Polish Works and Serials in the History of Technology

Abstract

Dialogue THEORY AND NARRATIVE IN THE HISTORY OF TECHNOLOGY R. A. BUCHANAN The history of technology is concerned with many related issues, such as the genesis of invention, the development of innovation and its trans­ mission, and the impact of this process on society. These issues pose a series of questions of fact and interpretation. The efforts we make to answer such questions will color and be colored by our understanding of history. So from the outset the historian of technology is challenged to grapple with historiography in order to possess a consistent view of history. Thus, like any other aspect of historical studies, the history of technology is capable of being interpreted in several different ways. On the one hand, it may be treated like traditional narrative history, as if the objective is to discover “what actually happened”; on the other hand, it may be regarded as a happy hunting ground for trying out or demon­ strating theoretical constructions. Between these two opposite points of view is a wide range ofintermediate positions stressing different mixtures of narrative and theory. All are agreed that there are significant past events that need to be described and explained. All are agreed that some measure of theoretical framework is necessary to organize what might otherwise appear to be an inchoate mass of evidence. It is the argument of this article, however, that in recent years the theoretical element has received too much emphasis and that the time has come to reassert the importance of narrative. There have been a variety of theoretical approaches to the history of technology. Fifty years ago Lewis Mumford deployed his ingenious and immensely teachable analysis of successive epochs of technolog­ ical evolution, and even earlier the Marxist diagnosis of endemic class conflict had stimulated another distinctive formulation of technical Dr. Buchanan is director of the Centre for the History of Technology, Science and So­ ciety at the University of Bath and the author of The Engineers: A History ofthe Engineering Profession in Britain, 1750-1914 (London, 1989). An earlier version ofthis article appeared as “Theory and System in the History of Technology,” in Innovation at the Crossroads between Science and Technology, ed. M. Kranzberg, Y. Elkana, and Z. Tadmor (Haifa, 1989).© 1991 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040- 165X/91/3202-0005$01.00 365 366 R. A. Buchanan history, with authors like Samuel Lilley undertaking ambitious counts of inventions in different historical periods.1 Neither the liberal progressivistic view exemplified by Mumford nor the Marxist inter­ pretation is highly fashionable at present, although both have their supporters. More recently, however, the theoretical input into the history of technology has been methodological rather than ideological, and it is with the challenge presented by these modes of investigation that I am most concerned here. There are two major forms that this challenge has taken: that stemming from the application of econo­ metrics, and that derived from systems theory. Econometric analysis has a limited but important application to technological history insofar as it has attempted by counterfactual arguments to determine what the effects of inventions have been and thus throw some light on the inventive process itself. This approach has now been largely assimilated into the history of technology, although not without some spasms of indigestion. The challenge from systems theory, as used by sociologists and students of business management, is more serious because it presents a more fundamental attack on narrative history. It is also enjoying something of a vogue. The distinguished British economic historian Sir John Clapham contributed a short article to The EconomicJournal in 1922 entitled “Of Empty Economic Boxes.”2 He imagined an economist visiting a hat-factory store, with the hats arranged on the shelves in boxes, and went on by a rather labored analogy to express a gentle protest against the readiness of economists to arrange the facts of the real world in a series of conceptual “boxes” with labels such as “diminishing-return industries” and “increasing-return industries.” Clapham argued that it is virtually impossible to fit industries with certainty into such boxes and insisted that any attempt to categorize them in this way resulted in a...