Günter Dinhobl (Hrsg.): Sonderband 7. Eisenbahn/Kultur – Railway/Culture (2004)
IV. Die Eisenbahn-Technik / Railway-technics - Manfred E. A. Schmutzer: Iron Rules Rule Iron Rails. Cultures and Their Technologies
Iron Rules Rule Iron Rails. Cultures and Their Technologies The expansion of railroads brought their intrinsic properties peculiar to a hierarchical and closed system to the foreground. Characteristic for such systems is their tendency to control their borders in space and time and to control membership. The immanent compulsion allows neither leeway nor inexact practices. Timetables are necessary prerequisites for the running of such organizations as are barriers at level crossings. Rigid adherence to rules is imposed on employees and also on passengers. Passengers cannot be allowed to choose their departing times at free will but are forced to succumb to discipline, for example, when entering or leaving the car. The same holds for the engine drivers, conductors, and the personnel at the stations, who are obliged to execute commands forwarded by telegraphy, telephone or the like. One cannot deny that this particular technology exhibits all qualities characterizing hierarchical order: control structures, control of borders, creation of additive and thus linear time-structures, standardization of thousands of details in material structures as well as in performance, expansionism in space, manpower and capital, but also in time by conquering the nights and winter seasons for traveling and transport. 317 Graph of Cultural Theory Clans closed opetr egalitarians Markets Zero-Matrix non-egalitarian Hierarchies
