Title: Publishing and cultural politics in revolutionary Paris, 1789-1810 
Author: Hesse, Carla
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: History | European History | Print Media | French Studies
Publisher's Description: In 1789 French revolutionaries initiated a cultural experiment that radically transformed the most basic elements of French literary civilization - authorship, printing, and publishing. In a panoramic analysis, Carla Hesse tells how the Revolution shook the Parisian printing and publishing world from top to bottom, liberating the trade from absolutist institutions and inaugurating a free-market exchange of ideas.Historians and literary critics have traditionally viewed the French Revolution as a catastrophe for French literary culture. Combing through extensive new archival sources, Hesse finds instead that revolutionaries intentionally dismantled the elite literary civilization of the Old Regime to create unprecedented access to the printed word. Exploring the uncharted terrains of popular fiction, authors' rights, and literary life under the Terror, Carla Hesse offers a new perspective on the relationship between democratic revolutions and modern cultural life.   [brief]
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Title: A skeptic among scholars: August Frugé on university publishing 
Author: Frugé, August 1909-
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: History | Californian and Western History | Reference | Publishing
Publisher's Description: When August Frugé joined the University of California Press in 1944, it was part of the University's printing department, publishing a modest number of books a year, mainly monographs by UC faculty members. When he retired as director 32 years later, the Press had been transformed into one of the largest, most distinguished university presses in the country, publishing more than 150 books annually in fields ranging from ancient history to contemporary film criticism, by notable authors from all over the world. August Frugé's memoir provides an exciting intellectual and topical story of the building of this great press. Along the way, it recalls battles for independence from the University administration, the Press's distinctive early style of book design, and many of the authors and staff who helped shape the Press in its formative years.   [brief]
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Title: Stealing into print: fraud, plagiarism, and misconduct in scientific publishing
Author: LaFollette, Marcel C. (Marcel Chotkowski)
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Media Studies | History and Philosophy of Science | Print Media | Public Policy | Science
Publisher's Description: False data published by a psychologist influence policies for treating the mentally retarded. A Nobel Prize-winning molecular biologist resigns the presidency of Rockefeller University in the wake of a scandal involving a co-author accused of fabricating data. A university investigating committee declares that almost half the published articles of a promising young radiologist are fraudulent.Incidents like these strike at the heart of the scientific enterprise and shake the confidence of a society accustomed to thinking of scientists as selfless seekers of truth. Marcel LaFollette's long-awaited book gives a penetrating examination of the world of scientific publishing in which such incidents of misconduct take place. Because influential scientific journals have been involved in the controversies, LaFollette focuses on the fragile "peer review" process - the editorial system of seeking pre-publication opinions from experts. She addresses the cultural glorification of science, which, combined with a scientist's thirst for achievement, can seem to make cheating worth the danger. She describes the great risks taken by the accusers - often scholars of less prestige and power than the accused - whom she calls "nemesis figures" for their relentless dedication to uncovering dishonesty.In sober warning, LaFollette notes that impatient calls from Congress, journalists, and taxpayers for greater accountability from scientists have important implications for the entire system of scientific research and communication.Provocative and learned, Stealing Into Print is certain to become the authoritative work on scientific fraud, invaluable to the scientific community, policy makers, and the general public.   [brief]
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Title: Telematic embrace: visionary theories of art, technology, and consciousness
Author: Ascott, Roy
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Art | Art Theory | Electronic Media
Publisher's Description: Long before e-mail and the Internet permeated society, Roy Ascott, a pioneering British artist and theorist, coined the term "telematic art" to describe the use of online computer networks as an artistic medium. In Telematic Embrace Edward A. Shanken gathers, for the first time, an impressive compilation of more than three decades of Ascott's philosophies on aesthetics, interactivity, and the sense of self and community in the telematic world of cyberspace. This book explores Ascott's ideas on how networked communication has shaped behavior and consciousness within and beyond the realm of what is conventionally defined as art. Telematics, a powerful marriage of computers and telecommunication, made technologies we now take for granted - such as e-mail and automated teller machines (ATMs) - part of our daily life, and made art a more interactive form of expression. Telematic art challenges traditional relationships between artist, artwork, and audience by allowing nonlocal audiences to influence the emergent qualities of the artwork, which consists of the ebb and flow of electronic information. These essays constitute a unique archaeology of ideas, tracing Ascott's meditations on the formation of consciousness through the intertwined cultural histories of art and technology from the 1960s to the present. Shanken's introduction situates Ascott's work within a history of ideas in art, technology, and philosophy. Given the increasing role of the Internet and the World Wide Web in the creation of commerce and community at the dawn of this new millennium, scholars, students, laypeople, policymakers, and artists will find this collection informative and thought-provoking.   [brief]
