Economic indicators: Force and regulation in the turn of the century United States (Henry Adams, Edith Wharton, Frank Norris).

摘要

In its broadest terms, my dissertation deals with "management" as an abstraction that permeated turn-of-the-century culture in the United States. I work with a wide variety of texts from both traditional literary sources and more technical writings about mechanical engineering, industrial management and stock-market speculation in order to define what it meant to manage a wide range of systems in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century. By "systems," I mean to refer largely to commercial or industrial processes--the proper manufacture of pulleys, the organization of production processes or the effective trade of stocks or commodities--but I also employ the term to designate broader cultural phenomena--for example, the writing of history, the shaping of subjectivity or the conceptualization of nature. What ties all of these systems together is a double sense that, on the one hand these were systems that in some sense required the hand of management, that without managerial intervention, they would fail; on the other hand, they were also systems that persistently resisted the dogged efforts of the shrewdest managers to take them under control. To manage these systems, one had to struggle with a core contradiction that structured management as a practice: the literature of management, in its extensive chronicling of the economic and uneconomic, participated in the production of the very object it purportedly aimed to control. In writing systems, it shaped the very forces that circulated within them. The sources used for conducting this investigation include turn-of-the-century engineering manuals, treatises on industrial management and guides on prudent investing on the stock and commodities markets. I also examine literary works by Henry Adams, Edith Wharton and Frank Norris, among others.