There is no shortage of historical arguments gathered in this issue, all of them with implications for contemporary social problems. First, Jason Resnikoff conducts us through the downright quirky late twentieth-century adaptations of the QWERTY keyboard. Richly mixing the history of technology with gender analysis and cultural history, he captures the ways that the breathless trope of “automation” served by the early 1980s to inveigle predominantly male midlevel managers (not to mention privileged professionals like university professors!) into the self-help world of word processing while eliminating legions of female secretaries and clerical workers. The author here invokes no nostalgia for quaint office culture; rather, he queries how and why a radical transformation of white-collar workways went down so easily.
Inquests into labor union setbacks proliferate in post-1970s retrospectives but rarely with the carefully controlled analysis of what led one campaign to victory and another in the same industry to defeat,...
