Cultural history and technology : theory, concepts, and examples from the Netherlands

Based on a lecture and using examples from my own research, the paper suggests ways of doing a cultural-historical analysis of debates about technolog

Naar aanleiding van 4 mei: 'Herdenken', 'denken over' en 'bruikbaar verleden'

a critical discussion of the Dutch 4 May ritua

Huizinga's children: Play and technology in twentieth century Dutch cultural criticism (from the 1930s to the 1960s)

This article traces the development of critical thought about the socio-political impact of technology in the Netherlands between the 1920s and the 1960s, from the perspective of thinkers and movements that developed theories about play and put these into practice. The historian Johan Huizinga, the painter Constant Nieuwenhuys and the Provo youth movement shared the conviction that play was a crucial element in society. In the late 1930s, Huizinga argued that play, which he believed was at the basis of all culture, was gradually suppressed in modern societies, as a consequence of the ascendancy of utility and technological efficiency as dominant goals. A much more optimistic view of the future of play and technology was developed after World War II, first in the utopian designs of Nieuwenhuys and then, from the middle of the 1960s, in more practical proposals developed by the Provo youth movement and its successor, the Kabouter Partij. This article describes an intellectual trajectory from deep cultural pessimism and technological determinism towards a utopian constructivist view, issuing in what was later called ‘appropriate technology’

Nederlandse uitgevers op de internationale markt, 1960-1990

Het artikel analyseert de verschillende strategieen bij de internationalisering van twee Nederlandse uitgevers, Kluwer en Elsevier

The romance of technology in an age of extremes. Leonard de Vries' Hobby Clubs, 1945-1965

An analysis of the work of the most popular science popularizers in the Netherlands, late 1940s to 1960s, who offered a romantic view of technology as an alternative to the then common pessimistic cog-in-the-machine view

Who believed in a second industrial revolution? The 'age of computers and automation' in popular media in NL and elsewhere

__Intro__ This paper is about a new project I have just started. So far, I have mainly worked with Dutch sources, but this is such an international subject that I’d like to broaden the project, preferably in some kind of collaboration. So the whole setup is up for discussion; and if you are interested in cooperation or know of others who are doing similar work, I’d be very intereste

The critique of industrial technology in the Netherlands and other western countries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries

Three Dutch critics of the social implications of industrial technology are discussed and situated in the general West European debate about industry. Their relative marginality as compared to similar critics in England and Germany is explained in the context of the development conservatism and romanticism in the Netherlands