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Title: Justice and the human genome project 
Author: Murphy, Timothy F 1955-
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Philosophy | Ethics | Biology | Medicine
Publisher's Description: The Human Genome Project is an expensive, ambitious, and controversial attempt to locate and map every one of the approximately 100,000 genes in the human body. If it works, and we are able, for instance, to identify markers for genetic diseases long before they develop, who will have the right to obtain such information? What will be the consequences for health care, health insurance, employability, and research priorities? And, more broadly, how will attitudes toward human differences be affected, morally and socially, by the setting of a genetic "standard"?The compatibility of individual rights and genetic fairness is challenged by the technological possibilities of the future, making it difficult to create an agenda for a "just genetics." Beginning with an account of the utopian dreams and authoritarian tendencies of historical eugenics movements, this book's nine essays probe the potential social uses and abuses of detailed genetic information. Lucid and wide-ranging, these contributions will provoke discussion among bioethicists, legal scholars, and policy makers.   [brief]
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Title: What machines can't do: politics and technology in the industrial enterprise
Author: Thomas, Robert Joseph 1952-
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Economics and Business | Politics | Sociology | Technology and Society
Publisher's Description: Virtually every manufacturing company has plans for an automated "factory of the future." But Robert J. Thomas argues that smart machines may not hold the key to an industrial renaissance. In this provocative and enlightening book, he takes us inside four successful manufacturing enterprises to reveal the social and political dynamics that are an integral part of new production technology. His interviews with nearly 300 individuals, from top corporate executives to engineers to workers and union representatives, give his study particular credibility and offer surprising insights into the organizational power struggles that determine the form and performance of new technologies.Thomas urges managers not to put blind hopes into smarter machines but to find smarter ways to organize people. As U.S. companies battle for survival in an era of growing global competition, What Machines Can't Do is an invaluable treatise on the ways we organize work. While its call for change is likely to be controversial, it will also attract anyone who wishes to understand the full impact of new technology on jobs, organizations, and the future of the industrial enterprise.   [brief]
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Title: The University of California Press: the early years, 1893-1953. [ON ORDER FOR CAL & CAL*]
Author: Muto, Albert
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: History | Californian and Western History | Reference | Publishing
Publisher's Description: In 1893, when the University of California was just twenty-five years old, its governing board took a bold step in voting the money to set up a publishing program for the works of its faculty. Like many of the American universities established in the late nineteenth century, California followed the German model of emphasizing original research among its faculty. But, then as now, commercial publishers were not prepared to publish the results, and so these early research universities began to publish for themselves. In the final quarter of the nineteenth century, Johns Hopkins, California, Chicago, and Columbia all began to publish. All four, in time, became scholarly publishers of consequence.In this book, published to commemorate the centennial of the University of California Press, Albert Muto chronicles the early history of the Press, from its beginnings as a printer of monographs by the University's own faculty to its emergence in the early 1950s as a full-fledged university press in the Oxbridge tradition.Profusely illustrated with archival photos and examples of early book design, this book gives us a new perspective on the history of publishing in the United States, and on the early years of the nation's largest public university.   [brief]
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Title: Averting catastrophe: strategies for regulating risky technologies 
Author: Morone, Joseph G
Published: University of California Press,  1988
Subjects: Environmental Studies | History and Philosophy of Science | Politics
Publisher's Description: Chernobyl, Bhopal, and Love Canal are symbols of the potentially catastrophic risks that go hand in hand with much modern technology. This volume is a non-partisan study of the imperfect but steadily developing system for containing the risks of such technologies as chemicals, nuclear power, and gen . . . [more]
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Title: The elusive embryo: how women and men approach new reproductive technologies
Author: Becker, Gaylene
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Sociology | Gender Studies | Medical Anthropology | Medicine | Women's Studies | Science
Publisher's Description: In the first book to examine the industry of reproductive technology from the perspective of the consumer, Gay Becker scrutinizes the staggering array of medical options available to women and men with fertility problems and assesses the toll - both financial and emotional - that the quest for a biological child often exacts from would-be parents. Becker interviewed hundreds of people over a period of years; their stories are presented here in their own words. Absorbing, informative, and in many cases moving, these stories address deep-seated notions about gender, self-worth, and the cultural ideal of biological parenthood. Becker moves beyond people's personal experiences to examine contemporary meanings of technology and the role of consumption in modern life. What emerges is a clear view of technology as culture, with technology the template on which issues such as gender, nature, and the body are being rewritten and continuously altered. The Elusive Embryo chronicles the history and development of reproductive technology, and shows how global forces in consumer culture have contributed to the industry's growth. Becker examines how increasing use of reproductive technology has changed ideas about "natural" pregnancy and birth. Discussing topics such as in vitro fertilization, how men and women "naturalize" the use of a donor, and what happens when new reproductive technologies don't work, Becker shows how the experience of infertility has become increasingly politicized as potential parents confront the powerful forces that shape this industry. The Elusive Embryo is accessible, well written, and well documented. It will be an invaluable resource for people using or considering new reproductive technologies as well as for social scientists and health professionals.   [brief]
