Corporate Capitalism In David Noble's America By Design

In America By Design, David Noble argues that the rise of technology is synonymous with the rise of corporate capitalism. The book title prescribes technology as a constructed capitalist plan to exert dominance over American society. Noble adopts a Marxist cultural determinist view that empowers humans (in this case corporations) as agents in technological development, thereby rejecting the technological determinist view which sees humans as malleable consumers, and technology as an external independent force. If technology is seen as an external force, then it cannot be subject to social control and thus cannot be adapted for different uses. Noble asserts that the engine of technical change is fundamentally and economically market-based. Bell …show more content…
For Noble, “scientific management not only conditioned the industrial climate for the psychologists, it determined to a large degree the direction, scope, and nature of psychological research.” In other words, the social sciences were included in scientific research, but only for manipulating workers. Here lies an imbalance of power. Science conveniently remained at the top of the hierarchy while the humanities operated according to their plan. According to Noble, industrial psychology was merely a solution to their “human factor” problem. In short, humanity was merely another obstacle corporations had to overcome. Under ordinary management, workers were masters of their trade who held more knowledge than managers on the subject and therefore required minimal supervision. Wages are kept at a minimum while output is maximized. Scientific management, also called Taylorism, converts human beings into machines. Large corporations are best thought of as mechanical entities, and machines for making money. Scientific management ultimately gave employers control over labour power and processes. It lacks the characteristics of a true science because its assumptions neglect nothing more than the outlook of the capitalist with regard to the conditions of production. Therefore, it resembles positivism in its greatest form. Taylorism in of itself disproves the notion that social institutions drive …show more content…
Noble’s left-wing critique of management theory and the educational system coincides with the transformation of corporate man theory into the development of the university. Engineers depended on laborers to manufacture their ideas. While it is no surprise that corporations exploited technology to gain profit, it is disconcerting how industrial businessmen infiltrated the university, thereby shaping the education of the engineer to fit in with the demands of modern capitalism. For example, the G.E apprenticeship school was designed to habituate students to the requirements of subordinate corporate employment and teamwork. Education consequently transformed into a factory geared towards materialism, efficiency, and stability, producing able-bodied men for positions within industrial corporations. I find this particularly problematic because the educational system was deigned to offer a wide scope of academia, and instead, they reduce what’s complex into a simple mathematic framework. It was no longer a school of thought, but a study of “what is” as opposed to “what ought to be.” Students would be going to university just to enter the bottom ladder of the corporate food chain, thereby earning a subordinate blue-collar position. Noble cites Professor Schell, who taught an MIT course in 1913 titled, Engineering Administration. His lecture’s were structured on how to “control men,” who were seen