Auto Mechanics

A wonderfully insightful study of the emergence and evolution of a contingent occupation and the meaning that that position had on both the people who did the work and those who procured the workers' services.

Auto Mechanics is an important contribution to U.S. labor and economic history and to our understanding of the ways that the mass production of automobiles changed working life.

Well-written and well-researched... will be read with interest by all scholars of modern America.

Auto Mechanics sheds new light on the history of the automobile that top-down and bottom-up studies alike have missed. Call it a 'history from the middle-out,' if you will.

Kevin Borg's Auto Mechanics is a finely researched, rich social history.

Borg’s Auto Mechanics will strongly appeal not only to those with an interest in this particular group, but also more generally to scholars working on the connections among material culture, labor, and the history of technology.

Borg’s history of technology, expert knowledge, training, recruitment, and reproduction of social inequality is elegantly crafted and seamlessly narrated... Given the centrality of the rise of the automobile to 20th-century American history, his book could be taught to undergraduate or graduate students in courses on sociology and the history of technology, as well as courses focused on industrialization, labor, or gender.

Borg’s careful attention to issues of race and gender, and his ability to draw connections between larger social movements and technological change makes Auto Mechanics a valuable contribution to a new generation of scholarship on the automobile, one that marries social history and the history of technology.

I found the history fascinating and was glad to see [Borg] addressed workplace issues I hear about all the time... Although there is a lot of overlap of car/truck mechanics with manufacturing workers we represent who build and fix equipment (machinists, tool & die makers, electricians, etc.), they are a different craft with their own set of issues.