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Title: Technology and gender: fabrics of power in late imperial China
Author: Bray, Francesca
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Anthropology | History | China | Women's Studies
Publisher's Description: In this feminist history of eight centuries of private life in China, Francesca Bray inserts women into the history of technology and adds technology to the history of women. Bray takes issue with the Orientalist image that traditional Chinese women were imprisoned in the inner quarters, deprived of freedom and dignity, and so physically and morally deformed by footbinding and the tyrannies of patriarchy that they were incapable of productive work. She proposes a concept of gynotechnics , a set of everyday technologies that define women's roles, as a creative new way to explore how societies translate moral and social principles into a web of material forms and bodily practices.Bray examines three different aspects of domestic life in China, tracing their developments from 1000 to 1800 A.D. She begins with the shell of domesticity, the house, focusing on how domestic space embodied hierarchies of gender. She follows the shift in the textile industry from domestic production to commercial production. Despite increasing emphasis on women's reproductive roles, she argues, this cannot be reduced to childbearing. Female hierarchies within the family reinforced the power of wives, whose responsibilities included ritual activities and financial management as well as the education of children.   [brief]
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Title: Technopolis: high-technology industry and regional development in southern California 
Author: Scott, Allen John
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Urban Studies | Geography | Politics
Publisher's Description: Technopolis is a timely theoretical and empirical investigation of the world's largest high-technology industrial complex - Southern California. Allen Scott provides a new conceptual framework for understanding urban and regional growth processes based on a combination of inter-industrial, labor market, and geographical factors. He presents case studies and original data on three major industries that have become synonymous with Southern California: aircraft and parts, missiles and space equipment, and electronics. The business community will be particularly interested in Scott's diagnosis of post-Cold War economic ills and his suggestions for possible remedies.In good times or bad, knowledge of how Southern California's high-tech industry and regional development have interacted in the past and might interact in the future will be invaluable for regional and economic planners everywhere.   [brief]
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Title: A shield in space?: technology, politics, and the strategic defense initiative: how the Reagan Administration set out to make nuclear weapons "impotent and obsolete" and succumbed to the fallacy of the last move 
Author: Lakoff, Sanford A
Published: University of California Press,  1989
Subjects: Politics | Political Theory | Technology and Society
Publisher's Description: In March 1983, Ronald Reagan made one of the most controversial announcements of his presidency when he called on the nation's scientists and engineers to develop a defensive shield so impenetrable as to make nuclear weapons "impotent and obsolete." This book provides the first comprehensive review and evaluation of the project launched to implement that announcement - the project officially known as the Strategic Defense Initiative and more popularly as "Star Wars." The authors - a political scientist and a physicist who has played a key role in developing military technologies - provide an intriguing account of how political rather than technical judgment led to the initial decision, and they explain the technical issues in terms accessible to nonspecialists. Judging SDI as "a classic example of misplaced faith in the promise of technological salvation," the authors examine the implications of the program for strategy, arms control, the unity of the Western alliance, its prospective economic impact, and the way the American political process has dealt with all these issues.   [brief]
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Title: Silicon second nature: culturing artificial life in a digital world
Author: Helmreich, Stefan 1966-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Science | Computer Science | Biology | Technology and Society | Social Theory | Cultural Anthropology | California and the West
Publisher's Description: Silicon Second Nature takes us on an expedition into an extraordinary world where nature is made of bits and bytes and life is born from sequences of zeroes and ones. Artificial Life is the brainchild of scientists who view self-replicating computer programs - such as computer viruses - as new forms of life. Anthropologist Stefan Helmreich's look at the social and simulated worlds of Artificial Life - primarily at the Santa Fe Institute, a well-known center for studies in the sciences of complexity - introduces readers to the people and programs connected with this unusual hybrid of computer science and biology.When biology becomes an information science, when DNA is downloaded into virtual reality, new ways of imagining "life" become possible. Through detailed dissections of the artifacts of Artifical Life, Helmreich explores how these novel visions of life are recombining with the most traditional tales told by Western culture. Because Artificial Life scientists tend to see themselves as masculine gods of their cyberspace creations, as digital Darwins exploring frontiers filled with primitive creatures, their programs reflect prevalent representations of gender, kinship, and race, and repeat origin stories most familiar from mythical and religious narratives.But Artificial Life does not, Helmreich says, simply reproduce old stories in new software. Much like contemporary activities of cloning, cryonics, and transgenics, the practice of simulating and synthesizing life in silico challenges and multiplies the very definition of vitality. Are these models, as some would claim, actually another form of the real thing? Silicon Second Nature takes Artifical Life as a symptom and source of our mutating visions of life itself.   [brief]
