College and Research Libraries consultants, educators, librarians, econ- Oinists, sociologists, and historians. In addition to submitted manuscripts, there are commissioned reports of research in progress, statistics, updates on orga- nizations, and book excerpts. Recent special issues-"Publishing Educa- tion," "Changes in the Environment of Scholarly Publishing," and "Europe 1992"-focus on timely topics. In an- other vein entirely are the interesting historical studies of reading that have appeared from time to time. These stud- ies reflect the current interest in popular culture, literacy, and reader response. Not surprisingly, this variety is both a strength and a weakness. At times the journal appears thin, uneven, or choppy, as when a study of "Economic Reform and the Dearth of Books in Nigeria" is followed by an explanation of "CD- ROM Data Storage Technology." The whole does not always succeed in being more than the sum of its parts. Academic librarians should definitely take a look at this journal, which regret- tably is not included in the standard in- dexes of librarianship. They should do so for two reasons. First of all, librarians need to understand how publishers view issues such as pricing, distribution, copyright, and changing formats. One comes away with a strong sense of what is worrying at least some publishers: loss of readers to audiovisual media, loss of the trust of universities and librarians, uncertainty about the risk of publishing in new formats, and anger that increas- ing consolidation and globalization of publishing, printing, bookselling, and distribution have destroyed "many au- thors, entrepreneurs, managers and publishing programs." The second reason for reading Publish- ing Research Quarterly is of less immedi- ate relevance to libraries: the intrinsic value in understanding the world of publishing, described by the editor, Beth Luey, as "our most important cultural industry." Long dismissed as the "acci- dental profession," publishing is only now beginning to establish itself as a full- fledged profession. Educational pro- grams and degrees are springing up (at Book Reviews 477 NYU and Simon Fraser, for example). Boundaries are being defined. Academic conferences are taking place. Profes- sional publications (such as this journal) are appearing. This fragile growth is oc- curring at a time of unprecedented merg- ers, cutthroat international competition, declining readership, and dizzying techno- logical change. Ubrarianship seems almost placidincomparison.-JeanAlexander,North- western University, Evanston, Illinois. Kohler, Robert E. Partners in Science: Foundations and Natural Science 1900- 1945. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Pr., 1991. 414 p. alk. paper, $34.95 (ISBN 0-226-45060-0). LC 90-43520. Historians of science have since tired of the debate in their ranks between internalists and externalists. The former group, which provided the core around which the discipline crystallized in this country shortly after World War II, has concentrated on the internal dynamic of the growth of scientific knowledge and often assumes that broader cultural fea- tures are not of great significance to the content of science. The externalists, who came to dominate the field in the 1970s, have concerned themselves with the po- litical, economic, and institutional envi- ronments in which science is done. The debate has faded because many histori- ans of science saw it as fruitless. In some ways, the difference is merely aesthetic: one group likes to study the changing con- tent of scientific knowledge; the other pre- fers to look at the circumstances in which scientists work. Moreover, some observ- ers would say that the best work of the past decade and a half has combined aspects of both programs-concerning itself with the content of scientific knowledge, but seeing contextual fac- tors as crucial in the development of that knowledge. Robert Kohler, a trained biochemist and an unabashed advocate of tradi- tional externalism, abandoned internal- ism soon after he began doing research at the newly opened Rockefeller Ar- chives in 1974. Kohler's work since then has concentrated on the institutional his- tory of laboratories, university depart- 478 College & Research Libraries ments, and the like. In the preface to Partners in Science, Kohler describes how he "became aware that science was a complex social system with many actors, in which securing resources, negotiating with patrons, creating departments and disciplines, competing for talents, designing products and services, and projecting pub- lic images were no less essential than bench research." As a consequence, he moved away from the history of science ("that is, of finished intellectual products") and toward the history of scientists ("that is, science as a social process"). This book is the natural outcome of Kohler's fascination with the Rockefeller patronage of science and culminates his nearly twenty years' work with manu- script sources. In some detail, yet in a readable style, it tells the story of how Rockefeller (and to a lesser extent, Car- negie) money was applied to basic re- search in physics, chemistry, and the nonmedical life sciences during the first half of this century. During the early years, foundation support was modeled on the older prac- tice of grants-in-aid to individual scien- tists, and ultimately was channeled through fellowships offered by the Na- tional Research Council (established for this purpose by the National Academy of Sciences in 1916). The scene changed in 1923, when the Rockefeller-funded General Education Board (GEB) and the International Education Board (IEB) began giving grants directly to institu- tions for support of science departments and laboratories. The growth of the Cal- ifornia Institute of Technology and of graduate science programs at Princeton University, in particular, was the result of Rockefeller activities at this time. When the GEB and the IEB were dis- mantled in the late twenties as part of a reorganization of the Rockefeller chari- ties, these grants ended and support for the natural sciences was transferred to a Rockefeller Foundation division, headed by the mathematician Warren Weaver. Weaver, driven by a vision of interdisci- plinary scientific work, cultivated close relations with individual scientists through a system of project