Management and control of modern technologies

Abstract

Technologies evolve simultaneously with the social institutions in which they exist. The institutions provide legitimacy; indeed, they are manifestations of the nature of society's consent to the technology. This paper identifies two characteristics of modern technologies—their increasing complexity and their expanding spatial and temporal reach— whose interactions tend to undermine the ability of traditional economic and political institutions to serve as the basis for societal consent. To understand ways of dealing with the interaction between a technology's complexity and reach, it is first necessary to explore separately cases in which technologies exhibit only one of these characteristics; the way institutions direct the innovations process; and how they accomodate technologies thus developed. These cases are examined in the context of the United States, where rational analysis plays a central role in identifying and informing stakeholders in the technology policy process. The analysis begins by proposing that conventional technology assessment methodology be expanded to represent explicitly the flow of information, as well as materials and energy, ecross the technology's system boundary. This not only provides an operational definition of technological complexity, but also facilities consideration of its relation to risk, uncertainty, and instruments of social control. Separate analyses of technological complexity and of spatial and temporal reach then lead to suggestions for dealing with the class of technologies exhibiting both these characteristics, e.g., toxic chemicals and nuclear power. Management and control strategies for these particular problematic types of modern technologies are described in terms of their effects on the institutional environment in which technological innovation occurs.