| Popis: |
Using industry publications and American archival documents from the Allied occupation period, chapter 5 focuses mainly on railway accident prevention measures to illustrate that railway operations required a perfect alignment of sociopolitical, technological, and environmental pieces. The material structure of the railway alone was insufficient to achieve the production of safe, speedy, and stable movement of trains. Seeing speed as corruptible through human behavior and perfectible through human endeavor, technocrats of the IRO and the Allied forces tried to contain its danger by reforming the embodied practice of movement among workers. They enacted safety regulations and sought standardization in many realms, specifying mundane physical motions of workers for particular procedures. The chapter also suggests that workers were not passive objects of reform but used their knowledge of the infrastructural system for goals different from those of technocrats. |
