Editing Modularity (section)

===Modularity in American studies===
In John Blair's ''Modular America'',<ref name=Blair>Blair, J.G. 1988. ''Modular America: Cross-cultural perspectives on the emergence of an American way''. New York: Greenwood Press.</ref> he argues that as Americans began to replace social structures inherited from Europe (predominantly England and France), they evolved a uniquely American tendency towards modularity in fields as diverse as education, music, and architecture.

Blair observes that when the word ''module'' first emerged in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it meant something very close to ''model''. It implied a small-scale representation or example. By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the word had come to imply a standard measure of fixed ratios and proportions. For example, in architecture, the proportions of a column could be stated in modules (i.e., "a height of fourteen modules equaled seven times the diameter measured at the base"<ref name=Blair/>{{rp|2}}) and thus multiplied to any size while still retaining the desired proportions.

However, in America, the meaning and usage of the word shifted considerably: "Starting with architectural terminology in the 1930s, the new emphasis was on any entity or system designed in terms of modules as subcomponents. As applications broadened after World War II to furniture, hi-fi equipment, computer programs and beyond, modular construction came to refer to any whole made up of self-contained units designed to be equivalent parts of a system, hence, we might say, "systemically equivalent." Modular parts are implicitly interchangeable and/or recombinable in one or another of several senses".<ref name=Blair/>{{rp|3}}

Blair defines a modular system as "one that gives more importance to parts than to wholes. Parts are conceived as equivalent and hence, in one or more senses, interchangeable and/or cumulative and/or recombinable" (p. 125). Blair describes the emergence of modular structures in education (the college curriculum), industry (modular product assembly), architecture (skyscrapers), music (blues and jazz), and more. In his concluding chapter, Blair does not commit to a firm view of what causes Americans to pursue more modular structures in the diverse domains in which it has appeared; but he does suggest that it may in some way be related to the American ideology of liberal individualism and a preference for anti-hierarchical organization.