Inequality and innovation as seen from the South

Abstract

This article begins by contrasting different approaches to Science, Technology and Society (STS), and suggests that an interactionist model is best for understanding development issues. It then argues that in a perspective “from the South”, interactionism points as well toward adaptation of a national systems of innovation (NSI) approach and the need for a more careful analysis of the features of underdevelopment that are characteristic of specific countries in the age of globalization. Following a review of NSI theory, the article focuses on some relations between inequality, capabilities, and technical change, with comparisons between development trajectories in Scandinavia and the Southern Cone of the Americas. “Learning divides” are characterized as a core dimension of underdevelopment today. Historical comparisons suggest a distinction between proactive and reactive types of equality as important for development studies. A conclusion presents the search for “proactive equality” as a fundamental task for STS studies in underdeveloped contexts. In the STS studies, there are two main approaches: a “European” tradition that focuses on the social factors shaping the generation of new science and technology outputs, and a [north] “American” tradition that focuses on the social consequences of such outputs [1] (p. 66). But another tradition defined by J.D. Bernal in his great work on social history of science [2] studies the interactions of scientific and technological practices with all social relations. This approach has a long if currently unappreciated history, especially in the South, where a remarkable example is provided by Latin American thinking of the 1960s and 1970s on the “science-technology-development-dependency” issues [3] (esp. Sec. III). This “third tradition” inspires our “innovation as seen from the South” approach that is briefly presented here. It aims to make a small contribution at the crossroads of innovation studies and development problems.