grants and used the proj- September 1991 ect grant system to bring physicists and chemists into partnership with physiolo- gists and other life scientists. The term "molecular biology" came into use dur- ing this period in association with Weaver's program, and researchers made good use of Rockefeller money in investi- gating the structure of protein and genetic material. Kohler clearly admires Weaver for having finally created a system for the management of scientific research, but he wisely avoids making a direct link between the success of Weaver's strat- egy and developments in genetics that came after 1953, in the wake of the de- scription of the double helix. Kohler also avoids making a link be- tween the foundations' funding programs and the federally dominated ''big science" of World War II and the postwar period. The difference in scale is too great; and the type of relationship that prevailed be- tween patron and scientist is too differ- ent: for example, peer review of funding proposals was unknown in Weaver's natu- ral science division. Kohler postulates that the extramural programs of the National Cancer Institute (founded within the Na- tional Institute of Health in 1937) set much more of a precedent for the activities of war-time and postwar federal science funding agencies. What then is the import of Kohler's story? It is an account of the activities of a group of scientists and university ad- ministrators who came to manage a por- tion of the private wealth of this country in support of a set of working scientists at a particular moment in history. This book does not address the development of scientific knowledge; and, contrary to his assertion in the preface, Kohler tells us very little about the activities of work- ing scientists beyond their relations with the foundations. Nor, for that matter, is the politics of philanthropy discussed much, although Kohler implicitly denies that the Rockefellers and their associates had any object other than to put a por- tion of the family wealth to use in disin- terestedly advancing knowledge. But the story is more important than it appears when described in this way. For a time, Rockefeller money was central to scientific research in the United States and around the world; and Weaver, in particular, helped create a paradigm for creatively managing science through control of funding. Kohler provides cru- cial material with which other scholars can further explore the means by which institutional arrangements-and espe- cially patronage--served as intermedi- aries between broader political and cultural contexts and both the daily ac- tivity of working scientists and the knowl- edge they produced. The story of foundations and natural scientists is one worth telling; and it is hard to think of anyone better equipped than Robert Kohler to tell it in as lucid and engaged a fashion.-Ed Morman, Institute of the History of Medicine, Johns Hopkins Univer- sity, Baltimore, Maryland. Johnson, Peggy. Automation and Organi- zational Change in Libraries. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1991. 201 p. alk. paper (ISBN 0-8161-1919-8, hardcover. ISBN 0- 8161-1920-1, paper). LC 90-26147. Peggy Johnson has provided an excel- lent summary of state-of-the-art manage- ment of research libraries that have undergone or are in the process of under- taking a transition to automated sys- tems. While the monograph describes the results of a survey of academic librar- ies in the United States and Canada, it also contains a well-researched historical overview of academic libraries, followed by a description of the organizational envi- ronment of libraries. The introductory chapters provide substantive back- ground for the work that follows and include many references to supplemen- tal reading and supporting documenta- tion, including a substantial number o{ articles and monographs from the gen- . eral areas of organizational develop- ment and management. The remainder of the work describes the survey methodology devised by Johnson, the responses to the survey, and the interpretation of the data as they re- late to organizational development and human factors in large automated aca- demic libraries. A comparison of the sur- vey responses to predictions in the Book Reviews 479 literature places the developments in the library world into a larger management context. The survey research both confirms and refutes commonly held predictions and beliefs about the structural and or- ganizational changes to be brought about by automation. Examples of issues addressed are the "flattening'' of the or- ganizational structure, increase in the number of departments, growing empha- sis on task specialization, blurring of dis- tinctions between technical and public services, changing communication and decision-making patterns, modifications to staff classifications, and paradoxical centralizing and decentralizing effects of automation. The author demonstrates that although some changes have been slower in coming than originally predicted, the overall impact of automation has been revolutionary on collections, services, and the ability of libraries to deal effec- tively with the dual problems of rapid inflation in the costs of goods and ser- vices and the information explosion. A separate chapter describes the man- agement literature on change in innova- tion, especially as it applies to technological change, and libraries in particular. Finally, trends for the future are analyzed and "new understanding of libraries" de- scribed. The author challenges library leaders "not only to make the transition to an automated organization as pain- less as possible for the library and its users but to take full advantage of the opportunities presented." The first step is to recognize that a paradigm shift is happening: librarians must not pas- sively let the future happen, but must actively seek it. This book is both useful and interest- ing; it is also exceptionally well written. The general library reader will come away with a basic understanding of the impacts of technology on modern large academic libraries, and the reader desir- ing a more sophisticated understanding of the state of the art will benefit from both the details of the research reported in this text and the many references to the literature of general management and organizational change, as well as to