Abstract
One of the ironies of our time is the sparsity of useful analytic tools for understanding change and development within technology itself. For all the diatribes about the disastrous effects of technology on modern life, for all the equally uncritical paeans to technology as the panacea for human ills, the vociferous pro- and anti-technology movements have failed to illuminate the nature of technology. On a more scholarly level, in the midst of claims by Marxists and non-Marxists alike about the technological underpinnings of the major social and economic changes of the last couple of centuries, and despite advice given to government and industry about managing science and technology by a small army of consultants and policy analysts, technology itself remains locked inside an impenetrable black box, a deus ex machina to be invoked when all other explanations of puzzling social and economic phenomena fail.
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Notes and References
Thomas P. Hughes, ‘Emerging Themes in the History of Technology,’ Technology and Culture 23 (1979), 697–711.
Much of this emerging consensus has yet to be published in monograph form, and the original studies that form the basis are in articles (largely in Technology and Culture) and in dissertations. Perhaps the easiest way to appreciate that it exists, outside of society meetings is in the syllabi published from time to time in various newsletters.
For references to these works, see the notes in the remainder of the introduction.
The pioneering work of S. L. Gilfillan, The Sociology of Invention (Chicago: Follet, 1935) and Supplement to the Sociology of Invention (San Francisco: San Franciso Press, 1971 ) has attracted few successors. For a rare exception, see the survey by Hedvah L. Shuchman, Information Transfer in Engineering (Glastonbury, Conn: The Futures Group, 1981 ).
For an excellent survey of economic models, particularly those applicable to history, see the editor’s introduction in A. E. Musson, ed., Science, Technology and Economic Growth in the Eighteenth Century (London: Methuen, 1942), 1–68. Other summaries are given in Edwin Mansfield’s essay ‘The Economics of Industrial Innovation: Major Questions, State of the Art and Needed Research,’ in Patrick Kelly and Melvin Kranzberg, eds., Technological Innovation: A Critical Review of Current Knowledge (San Francisco: San Francisco Press, 1978 ) and in several of Nathan Rosenberg’s collected essays, Perspectives on Technology ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976 ).
For this point, see Nathan Rosenberg, Inside the Black Box: Technology and Economics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). As an example, the heated debate about railroads and American economic growth in the mid-nineteenth century is conducted entirely in external terms, and does little to illuminate the ways in which railroad engineers struggled with the technological problems facing them. For a useful summary of this debate sparked by Robert Fogel, Railroads and American Economic Growth (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1964) see Paul A. David ‘Transport Innovations and Economic Growth: Professor Fogel on and off the Rails,’ in Technical Choice, Innovation and Economic Growth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975).
See the classic papers by Moses Abramovitz, ‘Resource and Output Trends in the U.S. since 1870, ’ American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings (1956), 1–23 and Robert Solow, ’Technical Change and the Aggregate Production Function,’ Review of Economics and Statistics (1957), 312–20, and the subsequent flurry of studies on technology in the economic literature.
Similarly, some organization theorists look to technology as a possible determinant of the different forms of organizations. See, for example, Charles Perrow ‘A Framework for the Comparative Analysis of Organizations,’ American Sociological Review 32 (1967), 194–208 and James Thompson, Organizations in Action ( New York: McGraw Hill, 1967 ).
History is replete with examples where economic necessity failed to generate an adequate technological response. For example, despite the shortage of wood in seventeenth-century Britain, attempts to substitute coke for charcoal in the iron smelting process met with repeated failure, until Abraham Darby was partially successful in the early years of the eighteenth century. Examples such as these have led historians of technology to inverse the familiar slogan, claiming that ‘invention is the mother of necessity’.
A good example of the manifold meanings of technological change can be found in the eclectic collection of readings in John G. Burke and Marshall C. Eakin, eds., Technology and Change (San Francisco: Boyd and Fraser, 1979 ). Ellul and Florman, Einstein and Bronowski, Engels and Schmookler, as well as a host of other scholars from disciplines and intellectual orientations totally remote from one another jostle for attention. Justifiable in an anthology for introductory use, this open-mindedness becomes a hindrance if more scholarly analysis is the aim.
See Gary Gutting, Paradigms and Revolutions: Applications and Appraisals of Thomas Kuhn’s Philosophy of Science (Notre Dame, Indiana: Notre Dame University Press, 1980 ).
Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy ( Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1958 ), 49.
See Kelly and Kranzberg, Technological Innovation,ch. 4.
This is of course not the only problem. Others include developing supporting technological and economic structures, for example. See Everett Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations (New York: The Free Press, 1962) for a more complete description.
See, for example, John Fitchen’s The Construction of Gothic Cathedrals: A Study of Medieval Vault Construction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), for a fascinating account of his efforts to reconstruct the methods used by medieval masons for vault construction, or Donald Cardwell’s account of the difficulties encountered in building a replica of a Newcomen engine, in Turning Points in Western Technology ( New York: Science History Publications, 1972 ), 68.
