Theorising technology

Abstract

Technology is central not only to such traditional economic concerns as economic growth, wealth creation and the alleviation of poverty, but also to wider societal issues ranging from climate change, globalisation and the organisation of work, through to education, the provision of health care, and the development of media and the arts. It follows that, whatever their particular interests, economists, as well as social scientists and policy makers more generally, are at some stage likely to have to reflect upon the nature of technology. There are many potential issues to consider and some of the questions that arise include: ‘What is meant by technology?’, ‘What different kinds of technology are there?’, ‘What is technical change?’, ‘How do the material and social aspects of technology cohere?’ and so on. Although economics would seem a natural site for addressing questions of this kind, the analysis of technology in its own right within the discipline has been held back in several ways. First, although technology has been the subject of sustained and in-depth analysis by earlier generations of economists (e.g. in the works of Marx, Schumpeter and Veblen), modern mainstream economics has tended to downplay the analysis of technology per se in favour of a ‘black-box’ approach that reduces technology to a production function and technical progress to something that can be represented by (and that occurs between) shifts in production functions (Rosenberg, 1982). Economists interested in the nature of technology effectively face a choice between looking back to the contributions of their forerunners or looking outside their own discipline altogether. While the former route has been taken by some in recent years, this has tended to be restricted to those working in the Schumpeterian tradition (Dosi and Grazzi, 2010; Perez, 2010). The latter route, drawing on the wider literature in technology studies has, as yet, not been followed by many in economics. While there are no doubt a variety of reasons for this, an important factor appears to be the relative inaccessibility of some of the classic texts in these fields (especially in the philosophy of technology – for example Heidegger's Questioning Technology). Similarly, throughout the range of disciplines concerned with the study of technology, particular theories of technology are often interspersed with more detailed accounts of specific technologies or local intellectual disputes of one kind or another, making the main ideas in these literatures difficult to place and penetrate for those without a background in the particular disciplines.