Cultural Imperatives and Product Development: The Case of the Shirt-Pocket Radio

Abstract

Cultural Imperatives and Product Development: The Case of the Shirt-Pocket Radio MICHAEL BRIAN SCHIFFER How do the products of everyday life arise? Many analyses impli­ cate the push of technology or the pull of consumer needs. “Tech­ nology push” and “demand pull” are global models in the sense that they purport to explain all cases. In fact, they may explain very few, for these models fail to penetrate to the underlying cultural processes that lead from ideas to commercial products. It is perhaps unrealistic to expect that this theoretical hiatus can be filled with just one model. Instead, it may be more fruitful to build a variety of models, each appropriate for explaining a particular empirical pattern of product development. This article elaborates one such model, the “cultural imperative,” which seems especially useful for understanding the origin of products in capitalist-industrial societies that develop along many paths by fits and starts. The cultural imperative model is illustrated here by the history of the shirt-pocket radio.1 Cultural Imperatives and Product Development New products often begin as concepts, a thing that might be. A vision arises of an object having capabilities different from any that Dr. Schiffer, an archaeologist, is professor in the Department of Anthropology and director of the Laboratory of Traditional Technology at the University of Arizona. He wishes to thank especially Norman Krim for supplying crucial information; James Schwoch and another referee furnished insightful comments on an earlier draft. This article obviously owes much to The Portable Radio in American Life, the author’s first major effort to apply an archaeological perspective to investigating the social, cultural, and technological contexts of product development in recent United States history. His other publications include Formation Processes of the Archaeological Record (Albuquerque, N. Mex., 1987) and Technological Perspectives on Behavioral Change (Tucson, Ariz., 1992). He is currently working on a history of the electric automobile. ‘In a short article such as this, one cannot describe—much less contextualize—the entire history of the portable radio. My aim is, rather, to showcase the cultural imperative model. For a fuller treatment of relevant radio history, see M. B. Schiffer, The Portable Radio in American Life (Tucson, Ariz., 1991).© 1993 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/93/3401-0002$01.00 98 Cultural Imperatives and Product Development 99 presently exist. Visions of new products obviously have many sources rooted in human creativity. An abundance of product ideas, for example, originate as new combinations of preexisting linguistic categories, which include both extant products and conceptual di­ mensions such as portability and miniaturization. Products can be combined to form new composite products, such as hat radio, bicycle radio, and lamp radio. Similarly, when conceptual dimensions such as miniaturization are applied to an item like a radio, additional product visions are generated: for example, radios small enough to fit into a coat pocket or shirt pocket or onto a pinkie ring. Although most visions created by “thought experiments” never become commercial products, a surprising number do lead to devel­ opmental efforts on the part of hobbyists, independent inventors, and even corporate laboratories. Indeed, some product visions are the subject of recurrent developmental efforts because they have become cultural imperatives. A cultural imperative is a product fervently believed by a group—its constituency—to be desirable and inevitable, merely awaiting technological means for its realization.2 A cultural imperative is not, however, a product that everyone obviously wants; it could not arise spontaneously across society as a felt need. Rather, it is the fancy of a group, often a very small group, captivated by the vision.3 Members of the constituency are likely to believe that when the product is “perfected” it will have great popular appeal, but this belief may be little more than wishful thinking. Cultural imperatives are mandates for technological development. Indeed, members of the constituency take concrete steps toward creating the product: as tinkerers, inventors, even eccentrics, they carry out experiments that apply existing technologies and create new ones; as managers, engineers, and entrepreneurs, they may bring about the product’s commercialization. A constituency can expand or contract over time, but it nonetheless enjoys...