Eugene Ferguson ‘The Mind’s Eye: Non Verbal Thought in Technology,’ Science 197 (1977), 827–836. See also Derek J. deSolla Price, ’Is Technology Historically Independent of Science? A Study in Statistical Historiography,’ Technology and Culture 6 (1965), 553–568, for an analysis of the disinclination of technologists to verbalize.
Jennifer Tann, ed., The Selected Papers of Boulton and Watt,vol. I (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1981), or Walter G. Vincenti, ‘The Air-Propeller Tests of W. F. Durand and E. P. Lesley: A Case Study in Technological Methodology,’ Technology and Culture 20 (1979), 712–751 and Stuart W. Leslie, ’Charles F. Kettering and the Copper-Cooled Engine,’ ibid.,752–776. These references, and those in the following footnotes are illustrative. Further examples could be found by perusing Technology and Culture.
Eric Robinson and A. E. Musson, James Watt and the Steam Revolution (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1969 ).
Francis Evans, ‘Roads, Railways and Canals: Technical Choices in Nineteenth-Century Britain,’ Technology and Culture 22 (1981), 1–34.
Thomas P. Hughes, ‘The Electrification of America: The System Builders,’ Technology and Culture 20 (1979), 124–161.
Eda Fowlkes Kranakis, ‘The French Connection: Giffard’s Injector and The Nature of Heat,’ Technology and Culture 23 (1982), 1–38.
Nathan Rosenberg ed., The American System of Manufactures: Parliamentary report by George Wallis and Joseph Whitworth, 1855 ( Reprint, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981 ).
Bruce Sinclair, Philadelphia’s Philosopher Mechanics: A History of the Franklin Institute 1824–1865 ( Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974 ).
Merritt Roe Smith, Harper’s Ferry Armory and the New Technology: The Challenge of Change (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977); Anthony Wallace, Rockdale: The Growth of an American Village in the Early Industrial Revolution (New York: W. W. Norton, 1980) and Anthony Wallace, The Social Context of Innovation ( Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1982 ).
See Edwin Layton, ‘Mirror-Image Twins: The Communities of Science and Technology in Nineteenth-Century America,’ Technology and Culture 12 (1971), 562–580.
This expression was coined by the philosopher, Dudley Shapere.
This was pointed out by Polânyi himself. See also Harry Collins, ‘The Seven Sexes: A Study in The Sociology of a Phenomenon, or The Replication of Experiments in Physics,’ Sociology 9 (1975), 205–24.
Edwin Layton, ‘Technology as Knowledge,’ Technology and Culture 15 (1974), 31–41.
Note three recent, and typical examples of the persistence of this claim. “Technology, a synonym for experiment, is a name for the applications of science.” Daniel Boorstin, The Republic of Technology (New York: Harper and Row, 1978), xiii; “Technology” [is] broadly defined to include all varieties of applied physical and biological science and engineering, and also basic research that might soon lead to a proposed technological development,“ Edward Lawless, Technology and Social Shock (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1977), 9; and ”Technology is science plus purpose. While science is the study of the laws of nature, technology is the practical application of those laws toward the achievement of some purpose or purposes.“ Richard C. Dorf, Technology and Society ( San Francisco: Boyd and Fraser, 1974 ), 1.
See the articles by James K. Feibleman, James Kip Finch, A. Rupert Hall, Peter F. Drucker, Henry M. Leicester, Cyril Stanley Smith, Fred Kohlmeyer, Floyd Litterum, Milton Kerker and John B. Rae under the heading ‘Science and Engineering’ in Technology and Culture 2 (1961), 305–99; those by John J. Beer, Derek J. de Solla Price, Robert P. Multhauf, Carl W. Condit and Robert E. Schofield under the heading ’The Historical Relations of Science and Technology,’ Technology and Culture 6 (1965), 547–95, and those by James K. Feibleman, Mario Bunge, Joseph Agassi, J. O. Wisdom, Henry Sholimowski and I. C. Jarvie under ’Toward a Philosophy of Technology,’ Technology and Culture 7 (1966), 318–90. More recent literature on the subject is summarized in Wolfgang Krohn, Edwin T. Layton and Peter Weingart, eds., The Dynamics of Science and Technology, Sociology of the Sciences Yearbook II. (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel, 1976 ).
See numerous articles by Derek Price, including ‘On the Origin of Clockwork, Perpetual Motion and the Compass,’ U.S. National Museum Bulletin 218 (Washington, 1959), 82–112, ’Automata and the Origins of Mechanism and Mechanistic Philosophy,’ Technology and Culture 5 (1964), 9–23, and his essay in this volume.
D. S. L. Cardwell, From Watt to Clausius: The Rise of Thermodynamics in the Early Industrial Age (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1971), and Eda Fowlkes Kranakis, ‘The French Connection.’
C. C. Gillispie, ‘The Natural History of Industry,’ Isis 48 (1957), 398–407.
Project Hindsight (1969), Office of the Director of Defense Research and Engineering, 2 vols. (Chicago, 1968). Illinois Institute of Technology Research Institute. Technology in Retrospect and Critical Events in Science,(National Science Foundation, Washington, 1969).