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Title: Technology as freedom: the New Deal and the electrical modernization of the American home 
Author: Tobey, Ronald C
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: History | American Studies | Technology and Society | United States History
Publisher's Description: Before 1930, the domestic market for electrical appliances was segmented, but New Deal policies and programs created a true mass market, reshaping the electrical and housing markets and guiding them toward mandated social goals. The New Deal identified electrical refrigeration as a key technology to reform domestic labor, raise family health, and build family assets. New Deal incentives led to nearly fifty percent of Title I National Housing Act loans being used to buy electric refrigerators in the 1930s. New Deal policies ultimately created the mass commodity culture of home-owning families that typified the conservative 1950s.   [brief]
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Title: High-Tech Europe: the politics of international cooperation 
Author: Sandholtz, Wayne
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Politics | Public Policy | Economics and Business | Technology and Society
Publisher's Description: A study of cooperative efforts in the high-tech industries of Europe. Sandholtz examines why collaboration came late to these countries, how protective walls came down, how countries work together in economically sensitive areas.Governments have recognized for decades the dynamic role played by microelectronics, computers, and telecommunications in the modern economy. Although Europe's deficiencies in these crucial sectors had long been acknowledged, it was not until the 1980s that European nations began collaborating to develop and promote high-tech industries. Their collaboration gives rise to many questions. Why, for example, did the joint efforts come at such a late date rather than in the 1960s or 70s? And how is it possible that they work together in economically sensitive areas? These questions point to fundamental issues in the areas of international cooperation, international institutions, and technology policy.Before the institution of the collaborative programs ESPRIT (European Strategic Programme for Research and Development in Information Technology), RACE (R & D in Advanced Communications-technologies in Europe), and EUREKA (European Research Coordination Agency) in the 1980s, each European country sought its own technological renaissance through protection of national firms behind walls of technical standards, procurement preferences, and research subsidies. Here is a thorough, carefully researched work that examines the breakdown of these walls. It will appeal to political scientists, economists, and scholars of technology and Western Europe interested in the political contours of the high-tech landscape.   [brief]
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Title: Assembled in Japan: electrical goods and the making of the Japanese consumer
Author: Partner, Simon
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: History | Japan | Media Studies | Technology and Society | Consumerism
Publisher's Description: Assembled in Japan investigates one of the great success stories of the twentieth century: the rise of the Japanese electronics industry. Contrary to mainstream interpretation, Simon Partner discovers that behind the meteoric rise of Sony, Matsushita, Toshiba, and other electrical goods companies was neither the iron hand of Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry nor a government-sponsored export-led growth policy, but rather an explosion of domestic consumer demand that began in the 1950s.This powerful consumer boom differed fundamentally from the one under way at the same time in the United States in that it began from widespread poverty and comparatively miserable living conditions. Beginning with a discussion of the prewar origins of the consumer engine that was to take off under the American Occupation, Partner quickly turns his sights on the business leaders, inventors, laborers, and ordinary citizens who participated in the broadly successful effort to create new markets for expensive, unfamiliar new products.Throughout, the author relates these pressure-cooker years in Japan to the key themes of twentieth-century experience worldwide: the role of technology in promoting social change, the rise of mass consumer societies, and the construction of gender in advanced industrial economies.   [brief]
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Title: Draw the lightning down: Benjamin Franklin and electrical technology in the Age of Enlightenment
Author: Schiffer, Michael B
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: History | Urban Studies | History of Science | Anthropology | American Studies | European History
