Jon Clark’s study of the effect of the modernization of a telephone exchange on exchange maintenance work and workers is a solid contribution to a debate that encompasses two lively issues in the history and sociology of technology: technological determinism and social constructivism.

Clark makes the point that the characteristics of a technology have a decisive influence on job skills and work organization. Put more strongly, technology can be a primary determinant of social and managerial organization. Clark believes this possibility has been obscured by the recent sociological fashion, exemplified by Braverman’s analysis, that emphasizes the way machinery reflects social choices. For Braverman, the shape of a technological system is subordinate to the manager’s desire to wrest control of the labor process from the workers. Technological change is construed as the outcome of negotiations among interested parties who seek to incorporate their own interests into the design and configuration of the machinery. This position represents the new mainstream called social constructivism.

The constructivists gain acceptance by misrepresenting technological determinism: technological determinists are supposed to believe, for example, that machinery imposes appropriate forms of order on society. The alternative to constructivism, in other words, is to view technology as existing outside society, capable of directly influencing skills and work organization.

Clark refutes the extremes of the constructivists by both theoretical and empirical arguments. Theoretically he defines "technology" in terms of relationships between social and technical variables. Attempts to reduce the meaning of technology to cold, hard metal are bound to fail, for machinery is just scrap unless it is organized functionally and supported by appropriate systems of operation and maintenance. At the empirical level Clark shows how a change at the telephone exchange from maintenance-intensive electromechanical switches to semi-electronic switching systems altered work tasks, skills, training opportunities, administration, and organization of workers. Some changes Clark attributes to the particular way management and labor unions negotiated the introduction of the technology, whereas others are seen as arising from the capabilities and nature of the technology itself. Thus Clark helps answer the question: "When is social choice decisive and when are the concrete characteristics of technology more important?"

    The experience of British business in Iran between the 1860's and the 1970's is one example of the changing importance of British enterprise in Asia as a whole. Before 1914 British business established and dominated Iran's modern industrial and financial sector; in the 1920's this domination began to wane; by the 1960's British enterprise was of little importance in the Iranian economy. While in Japan and India the decline of British business was primarily a function of the rise of strong indigenous business groups, in Iran, by contrast, the government played a large role in both challenging British commercial interests and stimulating locally owned enterprise. Periodic surges of intense Iranian economic nationalism must be understood partly as a reaction to the close relations between British business in Iran and the British government. In retrospect, it is possible to see the uneasy and ambiguous nature of this relationship. It is true that the British Imperial Bank in Iran was never entirely a tool of the British government, and that the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company did not take its orders from the British government, despite the 51 percent government shareholding. However, the relationship between British business and the British government was sufficiently close that many Iranians understandably viewed the oil company and the bank as symbols of a British imperialist policy.