Ronald R Kline

Biographic Data

ID454280
NAMERonald R Kline
GIVEN NAMESRonald R
FAMILY NAMEKline
SIGNATUREKLINE R R
AFFILIATIONSCornell University
VERIFIEDNo
TOTAL WORKS56
TOTAL CITATIONS95
AUTHOR COUNT56
EDITOR COUNT0
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR1980
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2023
H-INDEX5

  • AI Narratives: A History of Imaginative Thinking about Intelligent Machines ed. by Stephen Cave, Kanta Dihal, and Sarah Dillon

    Ronald R KlineARTICLETechnology and Culture2023

    Reviewed by: AI Narratives: A History of Imaginative Thinking about Intelligent Machines ed. by Stephen Cave, Kanta Dihal, and Sarah Dillon Ronald R. Kline (bio) AI Narratives: A History of Imaginative Thinking about Intelligent Machines Edited by Stephen Cave, Kanta Dihal, and Sarah Dillon. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. 424. The strength of this edited volume, which grew out of a series of interdisciplinary workshops organized by th…

  • Dustin A. Abnet. The American Robot: A Cultural History

    Open AccessRonald R KlineARTICLEThe American Historical Review2022

  • How disunity matters to the history of cybernetics in the human sciences in the United States, 1940–80

    Open AccessRonald R Kline, Ronald KlineARTICLEHistory of the Human Sciences2020Cited by: 1References: 25

    Rather than assume a unitary cybernetics, I ask how its disunity mattered to the history of the human sciences in the United States from about 1940 to 1980. I compare the work of four prominent social scientists – Herbert Simon, George Miller, Karl Deutsch, and Talcott Parsons – who created cybernetic models in psychology, economics, political science, and sociology with the work of anthropologist Gregory Bateson, and relate their interpretations…

  • The Cybernetics Moment: Or Why We Call Our Age the Information Age

    Ronald R Kline, Ronald Kline et al.BOOKCybernetics Moment2017Cited by: 22

  • Dream of an Unfettered Electrical Future: Nikola Tesla, the Electrical Utopian Novel, and an Alternative American Sociotechnical Imaginary

    Jennifer L Lieberman, Ronald R KlineARTICLEConfigurations2017

    The fin de siècle American fascination with electricity has been well documented. David E. Nye, Carolyn Marvin, and other historians have explored the hopes and fears of the new technology in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and they have brought laboratories, living rooms, and worlds fairs back to life in the process. But turn-of-the-century writers and inventors sparked another fantasy that remains unaccounted for in these historie…

  • Technological Determinism

    Open AccessRonald R KlineCHAPTERInternational Encyclopedia of the…2015

  • Teaching Social Responsibility for the Conduct of Research

    Open AccessRonald R Kline, Ronald KlineARTICLEIEEE Technology and Society…2013

    In this essay I draw on the history of engineering and research ethics, and on the way priorities in those disciplines were established in the United States, to discuss how we should teach social responsibility in research ethics. Following Deborah Johnson, I use the term ?social responsibility? in the sense of having a moral obligation ?to protect the safety and welfare of society? [1]-[3].1 I focus on one obstacle in teaching this aspect of res…

  • Foundational Stories

    Ronald R Kline, Ronald KlineARTICLETechnology and Culture2013

    This SHOT presidential address surveys the past thirty years of the historiography of technology, especially in regard to the themes of the science-technology relationship, the users and technology, and attempts to go beyond SCOT. It argues that historians of technology should pay more attention to the foundational issue of race in order to write more powerful stories that counter the standard progress narratives of autonomous technology automati…

  • Beyond the closed world

    Ronald R KlineARTICLEHistory and Technology2012

  • Engineering Case Studies: Bridging Micro and Macro Ethics

    Open AccessRonald R Kline, Ronald KlineARTICLEIEEE Technology and Society…2010

    The literature leaves little doubt that case studies were central to the new discipline of engineering ethics when it was established in the 1970s. Early conferences and sourcebooks focused on hypothetical scenarios, and many of the cases from that decade came to comprise a litany of disasters in engineering ethics. These cases include the DC10 crashes in Paris and Chicago, the Ford Pinto gas-tank fires, and the nuclear accident at Three Mile Isl…

  • Where are the Cyborgs in Cybernetics

    Open AccessRonald R Kline, Ronald KlineARTICLESocial Studies of Science2009Cited by: 12References: 10

    Cyborgs — cybernetic organisms, hybrids of humans and machines — have pervaded everyday life, the military, popular culture, and the academic world since the advent of cyborg studies in the mid 1980s. They have been a recurrent theme in STS in recent decades, but there are surprisingly few cyborgs referred to in the early history of cybernetics in the USA and Britain. In this paper, I analyze the work of the early cyberneticians who researched an…

  • From Progressivism to Engineering Studies: Edwin T. Layton's The Revolt of the Engineers

    Ronald R KlineARTICLETechnology and Culture2008

    The classic book The Revolt of the Engineers: Social Responsibility and the American Engineering Profession (1971), by Edwin T. Layton Jr., still holds a prominent place in the historiography of technology and engineering. But its interpretation of professionalization has been revised and extended beyond the historiographic concerns of postwar scholarship on the progressive era by recent scholarship on class, gender, and politics in a new field c…

