The 1922 Rand Rebellion was the only instance of worker protest in the twentieth century in which a modern state used tanks and military airplanes, as well as mounted infantry, to suppress striking workers. These circumstances were unprecedented in their own time and for most of the century. The compressed and intensely violent rebellion of twenty thousand white mineworkers in South Africa’s gold mines had several overlapping features. Within a matter of days—from 6 to 12 March—it went from a general strike to a racial pogrom and insurrection against the government of Prime Minister Jan Smuts. Throughout all these twists and turns, the battle standard remained, “Workers of the world unite and fight for a White South Africa!” Race and violence were integral features of South Africa’s industrial history, but they do not explain the moments when discrete groups of people chose to use them as weapons or bargaining tools. At the close of the First World War, for instance, South Africa’s white mine workers demanded a more comprehensive distribution of the privileges of white supremacy, but in a manner that was both violent and contentious. Consequently, South Africa’s immediate postwar period became one of the most violent moments in its history.

Who managed large corporations during the first half century of their emergence? How did modernizing firms navigate periods of rapid technological change such as those that swept the U.S. economy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? What role did engineers play in the management of large corporations? This paper draws on an original database of tens of thousands of mining and metallurgical engineers who graduated from universities during this period, examining patterns in their employment records, job descriptions, and career trajectories, matching our data on individual engineers with a linked database of mining and metallurgical corporations. We trace two distinct phases in engineers’ managerial role that corresponded to periods of rapid technological change and technological quiescence in the industry. We argue that explaining the rise of the modern corporation and the historical dynamics of corporate management requires a better understanding of technical expertise in management.

This article examines Chinese immigrant engineers’ navigation in the highly flexible information technology (IT) industry in the United States and their strategies of utilizing the high-velocity labour market to their advantage. Flexible employment has grown both in prevalence and prominence in the study of the American IT industry. What flexibility theorists fail to attend to, however, is the ethnicised demission of the high-velocity labour market in the IT sector. To address this vacancy, the researcher conducted a 13-month ethnography at a leading internet-services firm in the United States and 66 additional interviews with engineers from eight leading tech companies. The ethnographic work showed that inequality that emerged within the tech firms (e.g. ‘bamboo ceilings’) disadvantaged Chinese engineers’ career development. The ‘bamboo ceiling’ stimulated Chinese immigrants to use the high-velocity labour market to normalize their job-hopping practices, in order to circumvent their career disadvantage. To facilitate their job-hopping, Chinese engineers developed university-based networks. This study concludes that, with help of their university network, Chinese immigrants became the most mobile group in the US tech industry, which further preserved the industry’s flexibility.

This article challenges the assumption that the early modern engineer acted as a reliable agent for colonial authorities. Far from acting as trusted mediators between colony and metropole, experts could exacerbate tensions. The English East India Company knew this, and avoided engineers throughout its early history. This article considers the interplay between authorities in London and their subordinates in Bombay. The company's directors saw engineers as untrustworthy agents who increased expenditure and disrupted the company's system of consultative governance. For much of its early modern history, the company's fortifications and built environments relied on a knowledge network of informal expertise. Examining these experts-in-context reveals how expertise was managed and built environments maintained in colonial settings. When the company did turn to experts in the mid-eighteenth century, it struggled to utilise and incorporate them. This demonstrates that in some colonial contexts experts could be profoundly disruptive.

By the end of the nineteenth century, railway expansion had led to the formation of a technocratic bureaucracy in Chile and other countries in Latin America. Central to this formation were the engineers who oversaw and regulated both public and private railways. Recently, historians have begun to re-examine engineers’ roles in this period. By employing methods and theoretical framings from the history of technology, this article argues that engineering was an important framework through which state–capital relations evolved, making engineers pivotal actors in the evolution of political economy at the time.

The literature on knowledge transfer is confident in its assertion that a ‘stickiness’ pervades knowledge disclosure process. This phenomenon is often attributed to structural communication barriers but an equally valid explanation could stem from the individual feeling a sense of ownership of their knowledge which then engenders a reluctance to be open about their knowledge within a formal knowledge transfer process. We pursue this idea theoretically through notions of possessiveness and psychological ownership; and empirically by exploring the concept of willingness to disclose. Assuming willingness to be unidimensional a methodology is put forward that uses indicators to measures its direction. Using a sample of 1050 UK engineers we illustrate the direction of willingness on a reluctance–willing dimension. We argue that knowledge transfer requires management to examine more closely the stimuli that affect the process.

This article demonstrates that among violent Islamists engineers with a degree, individuals with an engineering education are three to four times more frequent than we would expect given the share of engineers among university students in Islamic countries. We then test a number of hypotheses to account for this phenomenon. We argue that a combination of two factors – engineers’ relative deprivation in the Islamic world and mindset – is the most plausible explanation.