Process Of Technological Change Research Articles

The Effect of Culture on Technological Change: The Case of American Military Organizations

While highlighting the very specific nature of ICT with regards to other technologies, this article examines the many-sided relations between cultural values and ICTs use for grasping the cultural aspect of the technological change process in organizations. From the structurationist approach, the paper concentrates on the different kind of uses related to situated culture. The case of military organizations is used here to explore the cultural dimension of the information revolution is occurred within military organizations. The article underlines both the strong influence of situated culture on ICTs uses and the plurality of use ways. Culture is able to induce distorted uses of technology that can enhance as hinder the efforts of change. It is also possible to observe some situations where military technical communities embrace a technology and its expected use and, at the same time, profoundly examine its new cultural pattern. Every situation is single, depending on the background and the cultural pattern of the organization concerned.

Is Participation Rooted in Colonialism? Agricultural Innovation Systems and Participation in the Netherlands Indies

Participation is connected to technology through the notion of innovation systems. To make the connection work, it is argued, the focus has to shift from a framing of participation in terms of democratic entitlement to a framing in terms of the settlement of issues (i.e. politics from below), The innovation system is an appropriate notion to see where issues are likely to lock on to processes of technological change. Drawing on material from colonial history (the Netherlands Indies) it is shown that much of the (seemingly) technical discussions about the organisation of research and extension, as well as concrete technical alternatives, were attempts to respond to growing economic uncertainty and social unrest among the rural population.

A policy approach to the environmental impacts of technological lock-in

The broadening spectrum of environmental problems, the uncertainty regarding their scale and duration, and their possible irreversibility, in the context of the growing social preference for environmental quality, make it necessary to undertake an ex ante approach to the link between productive activity and environmental quality. This link lies in technology, and the right approach is to understand how the process of technological change can lead towards sustainability. The added value of Evolutionary Economics in the context of environmental policy resides mainly in the fact that it warns that certain inferior environmental technologies may be locked in to the economic system. The results of our model show that it would be advisable to undertake policies expressly aimed at the process of sustainable technological change–applying an ex ante (precautionary) approach–in a way that is complementary to the conventional equilibrium oriented environmental policies. The nature of these policies and how they might be implemented are questions we will address from this novel approach to the concept of sustainable development. In short, the main objectives of this paper are to understand more fully the dynamics of the process of technological change, its role in sustainable development, and to assess the implications of this dynamic approach to techno-environmental policy. To achieve these goals we have developed an agent-based model (ABM), using distributed artificial intelligence (DAI) concepts drawn from the general methodology of social simulation.

Constructing identity and participation during technological change

The organizational practice of user participation in IT system development remains problematic. Two of the major issues identified are establishing the most effective strategy and selecting the most appropriate user representatives. Opinions on these issues vary according to theoretical perspective and empirical evidence does not provide definitive solutions. Taking a social constructionist perspective, this longitudinal case study of a contested technological change process allowed the exploration of organizational talk about user participation over time. In particular, we focus on differing and changing constructions of ‘the user’ and ‘effective participation’. We argue that claims about who represented an appropriate user and what was an appropriate participative strategy varied across time and fulfilled particular political functions. We conclude that issues identified as problems in the literature on user participation may rather be manifestations of the political and socially constructed nature of organizations.

The way it really happened: Competing narratives in the political process of technological change

Corporate narratives concerning technological change are often constructed around a linear event sequence that presents the organization in a positive light to internal and external observers. These narratives often sanitize the change process, and present data from which commentators can formulate neat linear prescriptions on how to implement new technology. In contrast, this article draws on processual-contextual theoretical perspectives to argue that technological change is a more complex political process represented by multiple versions of events which compete with each other for dominance as definitive change accounts. It also calls for an analysis of narratives over time (before, during and after change) in seeking to demonstrate the analytical significance of identifying and unpacking the multiple interpretive frameworks that are utilized in organizational struggles over technology and change at work. These struggles draw attention to the ways in which power is exercised through the construction and management of compelling stories that shape change. It is the contribution of these stories (competing narratives) to understanding the political process of technological change, that is the focus of this article.

Learning by Doing vs Learning by Researching in a Model of Climate Change Policy Analysis

Many predictions and conclusions in the climate change literature have been made and drawn on the basis of theoretical analyses and quantitative models that assume exogenous technological change. One is naturally led to wonder whether those conclusions and policy prescriptions hold in the more realistic case of endogenously evolving technologies. In previous work we took a popular integrated assessment model and modified it so as to allow for an explicit role of the stock of knowledge which accumulates through R&D investment. In our formulation knowledge affects both the output production technology and the emission-output ratio. In this paper we make further progress in our efforts aimed to model the process of technological change. In keeping with recent theories of endogenous growth, we specify two ways in which knowledge accumulates: via a deliberate, optimally selected R&D decision or via experience, giving rise to Learning by Doing. As an illustration, we simulate the model under the two versions of endogenous technical change and look at the dynamics of a selected number of relevant variables, including growth rates of GDP and physical capital, as well as total emissions and rate of domestic abatement.

