Experts in the 20th century

Focusing on experts in technology and science, ‘Building Europe on Expertise’ delivers a new reading of European history. The authors show that modern European history was defined by experts using their new knowledge to shape societies, set political agendas and establish research institutions and agendas which proved decisive in integrating the continent.

... As author Randy Shilts has concluded, these exclusions were “initially written as an enlightened and even compassionate treatment of homosexuality ... and narrative qualities of news, highlighting the way events are turned into news stories (Carey, 1975; Darnton, 1975; Schudson ...

"The 20th century can be described as the century of the expert. The emergence of the expert as a specific type of professionally qualified individual was a result of the growing scientification of economy, society and politics. In his public function, the expert always operates between a universalist understanding of science and the politically defined requirements of the nation state.

This volume examines the fate of the expert in Central Eastern Europe from the breakdown of the dynastic empires after World War I to the end of Communism. This multiethnic region with its turbulent tradition of statehood and changing political systems provides an ideal case to reveal the complex relationship between the transnational cooperation among experts on the one hand and their national orientation on the other."

The first half of the 20th century witnessed the rise of modernist architects. BROKERS OF MODERNITY reveals how East Central Europe turned into one of the pre-eminent testing grounds of the new belief-system of modernism. By combining the internationalism of the CIAM organi za tion and the modernizing aspirations of the new states built after 1918, the reach of modernist architects extended far beyond their established fields. Yet, these architects paid a price when Europe's age of extremes intensified. Using mainly Polish, but also wider Central and Eastern European, examples this book delivers a pioneering study of the dynamics of modernist architects as a group, including how they became qualified, how they organized, how they communicated and their own attempts to live the modernist lifestyle themselves. In so doing BROKERS OF MODERNITY raises questions concerning collective work and the social role of architects today.

At the beginning of the XXI century, human societies are entering a period of "late modernity" characterized by new forms of trust and risk, untransparent social situations and economic, political and cultural globalization. These processes are associated with the presence of abstract systems that surround people and which require support of people with expertise in the fields which include transport, telecommunications, finance, security, media, energy. At the same time, it is noted that the expertise cult is born and specialists not only meet the identified needs, but also produce new, thus contributing to the development of a culture of narcissism. Article aims to explain the characteristics of expert systems and cultural narcissism, experts role as a participant in social change, model types and kinds of experts with their arcane in to ontological and epistemological structures of the social world. I also highlight the problems associated with the suppression of restrictions in to the access of expertise knowledge.
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Wraz z początkiem XXI wieku społeczeństwa ludzkie wchodzą w okres „późnej nowoczesności” cechujący się nowymi formami zaufania i ryzyka, nieprzejrzystością sytuacji społecznych oraz postępującą globalizacją ekonomiczną, polityczną i kulturową. Procesy te wiążą się z obecnością systemów abstrakcyjnych, które otaczają ludzi i do funkcjonowania wymagają wsparcia osób z wiedzą specjalistyczną z zakresu m.in. transportu, telekomunikacji, finansów, bezpieczeństwa, mediów, energetyki. Jednocześnie zauważa się, iż rodzi się kult ekspertyzy a specjaliści nie tylko zaspokajają rozpoznane potrzeby, ale też wytwarzają nowe, przyczyniając się tym samym do rozwoju kultury narcyzmu. Artykuł ma na celu przybliżenie specyfiki systemów eksperckich i narcyzmu kulturowego, roli eksperta jako uczestnika przemian społecznych, modelowych typów ekspertów i rodzajów ich wtajemniczeń w struktury ontologiczne i epistemologiczne świata społecznego oraz zwrócenie uwagi na problemy związane ze znoszeniem ograniczeń dostępu do wiedzy specjalistycznej.

The project aims at defining, conceptualizing and historicizing the paradigm of planning in order to analyze public policies in Western Europe at the national, transnational and supranational level between 1945 and the late 1960s. The fields of public policies covered by the project are economic planning, social planning, urban/spatial planning.
The project will start with a comparative analysis of four national cases (France, Great Britain, Federal Republic of Germany, Italy), of the approach to planning policies displayed by their respective governments, with a special attention to the differing
or converging patterns during phases of left-wing/right-wing alternation. For each case, the project will observe planning institutes and policies as they learned and borrowed from respective national traditions or other experiments by European
countries with a longer tradition in the field (not just restricted to the four project countries). The research will also take into consideration the influence exerted by the US example, especially Roosevelt’s “New Deal”; and the Western debate at the time on the possibility of technical convergence with specific features and institutes of the “Real Existing Socialism” model, despite insuperable differences of political regime. The project will also deal with the transnational circulation of knowledge, technical know-how and ‘experts’; with the process of inspiration that specific institutes and policies exerted among the four national cases; and lastly with the relevance or otherwise of planning in bringing about long-term convergence among these countries. Finally, the project will turn to the supranational dimension to gauge how the different national traditions and experiments in planning policies were transferred to the European cooperation/integration level from the outset of the OEEC and the ECSC to the late 1960s.

The contemporary notion of professional competence is not grounded in an adequate notion of civil society. Professional practice tends to put citizens in a situation of incompetence, even when it is supposed to serve them. In a civil society, this is not an acceptable state of affairs.

