[INES Announce] Book publication: Engineers and the Two Taiwans: The Abnormal Club (Chang, Downey, and Shih)

[Downey, Gary]

INES colleagues,
We are pleased to announce the publication of our book:

Chang, Kuo-Hui, Gary Lee Downey, and Bono Po-Jen Shih. 2025. Engineers and the Two Taiwans: The Abnormal Club<https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-59766-4> (Cham, Switzerland: Springer Cham).

The book is available in ebook and hardcover versions, with a softcover version to follow later.

Abstract: Engineers do politics even when they avoid partisan politics. They do it through material commitment. This book, an experiment in critical participation, shows how. Local engineers and would-be engineers in Taiwan had found ways of climbing hierarchical infrastructures established by Japanese colonialists and then an arriving Kuomintang government by founding small companies. Islander engineers continued this practice into the 1970s, complementing the work of mainlander engineers in large, state-supported companies to produce an electronics industry structured differently than those in Japan and Korea. The Abnormal Club was a small group of mainlander and islander graduate students who stayed in Taiwan for graduate school and work in electronics rather than go to the United States. Their collaboration in learning despite different geographical identities became a metaphor for the greater cooperation in industry that effectively disrupted the hierarchy of mainlanders over islanders in Taiwan and laid the material groundwork for democratization in the 1980s and beyond. Yet the land of Taiwan they helped to animate was actually two different Taiwans, one linked to the Republic of China and the other a thing unto itself. The separation between mainlander and islander engineers re-emerged when both crossed the Strait of Taiwan, which also raised the specter of a third Taiwan. The abnormal club was gone but the privileges engineers had earned in the process assigned them responsibilities in the present. A commitment to provide material benefits for all can now be a strategic goal rather than a naïve one.

"What a book. Engineers and the Two Taiwans traces how engineers creatively crafted professional identities and pathways in the cracks of multiple, shifting empires – and in so doing helped create Taiwan as a thing-unto-itself. In showing how engineers shaped and were shaped by geopolitics and the birth of a new electronics industry, the book opens up fresh perspectives on longstanding questions about who engineers are, how they are trained, where they ought to work, and ultimately what engineering is for. These engineers did politics through their material commitments even as they avoided partisan politics."
     Jessica M. Smith, Editor-in-chief, Engineering Studies<https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/test20/current>, Professor, Engineering, Design, and Society Department, Colorado School of Mines

"This book explores Taiwan’s dynamic industrial evolution over the past century through the lens of different engineers’ social dynamics, identity, values, and compelling narratives. It offers insights into Taiwanese own perceptions in the electronics industry and prompts reflection on how countries navigate domestic and international technology policies and social progress. You will come to appreciate how engineers in Taiwan today bear continuing responsibilities to connect their technical work to its land and people, even when their own commitments differ from one another."
     Minn-Tsong Lin, Deputy Minister, National Science and Technology Council, Taiwan, Distinguished Professor, Department of Physics, National Taiwan University

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Critical participation is an approach to the scholarship of STS making & doing that works to inflect dominance. Each project addresses two sets of audiences. For academic audiences, it theorizes and enacts ways of expressing STS knowledge to increase its chances of traveling beyond the boundaries of the field. For outside audiences, it uses flows of STS learning to inflect taken-for-granted images, practices, and realities, without requiring their wholesale replacement.

Thanks much,
Kuo-Hui  (Associate Professor, National Taiwan University)
Gary  (Alumni Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Virginia Tech)
Bono  (Postdoc Scholar, Pennsylvania State University)
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