  • Responses

    Martin Collins, Ronald R Kline et al.ARTICLEHistory and Technology2007

  • Tinkering: Consumers Reinvent the Early Automobile

    Ronald R KlineARTICLEJournal of American History2006

    Journal Article Tinkering: Consumers Reinvent the Early Automobile Tinkering: Consumers Reinvent the Early Automobile. By Franz Kathleen. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005. 224 pp. $35.00, isbn0-8122-3881-8.) Ronald R. Kline Ronald R. Kline Cornell UniversityIthaca, New York Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 93, Issue 2, September 2006, Page 565, https:…

  • Cybernetics, Management Science, and Technology Policy: The Emergence of "Information Technology" as a Keyword, 1948-1985

    Ronald R KlineARTICLETechnology and Culture2006Cited by: 2

    In November 1981, British prime minister Margaret Thatcher proclaimed 1982 as "Information Technology Year, IT-82." Her government aimed to reinvigorate the country's electronics industry to keep it from falling further behind the United States and Japan in the booming markets of microelectronics, computers, and telecommunications. To celebrate IT-82, the British government issued an IT stamp and commissioned an IT play and an IT ballet. In writi…

  • Competing Research Traditions in American Industry: Uncertain Alliances between Engineering and Science at Westinghouse Electric, 1886–1935

    Open AccessRonald R Kline, Thomas C LassmanARTICLEEnterprise & Society2005Cited by: 5References: 9

    Westinghouse Electric opened a new research laboratory near the company’s main factory in East Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1916. Located in the suburban borough of Forest Hills, the laboratory was set up to provide scientific knowledge for the older materials testing and product development laboratories at the factory. Unlike its industrial counterparts, however, the Forest Hills laboratory was dominated by a strong engineering research traditio…

  • Consumers in the Country: Technology and Social Change in Rural America (Revisiting Rural America)

    Ronald R Kline, Ronald Kline et al.BOOKConsumers in the Country2002

    "Consumers in the Country Ronald Kline, avoiding the trap of technological determinism, explores the changing relationships among the Country Life professionals, government agencies, sales people, and others who promoted these technologies and the farm families who largely succeeded in adapting the technologies to rural culture."--BOOK JACKET

  • Consumers in the Country: Technology and Social Change in Rural America

    D Clayton Brown, Ronald R KlineARTICLEThe Journal of Southern History2002

  • Using history and sociology to teach engineering ethics

    Open AccessRonald R KlineARTICLEIEEE Technology and Society…2001

    An overview is given of the academic discipline of engineering ethics in the United States, describing how the subject has been taught in the US, and suggesting a new method that uses the history and sociology of science and technology to teach ethical issues in engineering. Traditionally, engineering ethicists have focussed on accidents to analyze both ethical conduct and social implications of engineering. The new approach attempts to move beyo…

  • Consumers in the Country: Technology and Social Change in Rural America

    Melissa Walker, Ronald R KlineARTICLEJournal of American History2001

    Journal Article Consumers in the Country: Technology and Social Change in Rural America. By Ronald R. Kline. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. xii, 372 pp. $39.95, ISBN 0-8018-6248-5.) Get access Melissa Walker Melissa Walker Converse College, Spartanburg, South Carolina Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 88, Issue 2, September 2001, Pages 696–697, https://d…

  • The Papers of Thomas A. Edison: The Wizard of Menlo Park, 1878 . Thomas A. Edison , Paul B. Israel , Keith A. Nier , Louis Carlat

    Ronald R Kline, Ronald KlineARTICLEIsis2001

  • Power Loss: The Origins of Deregulation and Restructuring in the American Electric Utility Industry . Richard F. Hirsh

    Ronald R Kline, Ronald KlineARTICLEIsis2001

  • Consumers in the Country: Technology and Social Change in Rural America

    Brian Q Cannon, Ronald R KlineARTICLEWestern Historical Quarterly2001

    Journal Article Consumers in the Country: Technology and Social Change in Rural America Get access Consumers in the Country: Technology and Social Change in Rural America. By Kline Ronald R.. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. xii + 372 pp. Illustrations, chart, appendixes, notes, bibliographical notes, index. $39.95.) Brian Q. Cannon Brian Q. Cannon Brigham Young University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic…

  • The paradox of "engineering science"-a cold war debate about education in the U.S

    Open AccessRonald R KlineARTICLEIEEE Technology and Society…2000

    During the early years of the Cold War, engineering educators in the United States vigorously debated a rather abstruse topic that, nevertheless, had lasting public policy implications. Did the field called "engineering science", which the newly formed National Science Foundation (NSF) was chartered to support, indeed exist, and, if it did, how should engineering colleges and the NSF support it? My recounting of the public aspect of this debate (…

  • Engineering Practice and Engineering Ethics

    Open AccessWilliam T Lynch, Ronald R Kline et al.ARTICLEScience Technology & Human Values2000Cited by: 6References: 18

    Diane Vaughan's analysis of the causes of the Challenger accident suggests ways to apply science and technology studies to the teaching of engineering ethics. By sensitizing future engineers to the ongoing construction of risk during mundane engineering practice, we can better prepare them to address issues of public health, safety, and welfare before they require heroic intervention. Understanding the importance of precedents, incremental change…