Publisher's Description: Most of us know - at least we've heard - that Benjamin Franklin conducted some kind of electrical experiment with a kite. What few of us realize - and what this book makes powerfully clear - is that Franklin played a major role in laying the foundations of modern electrical science and technology. This fast-paced book, rich with historical details and anecdotes, brings to life Franklin, the large international network of scientists and inventors in which he played a key role, and their amazing inventions. We learn what these early electrical devices - from lights and motors to musical and medical instruments - looked like, how they worked, and what their utilitarian and symbolic meanings were for those who invented and used them. Against the fascinating panorama of life in the eighteenth century, Michael Brian Schiffer tells the story of the very beginnings of our modern electrical world. The earliest electrical technologies were conceived in the laboratory apparatus of physicists; because of their surprising and diverse effects, however, these technologies rapidly made their way into many other communities and activities. Schiffer conducts us from community to community, showing how these technologies worked as they were put to use in public lectures, revolutionary experiments in chemistry and biology, and medical therapy. This story brings to light the arcane and long-forgotten inventions that made way for many modern technologies - including lightning rods (Franklin's invention), cardiac stimulation, xerography, and the internal combustion engine - and richly conveys the complex relationships among science, technology, and culture.   [brief]
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Title: Images and ideologies: self-definition in the Hellenistic world 
Author: Bulloch, A. W
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Classics | Philosophy | Classical Philosophy | Ancient History | Art History
Publisher's Description: This volume captures the individuality, the national and personal identity, the cultural exchange, and the self-consciousness that have long been sensed as peculiarly potent in the Hellenistic world. The fields of history, literature, art, philosophy, and religion are each presented using the format of two essays followed by a response.Conveying the direction and focus of Hellenistic learning, eighteen leading scholars discuss issues of liberty versus domination, appropriation versus accommodation, the increasing diversity of citizen roles and the dress and gesture appropriate to them, and the accompanying religious and philosophical ferment. The result is an arresting view of the incredible and unprecedented diversity of the Hellenistic world.   [brief]
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Title: Reconcilable differences?: congress, the budget process, and the deficit 
Author: Gilmour, John B
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Politics | Economics and Business | Public Policy
Publisher's Description: Gilmour traces the development of the congressional budget process from its origin through the emergence of reconcilliation and Gramm-Rudman-Hollings. He shows how changes in process have brought about far-reaching shifts in congressional power, and explains why they have failed to control the explosion of budget deficits.Throughout the last decade budgetary issues have dominated the national political agenda as the deficit has skyrocketed to previously unimaginable levels. In this important book, John Gilmour traces the continuing quest of Congress over the last fifteen years to reform its budgeting system in the hope of producing better policy. He shows that the enactment of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974 and the introduction of the reconciliation procedure in 1980 have produced a budgetary system in which congressional majorities can get what they want, provided only that they can agree on a comprehensive budget policy. From his thorough analysis, Gilmour concludes that, while the reforms have not produced balanced budgets, they have eliminated procedural obstructions to the adoption of a coherent budget.New budget procedures have transformed the way Congress works. Before the reforms of 1974 and 1980, Congress had an extremely fragmented, disintegrated budgetary system in which the budget emerged almost haphazardly from the independent actions of numerous committees. Gilmour shows that reconciliation procedures in the budget process makes total revenue, total expenditures, and the size of the deficit matters of deliberate choice, consolidating decisionmaking to an extent unprecedented in the history of the modern Congress.Yet, despite the striking structural and procedural changes, and despite its highly majoritarian features, the budget process has failed to reduce dissatisfaction with congressional handling of money. Deficits have been larger, not smaller, and overall spending has gone up. Gilmour deftly shows that the massive budget deficits of the Reagan years were due primarily to the failure of the House, the Senate, and the President to agree on how to reduce spending or increase taxes enough to eliminate the deficit. Responsibility for budgetary failure, he argues, must rest with Congress and its inability to reach consensus, not on the new budget process, which, given what we can expect from procedural change, has been quite successful.   [brief]
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Title: Genetic nature/culture: anthropology and science beyond the two-culture divide
Author: Goodman, Alan H
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Anthropology | Biology | Sociology
Publisher's Description: The so-called science wars pit science against culture, and nowhere is the struggle more contentious - or more fraught with paradox - than in the burgeoning realm of genetics. A constructive response, and a welcome intervention, this volume brings together biological and cultural anthropologists to conduct an interdisciplinary dialogue that provokes and instructs even as it bridges the science/culture divide. Individual essays address issues raised by the science, politics, and history of race, evolution, and identity; genetically modified organisms and genetic diseases; gene work and ethics; and the boundary between humans and animals. The result is an entree to the complicated nexus of questions prompted by the power and importance of genetics and genetic thinking, and the dynamic connections linking culture, biology, nature, and technoscience. The volume offers critical perspectives on science and culture, with contributions that span disciplinary divisions and arguments grounded in both biological perspectives and cultural analysis. An invaluable resource and a provocative introduction to new research and thinking on the uses and study of genetics, Genetic Nature/Culture is a model of fruitful dialogue, presenting the quandaries faced by scholars on both sides of the two-cultures debate.   [brief]
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