Kevin Borg's fine social history of auto workers in the United States is a novel investigation of what he calls “technology's middle ground,” that “ambiguous space between production and consumption in which workers maintain and repair artifacts that they neither create nor own” (2). That space was neither new to the twentieth century nor unique to auto mechanics, but Borg's careful and imaginative reconstruction of this one group in this one period allows him to lay out some important aspects of how class and skill interact, and how technology really works on the ground.

“The repair shop,” writes Borg, “is where the weaknesses of technology are laid bare; where progress is stalled, repaired, and sent back on the road; where technological failure is the stock-in-trade and the ideal of the well-oiled machine meets the reality of our entropic world” (4). At the same time, Borg insists that his history is “as much about maintaining social boundaries, hierarchies, and relationships as it is about maintaining automobiles” (6).

The social boundaries, hierarchies, and relationships are made clear in the first group Borg describes, the earliest chauffeur–mechanics who cared for and drove the large, heavy, expensive cars of the urban rich. Like the liveried coachmen they replaced, they were seen as servants, required to know and keep their place. Subsequent chapters describe the “ad hoc mechanics,” those blacksmiths, plumbers, electricians and others who stepped forward, often in emergencies, to work on the cars they barely knew anything about. YMCAs began to hold classes for both owners and drivers as well as mechanics, and, not surprisingly for the progressive era, public schools began to offer “auto shop” to working-class boys.

This cadre of newly trained mechanics, Borg believes, “reinforced the class and gender disparity between motorists and mechanics by locating crucial technological knowledge within a narrow demographic band” (99). The years after World War II were a golden age for the automobile in America, but mechanics, almost alone among Americans, failed to share the cultural cachet of the postwar car culture. Indeed, distrust of mechanics, and fears of cheating and fraud in the auto repair industry, may have reached a crescendo. The attack on that car culture during the 1960s and 1970s, along with the coming of computers as an increasingly important component of automotive operating systems in the 1980s, brought new challenges to the social status of mechanics. The disruption of social hierarchies caused by the introduction of automobiles at the beginning of the century continued at the end.

Borg's account, accompanied by excellent illustrations, is a first-rate attempt to expand the history of technology beyond the invention–innovation paradigm that dominated its early years and privileged design and those inventors and engineers who were seen as its key purveyors. This is a newer kind of history of technology, as well as a newer kind of labor history.