The Whale and the Reactor

176 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE The Whale and the Reactor: A Searchfor Limits in an Age ofHigh Technol­ ogy. By Langdon Winner. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. Pp. xiv+200; notes, index. $17.50. Eight of the ten chapters of this work have been published previ­ ously as articles during the period 1980—85. One of the earliest pub­ lished, a personal memoir entitled “The Whale and the Reactor,” now appears as the last chapter, although it seems out of place at the end rather than at the beginning of the volume. In it Langdon Winner tells of visiting the site of the large nuclear reactor under con­ struction at Diablo Canyon on the California coast near his boy­ hood home, San Luis Obispo. As he surveyed the scene, he noticed a California gray whale break the surface of the Pacific and experi­ enced an epiphany. “Here were two tangible symbols of the power of nature and of human artifice: one an enormous creature swim­ ming gracefully in a timeless ecosystem, the other a gigantic piece of apparatus linked by sheer determination to the complicated mech­ anisms of the technological society” (p. 168). The experience illumi­ nated a “predicament” that Winner, a political scientist and author of Autonomous Technology (1977), had been studying, namely, society’s acceptance of sweeping changes generated by technology with little discussion, deliberation, or thought to the consequences. The Whale and the Reactor presents the gathered fruits of his subse­ quent thought. Winner writes well, with clarity and precision, and on the whole his chapters are rich, well constructed, illuminating, and thought pro­ voking. But this collection of essays does not form an integrated whole.Tts lack of focus and the lack of a sustained thematic develop­ ment stand in contrast to the sharp focus and controlled develop­ ment of each chapter. The book is divided into three sections, the three chapters of the first being concerned with the development of a political philoso­ phy of technology. Here, in the most integrated section of the book, Winner advocates “a process of technological change disci­ plined by the political wisdom of democracy” (p. 55). Of the three chapters of the second section, the first two are related, one analyz­ ing the appropriate technology movement and the other the con­ cept of decentralization. The third chapter examines the “romantic dream” of some computer enthusiasts that the coming of an informa­ tion age will inevitably produce a more democratic egalitarian soci­ ety. The author does not indicate how this section is related to the first. Nor is it clear how the final section, the least integrated of the three, is related to its predecessors. The fourth and final chapter of this section has been described. The other previously published chap­ ter discusses the concept of risk and warns of the danger of misdefin­ ing important social and political issues as matters of risk. To illustrate: “A technology recognized as an example of true risk in TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 177 one context, recombinant DNA research and development, will be badly misconstrued if it is seen as nothing more than a risk ques­ tion in another emerging context—public policy on genetic engineer­ ing” (p. 153). The previously unpublished chapters are the weakest. In one of them, a discussion of values, the reader begins to antici­ pate, or hope for, a synthesis of all that has gone before, but a synthe­ sis is not provided. Although they do not constitute an integrated whole, I enthusiasti­ cally recommend these essays on a variety of contemporary technopolitical issues. William McGucken Dr. McGucken, professor of history at the University of Akron, is the author of Sci­ entists, Society, and State: The Social Relations of the Science Movement in Great Britain, 1931—1947 (1984). Currently he is preparing a book tentatively titled “Fashioning an Acceptable Technology: Biodegradable Synthetic Detergents in the United States.” Sons of the Machine: Case Studies of Social Change in the Workplace. By Charles H. Savage, Jr., and George F. F. Lombard. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986. Pp. xvi+313; illustrations, tables, notes, glossary, appendixes, bibliography, index. $25.00. Since mid-century, studies of industrial behavior in Third

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