Layton, ‘Technology as Knowledge.’
Edwin Mansfield, Technological Change (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1971), 9, defines technology as “society’s pool of knowledge regarding the industrial arts.” Richard Nelson, reporting on the deliberations of a group composed mainly of economists, indicates that “it was generally agreed that inventive activity was a form of problem solving,” The Rate and Direction of Inventive Activity: Economic and Social Factors ( New York: Arno Press, 1975 ), 7.
Brooke Hindle, Emulation and Invention ( New York: New York University Press, 1981 ).
See Krohn et al., Dynamics of Science and Technology.
For surveys of these, see the compendia by Paul T. Durbin, ed., A Guide to the Culture of Science, Technology and Medicine (New York: The Free Press, 1980 ) and Ina Spiegel-Rosing and Derek J. de Solla Price, eds., Science, Technology and Society ( London: Sage, 1977 ).
For a survey of this literature see Carl Mitcham, ‘Philosophy of Technology,’ in Durbin, Guide to the Culture of Science, Technology and Medicine,282–363.
Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations.
For example, the German tradition exemplified by Werner Sombart, and American work indebted to this, such as Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1934) or Lynn White’s classic Medieval Technology and Social Change ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962 ).
Thus Alfred Chandler’s fascinating study The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1977) and the numerous studies at the interface of business history and the history of technology that it has spawned are only tangentially relevant to our concerns.
This point is forcibly made by Rosenberg, ‘The Machine-Tool Industry, 1840–1900,’ in Perspectives in Technology. The case is explored at more length by David Hounshell ’From the American System to Mass Production: The Development of Manufacturing Technology in the United States, 1850–1920,’ Ph.D. dissertation, University of Delaware, 1978.
J. A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy ( 1942; revised ed., New York: Harper, 1950 ), 132.
John Enos, ‘Invention and Innovation in the Petroleum Refining Industry,’ in Rate and Direction of Inventive Activity, 299–321. Another classic example is Jacob Schmookler’s Invention and Economic Growth (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1966 ).
Gilfillan, Sociology of Invention.
Abbott Payson Usher, A History of Mechanical Inventions (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1929). See also the research mentioned in footnotes 16 through 26.
Wallace, for example, has claimed that “the fraternity of mechanicians who invented the machinery of the Industrial Revolution [was] a small cache of men, on the order of a few hundred, who over the course of about three hundred years (roughly 1600–1900) made the great mechanical improvements that preceded the electrical age.” Social Context of Innovation,xi.
Usher, for example, explicitly tried to tell the history of mechanical inventions in terms of a problem-solving model derived from Gestalt psychology, History of Mechanical Inventions,ch. 2. Wallace used an adaptation of the Kuhnian model to quote his research on the cotton mill town of Rockdale, Rockdale,appendix.
Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 2nd ed., (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1970); Imre Lakatos, ‘Falsification and The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes,’ in Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, ed. Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970); Stephen Toulmin, Human Understanding Vol. I, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971). and Larry Laudan, Progress and its Problems ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977 ).
For an account of this ‘received view’ see Frederick Suppes, The Structure of Scientific Theories (Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1973 ).
Kuhn commented on two papers in the session on ‘Non-Market Factors,’ in a 1960 conference on ’The Rate and Direction of Inventive Activity: Economic and Social Factors,’ in Nelson, Rate and Direction of Inventive Activity. Stephen Toulmin gave a paper on ’Innovation and the Problem of Utilization’ in an MIT conference on The Human Factor in the Transfer of Technology,’ reported in William H. Gruber and Donald G. Marquis, eds., Factors in the Transfer of Technology (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1969 ), 24–38.
See Krohn, et. al., Dynamics of Science and Technology.
Barry Barnes, ‘The Science-Technology Relationship: A Model and a Query,’ Social Studies of Science 12 (1982), 166–72.
Anthony Wallace, ‘Paradigmatic Processes in Culture Change,’ American Anthropologist 74 (1972), 467–78.
David Wojick, ‘The Structure of Technological Revolutions,’ in George Bugliarello and Dean B. Doner, eds., The History and Philosophy of Technology ( Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1979 ).
Edward Constant, The Origins of the Turbojet Revolution (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980).
See Giovanni Dosi, ‘Technological Paradigms and Technological Trajectories: A Suggested Interpretation of the Determinants and Directions of Technical Change,’ Research Policy 11 (1982), 147–62, and Trevor Pinch and Wiebe Bijker, ‘The Social Construction of Facts and Artefacts: Strategic and Methodological Imperatives for a Unified Approach Toward the Study of Science and Technology,’ unpublished m. s., 1983. See also D. Sahal, ’Alternative Conceptions of Technology,’ Research Policy (1981).
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Laudan, R. (1984). Introduction. In: Laudan, R. (eds) The Nature of Technological Knowledge. Are Models of Scientific Change Relevant?. Sociology of the Sciences Monographs, vol 4. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-7699-4_1
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