Building the Trident Network: A Study of the Enrollment of People, Knowledge, and Machines (Inside Technology) Review

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(More customer reviews)In this book, Maggie Mort examines the history of the Trident submarine program in Britain from early 1980s to 1998, focusing on the management and workers of Vickers Shipbuilding and Engineering Ltd. (VSEL) and particularly the shipyard operations in Barrow.
The Trident is a large submarine designed to carry eighteen submarine-launched ballistic missiles tipped with multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle (MIRV) nuclear warheads. Tridents would replace the smaller Polaris submarines in the 1980s to provide a less vulnerable sea-based nuclear deterrent force for both the Britain and United States. Trident technology was complex and therefore very expensive.
The idea of building the submarines in the early 1980s was attractive to the management at VSEL because of the potential for profit. They assumed, as most people did at the time, that the Cold War would not end soon. British equity investors endorsed this view by rewarding VSEL with a high and growing stock price. As a result, the management of VSEL progressively divested itself of other businesses to focus most of its efforts on building Tridents.
A major argument in the book is that the closing of the Trident building program in 1998 brought considerable hardship to the workers of Barrow, but that this was not an inevitable outcome. A group of workers called the Barrow Alternative Employment Committee (BAEC) argued forcefully for the diversification of VSEL activities in order to avoid overdependence on defense contracts. Mort examines carefully in Chapter 3 the BAEC's claims that VSEL could have remained diversified by investing in non-defense technologies such as radomes and the Constant Speed Generator Drive (CGSD). The latter was basically a gearing system that allowed ocean-going vessels to generate their own electricity directly from the diesel engines that powered the propulsion system rather than using separate generating systems. Mort shows how this technology was jettisoned in a rather cavalier manner by a management not wanting to be distracted from its military mission by profitable commercial activities. The correctness of the BAEC's views and the stupidity of management decisions regarding CGSD in hindsight lead Mort to conclude that things did not have to work out the way they did.
However, there are other aspects of the argument that are worthy of comment. One of the problems that Mort addresses in Chapter 4 is how the majority of workers (other than the BAEC members and their allies) were convinced not just to go along with the divesting of civilian businesses but also actually to invest themselves in the shares of the newly privatized and defense-contract-dependent VSEL. The British government under Margaret Thatcher was keen to privatize state-owned enterprises like British Shipbuilders, so it proposed a management/worker buyout of the Barrows works as one of the ways to convince the unions that they had a stake in the success of the Trident program. The government hoped that having a financial stake in the firm would reduce the propensity of the workers to engage in strikes. Ironically, the workers invested in the shares and then immediately went on strike for better wages and working conditions. They had purchased the shares for their potential appreciation and sold them when the price went up. Although the workers remained stakeholders in VSEL, they did not remain shareholders for long. However, even though this tactic failed to prevent strikes and other union activity, it succeeded in scuttling efforts of groups like the BAEC to get the rest of the work force to question the overdependence on defense contracts in Barrow.
There is a brief but good theoretical discussion in Chapter 1 of the social construction school of thought in the science, technology and society (STS) branch of sociology. The influential writings of David Noble, Langdon Winner, and Bruno Latour are discussed briefly. Mort herself stresses the concept of "enrollment" by which she means the process of involving individuals in large technological projects. Her interest in not just in enrollment, but also in "disenrollment," as when workers are laid off when demand for a new technology declines or when they lose faith in or become marginal to a given project.
In sum, this book represents a solid effort to understand the path not taken in a large and important technological effort. Its generalizability to other large technology efforts may be limited to some degree by the exotic nature of nuclear submarine technology and the importance of the sudden and rather unexpected end of the Cold War for the events described in the book. Nevertheless, there are all too few books on technology that adequately consider the importance of the views of the workers who are part of the overall effort and particularly of the potential role of dissident labor groups like the BAEC.

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