Los Angeles and the Automobile

1068 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE purse and purpose,” and placed a new emphasis on styling, particu­ larly evident in the annual model change. As a result, in the interwar period Ford’s share of the market for new cars collapsed from 59 percent to about 10 percent, while GM’s share increased from only 15 percent to some 40 percent. Arthur J. Kuhn mines the secondary literature to retell this story in greater detail than any previous scholar. He draws on some hereto­ fore neglected sources, such as GM vice-president for finance Don­ aldson Brown’s 1957 Some Reminiscences of an Industrialist. Also, in comparison with other scholars, most importantly Alfred D. Chand­ ler, Jr., Kuhn places greater emphasis on the overall centralizing effect of Sloanism on GM; and in his epilogue, he demonstrates how Sloanism carried to its illogical extreme ultimately proved disastrous for GM in the 1970s and 1980s. Despite an impressive amount of research, Kuhn’s book does not challenge in any fundamental way the accepted interpretation of GM’s coming to outperform Ford. Indeed, Kuhn does not claim the inten­ tion of adding anything new to our substantive knowledge of the subject. Rather, he tells us that “this book presents a cybernetic and system-theory analysis of the General Motors Corporation (GM) and Ford Motor Company (FM) reversals between 1918 and 1938” and that “the GM-FM analysis rests on a strong theoretical foundation and is intended to begin linking cybernetic and system theory with business practice” (p. ix). We are informed that “history is reinterpreted within this systematic framework so that the lessons learned may be applied to other cases whether historical or contemporary” (p. x). I could not find “a strong theoretical foundation” in the analysis, only a set of arbitrary categories for organizing the data. Nor can I conceive how organizing the data in this manner rather than in some other might permit application of the findings to other cases. Notably, Kuhn’s explanation for the decline of Ford 1918—38 does not result in a general model that explains GM’s recent subsequent decline. Furthermore, the book is marred by unnecessary jargon. In two paragraphs totaling only fourteen lines at the top of page 143, for example, we encounter “causal comparability,” “component decom­ posability,” “loosely coupled factorization,” “resource-segregation and benefit-separation techniques,” “transfer-price-setting parts markets,” and “inventory buffers of parts.” Combined with excessive detail, this makes for deadly dull reading. James J. Funk Dr. Funk teaches in the Program in Comparative Culture at the University of California, Irvine. Los Angeles and the Automobile: The Making ofthe Modern City. By Scott L. Bottles. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987. Pp. xiii + 302; illustrations, tables, notes, index. $27.50. TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Revieios 1069 The automobile and the City of Angels have been fused in the public mind so thoroughly that this book’s main title may seem a tautology. Indeed, the city-shaping power of automotive technology is at the center of Scott Bottles’s narrative, but the author places that story in what may strike readers exposed only to a generation of auto-bashing books as a novel and challenging light. By 1917, Bottles argues, “the public . . . saw [the car] as a progres­ sive piece of industrial and urban technology” (p. 57). This public “embraced the car as a democratic alternative to mass transit . . .” (p. 121). In short, Angelenos did not bungle into a state of smogshrouded anomie. Still less were they dragged kicking and screaming from efficient streetcars into wasteful cars and buses by a motor industry plot, as Bradford Snell and others have charged. Rather, they chose a new kind of decentralized community, bound together by the auto and the roads that served it. Bottles argues that Los Angeles mass transit was never beloved by its patrons and that it provided neither acceptable service levels nor extensions to the new communities desired by Angelenos. Sunk in debt and entangled in political snares they had helped to create, the Los Angeles Railway and Pacific Electric were, by 1920, distinctly unhealthy institutions. They could not finance subways, and the public saw no reason

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