Professional practice and the practice of citizenship need to be understood in such a way that professionals and citizens can meet as equals, though not necessarily as equally skilled individuals. Methodologically speaking, this is possible if we can show that there exists a common core of competencies that both sides can contribute to reflective practice.

This essay finds such a core competence in the new concept of critically systemic thinking. The author introduces some of its basic ideas and explains why they might become the source of a new critical competence for citizens as well as for professionals.

"ToC:

Forum
Pierre-Yves Saunier
Learning by Doing: Notes about the Making of the Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History, S. 159-180.

Technological Innovation and Transnational Networks: Europe between the Wars

Martin Kohlrausch
Technologische Innovation und transnationale Netzwerke. Europa zwischen den Weltkriegen/Technological Innovation and Transnational Networks: Europe between the Wars, S. 181-195.

Johan Schot and Vincent Lagendijk
Technocratic Internationalism in the Interwar Years: Building Europe on Motorways and Electricity Networks, S. 196-218.

Albert Presas i Puig
Technological Transfer as a Political Weapon: Technological Relations between Germany and Spain from 1918 and the early 1950s, S. 218-236.

Katrin Steffen
Wissenschaftler in Bewegung. Aufstieg und Fall des Materialforschers Jan Czochralski zwischen den Weltkriegen, S. 237-261.

Alexander C.T. Geppert
Space Personae: Cosmopolitan Networks of Peripheral Knowledge, 1927-1957, S. 262-286.

Simon Ball
The Hidden Wiring: Networks, Firms and the Transfer of Electrolytic Refining Technology, S. 287-301."

The aim of this paper is to observe the explain of such type of ministers at the Spanish cabinet. In a descriptive approach, we focus the cabinet dynamic behind the ministerial appointments and the differences between the more political type of ministers and those other ones coming from outside political pathways. The presentation of the case will be delivered in three parts. First, we will present the Spanish institutional framework, to place with the predominant figure of the head of government and the weight of the parties in the life of executives. Then we will have a review of the dynamics of the cabinets, in order to present the relationship between the political and nonpolitical profile variation among ministers. Finally, we will conduct an initial analysis of the selection and deselection of ministers to understand the impact and consequences of the appointment of independent and technocratic ministers in the Spanish governments. We will start discussing the difficulties of the concepts used so far to address this problem and will set our framework for the rest of the paper.

Local and global dependencies and interactions between individuals, groups and institutions are becoming increasingly opaque and risky. This is due to increased importance of highly complex abstract systems created and supported in order to maintain of transport, communications, finance, energy, media, security infrastructure, as well as social and cultural institutions. These systems require the knowledge and skills of experts. Professionals that not only satisfy identified needs, but also create new thereby contribute the development of cultural narcissism phenomenon. The aim of the book is to discuss relations of experts and mass narcissism, on the background of shaping the knowledge societies and knowledge-based economies, and moreover their transformations towards the societies and economies based on creativity and wisdom. Undertaken analysis is contribute to sociology of expertise and intervention by indicating four selected contemporary issues: dilemmas of the knowledge society development; selection between trust substitutes and its reconstruction methods; transformations of social stratification; and the choice of pathways to socio-economic development.

When Chile, after the Saltpeter war (1879-1883) acquired the world monopoly of saltpeter pro-duction, a group of positivist-minded liberal reformers began an ambitious reform program with the goal to contribute to the formation of an inclusive citizens-nation by means of secularization and democratization. These reformers enacted a change in the educational system (reforma al-emana) which took the German empire as reference, and which implied a unique expansion of the material, human and technological resources of the state education system, in particular through the establishment of the Instituto Pedagógico, the first institution for academic school teacher education in Latin America. This article deals with three German education experts who participat-ed in the reform effort through teaching activities at the Instituto Pedagógico and through advi-sory functions. This work is founded methodically on the historic research of education transfer, and particularly on the approach of entangled history. Thus the mutual interests between the two countries -German expertise versus Chilean saltpeter- during the reform period could be demon-strated. On the other hand, the activities of these educational experts are visualized as a factor of reciprocal knowledge exchange between Europe and Latin America. The education experts, in co-operation with Chilean actors, contributed not only to the definition of hybrid university structures and norms, especially for configuring a new model for training secondary school teachers, but used their research activities in Chile as a peripheral field of experimentation.

Following the largest peasant revolution in history, Russia's urban-based Bolshevik regime was faced with a monumental task: to peacefully “modernize” and eventually “socialize” the peasants in the countryside surrounding Russia's cities. To accomplish this, the Bolshevik leadership created the People's Commissariat of Agriculture (Narkomzem), which would eventually employ 70,000 workers. This commissariat was particularly important, both because of massive famine and because peasants composed the majority of Russia's population; it was also regarded as one of the most moderate state agencies because of its nonviolent approach to rural transformation. Working from recently opened historical archives, James Heinzen presents a balanced, thorough examination of the political, social, and cultural dilemmas present in the Bolsheviks' strategy for modernizing of the peasantry. He especially focuses on the state employees charged with no less than a complete transformation of an entire class of people. Heinzen ultimately shows how disputes among those involved in this plan-from the government, to Communist leaders, to the peasants themselves-led to the shuttering of the Commissariat of Agriculture and to Stalin's cataclysmic 1929 collectivization of agriculture.