Abstract
Many technologies are linked across industries. Such interindustry linkages can influence technological change; as a result, advances in one industry may depend on progress in a second and set conditions for the evolution of a third. Technological change then takes on an interindustry cumulativeness that helps explain why economically advanced countries lead in many industries, not just one. This article will try to show that technological linkages across industries directed invention along certain paths in the case of U.S. shoe manufacturing in the second half of the 19th century. It will then argue that linkages could only have had this effect because socioeconomic institutions, including firms, occupations, and communities of inventors, immersed inventors in communication networks that helped them identify and make use of technological linkages. Thus, linkages and social structure both affected invention. Issues
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