Expertise Information
Such an idea, constructed into an expert identity , placed engineers inside Kultur rather than Zivilisation, and due to this fact made them worthy of higher social standing. This transfer in turn invited questions concerning the relationship between Technik and tradition. While it had been the German engineers that had articulated the broad concept of Technik, it was German social scientists who probed this issue additional. Walter Sombart, for instance, in his 1911 paper ‘Technik und Kultur’, argued that the causal relationship was bidirectional. ‘In many ways’, notes Schatzberg, ‘this evaluation is quite much like the critique of technological determinism that emerged amongst American historians of know-how within the Nineteen Sixties and 1970s’ (p. 112). The broad idea decisively entered the English language when in the early 1900s Thorstein Veblen took and expanded the category of Technik as industrial arts however translated it as ‘technology’. Let us begin with the instrumenta