"Values, Regulation, and Technology in the American ElectricUtility Industry, 1973 to 1988."

赫什博士正在分析近年来促使美国电力行业重组的价值观和动机的变化。从历史和人文的角度来看，他特别关注监管界个人态度的演变——由于各种影响，这些态度被迫改变。技术变革一直是这些影响之一，尽管人们对其了解甚少。随着技术在20世纪60年代和70年代开始停滞不前，结束了80年来持续改进和单位成本下降的趋势，监管机构开始质疑公用事业行业“自然垄断”地位的合理性。与此同时，监管机构的价值观和观念受到新的经济理论和1978年通过的新立法的影响，该立法刺激了非公用事业发电机使用的技术创新。监管机构质疑，受监管的自然电力垄断企业是否仍“符合公众利益”，这一问题最近被转化为对该行业的部分放松管制。此外，这项工作将解决监管机构的新价值观如何转化为技术创新的新激励措施，以及这些激励措施如何促进将持续到20世纪90年代及以后的重组运动的问题。赫什博士的目标是进行一项研究，详细说明重组后的公用事业行业的社会、知识和技术起源。这本书将超越政治和经济讨论，为技术史学家、行业管理者和公共政策制定者提供原创视角。它还将满足管理者和政策分析师的迫切需求，因为它可以更好地了解参与者的动机，因为这个至关重要的行业正在经历痛苦的变化。

Dr. Hirsh is analyzing the changes in values and motivations that contributed in recent years to the restructuring of the American electric utility industry. Taking an historical and humanistic perspective, he is paying particular attention to evolving attitudes of individuals in the regulatory community--attitudes that have been forced to change due to a variety of influences. Technological change has been one of these influences, though it has been poorly understood. As technology used in the industry began stagnating in the 1960s and 1970s, ending an 80 year trend of continuous improvement and declining unit costs, regulators started questioning the rationale for the utility industry's status as a "natural monopoly." At the same time, regulators' values and perceptions were influenced by novel economic theories and passage in 1978 of new legislation that stimulated technological innovation for use by non-utility generators. The questioning by regulators of whether regulated natural electric utility monopolies were still "in the public interest" has recently been translated into partial deregulation of the industry. Additionally, this work will address the issue of how regulators' new values have been converted into novel incentives for technological innovation and how these incentives contribute to a restructuring movement that will continue into the 1990s and beyond. Dr. Hirsh's aim is to produce a study detailing the social, intellectual, and technical origins of a restructured utility industry. The work will transcend political and economic discussions and provide original perspectives to historians of technology, industry managers and public policy makers. It will also serve an immediate need of managers and policy analysts by offering a better understanding of participants' motivations as a vital industry undergoes wrenching changes.