William Bentley—he turns his attention instead to individuals who were decidedly on the periphery—that is, to the northern artisans, farmers, and middle-class women who consumed the products of the rapidly expanding market for the printed word. Had Brown devoted more attention to these 19th-century elites, the much-touted “democratization of gentility” might well have emerged as a somewhat less momentous break with the past. In 1837, as Brown reminds us, Ralph Waldo Emerson sardonically observed that news­ paper editors had become the true American aristocracy. Although Brown never explores the full implications of Emerson’s assertion, they are worth pondering. Throughout his book, Brown tends to presume that knowledge consists primarily of the rudimentary com­ mand of a given body of printed information. Yet is such an assumption plausible? To cite but one example, can the information unleashed by the communications revolution be conflated with the knowledge necessary to command the levers of power? And if so, why did this revolution coincide with the emergence of the modern professions, with their fiercely guarded ideology of expertise? Might not one, for example, want to distinguish between information relevant to, say, current trends in sentimental verse and the knowl­ edge necessary to successfully prosecute a case of law? Questions like these are a tribute to Brown’s considerable achieve­ ment. No one, Brown observes in his introduction, can pretend at this time to possess a “comprehensive understanding of information and its social implications during the communication revolution; we still have much to discover” (p. 11). Having set forth a plausible argument that can be confirmed, qualified, or rejected, Brown has done much to raise the level of debate. And however this debate evolves, Knowledge Is Power will have done much to point the way. Richard R. John Dr. John is a visiting assistant professor of history and a postdoctoral fellow at the Commonwealth Center for the Study of American Culture at the College of William and Mary. Control through Communication: The Rise of System in American Manage­ ment. ByJoAnne Yates. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. Pp. xx+ 339; illustrations, notes, sources, index. $29.50. ' This is a good book, an important book, but a dull book. It discusses in great detail the changes in the technology, form, and content of managerial communications in the last half of the 19th century and 620 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE first part of the 20th century. It is a good book because it makes sense of the complex changes that occurred in the ways managers exchanged information with one another and their employees. It is important because it helps to explain the ways in which the modern business firm developed, especially the ways in which managers used the flow of information to control operations. It puts communica­ tions and control at the center of the managerial revolution. It is a dull book, though, because it all too often gets bogged down in details—the history of the memorandum, of filing systems, of the preprinted form—beyond the point where they add to the story. More generalization and less blow-by-blow description of company procedures would have made the book more useful and easier to read. The first part of Control through Communication summarizes the technological and managerial changes that took place between about 1850 and 1920. This was the era of the rise of “systematic manage­ ment,” a new philosophy of all-encompassing managerial control that evolved along with improvements in managerial communications: new reporting, copying, and filing technologies. Letters could be delivered more quickly (Chicago to New York overnight in 1890, even before Federal Express), the telegraph came into widespread business use, and the invention of the vertical file meant that letters could be found again once they were filed away. New genres of internal communications—the memorandum, the circular letter, the company newsletter, graphs and charts—took advantage of new technologies to ease the spread of information both up and down the chain of corporate...