Skill Formation, Outsourcing, and Craft Unionism in Air Transport

The purpose of this article is twofold: (1) to rekindle old debates surrounding the efficacy of craft unionism (as opposed industrial unionism) in the age of globalization in order to provide insight into recent contentions by the Airline Mechanics Fraternal Association (AMFA) regarding the potential for craft strategy among mechanics in the air transport industry; and (2) to present a theoretical framework that combines the process of skill formation and technological change in a consistent and unifying manner. The theoretical framework offered here illuminates the transitory nature and meaning of skills in capitalism. Given the transitory meaning of skills and their extrinsic determination by the fast-pace of technology, to maintain reliance on the intrinsic value of skills alone—as AMFA seemingly does— should invite skepticism.Three global trends are identified that affect mechanics in air transport: the diminished role of major carriers, the change of fleet composition, and the growing use of outsourcing. These developments are discussed and their consequence for skilling and deskilling is examined. These tendencies align with the view that universal labor contingency is an aspect of contemporary globalization. In view of this fact, the article urges labor educator and union activists to carefully evaluate AMFA’s strategy.

The Mutual Shaping of Technology and Society in Videotex Newspapers: Beyond the Diffusion and Social Shaping Perspectives

This article argues that a mutual shaping lens enables a more encompassing account of the joint processes of technological and social change in new media than the diffusion of innovations and social shaping of technology perspectives. Drawing from recent work in sociology and history of technology, organization studies, social informatics, and computer-supported cooperative work, this article suggests that the shaping and diffusion of media artifacts are so intimately tied that they should be seen as the two sides of the same innovation coin. Using examples from the history of videotex newspapers in the United States, the analysis shows that actors simultaneously pursued interdependent technological and social transformations, that this was an ongoing process in which partial outcomes in the technological domain influenced social events at a later phase—and vice versa—and that such process was influenced by historical developments.

Mortality trends and setbacks: global convergence or divergence?

Health trends over much of the past century have been generally, and notably, positive throughout the world. In several regions, however, life expectancy has declined over the past 1-2 decades. This trend suggests that the expectation that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s of worldwide gains and convergence in population health status is not guaranteed by a general deterministic process. National populations can now be clearly grouped into those that have achieved rapid gains in life expectancy; those whose gains are slower or are perhaps plateauing; and those in which the trends have reversed. Over the past two centuries, outside times of war and famine, such reversals have been rare. Exploration of these varied population health trends elucidates better the close relation between population health and the processes of economic, social, and technological change. Such analysis has shown that the health status of human populations should be a guiding criterion in the debate on sustainable development.

The OHS consultant as a ‘political reflective navigator’ in technological change processes

The occupational health service (OHS) in Denmark is rarely involved as adviser when technological changes take place in client enterprises. To support OHS efforts in this area, the work practice of OHS consultants has been studied in four cases of technological change. Traditionally, the role of OHS consultants is placed on the line between an expert and a process consultant. Based on evidence from the cases and on the concepts of actor-network theory on technological development, we suggest a supplementary third role, that of the ‘political reflective navigator’, where the OHS consultant is an ‘actor’ who pursues a work environment agenda in a complex network in which other actors pursue other agendas such as productivity, economics, quality, etc. The consultant is political in the sense of pursuing a work environment agenda; the consultant is reflective in the sense of being able to switch between different roles and mobilize different types of knowledge depending on the context; the consultant is a navigator in the sense of knowing how to navigate in the complex organization surrounding the technological change process. The competencies of a political reflective navigator are outlined with the aim of revising the training necessary for OHS consultants. Relevance to industry In order to integrate ergonomics or work environment aspects into technological change processes, companies are involving internal or external OHS consultants. Hence, it is important for both industry and OHS units to gain a better understanding of the opportunities and constraints of OHS consultancy in this area.

Does Endogenous Technical Change Make a Difference in Climate Policy Analysis? A Robustness Exercise with the FEEM-RICE Model

Technical change is generally considered the key to the solution of environmental problems, in particular global phenomena like climate change. Scientists differ in their views on the thaumaturgic virtues of technical change. There are those who are confident that pollution-free technologies will materialize at some time in the future and will prevent humans from suffering the catastrophic consequences of climate change. Others believe that there are inexpensive technologies already available and argue the case for no-regret adoption policies (e.g. subsidies). Others again believe that the process of technological change responds to economic stimuli. These economic incentives to technological innovation are provided not only by forces that are endogenous to the economic system, but also by suitably designed environmental and innovation policies. In this paper, we consider and translate into analytical counterparts these different views of technical change. We then study alternative formulations of technical change and, with the help of a computerized climate-economy model, carry out a number of optimization runs in order to assess what type of technical change plays a role (assuming it does) in the evaluation of the impact of climate change and of the policies designed to cope with it.

Public policy and clean technology promotion. The synergy between environmental economics and evolutionary economics of technological change

Obstacles to clean technology development, innovation and diffusion are not only related to the lack of internalization of environmental externalities in production costs, as defended by traditional environmental economics. Empirical studies show that many other obstacles prevent these technologies from penetrating the market. The relevance of these obstacles differs between sectors, firms and technologies. Consequently, a more focused approach is proposed. By taking a look at the specific, real-world barriers to clean technologies, a policy framework as well as some specific measures that target those barriers are suggested. These instruments are useful and complementary in a policy framework that, in addition to specific instruments, takes into account the influence of the style of regulation and the configuration of actors in the environmental technological change process. This paper proposes a coherent framework integrating environmental policy and technology policy instruments. This is deemed necessary in the technological transition to sustainable development.

Global manufacturing in the Mexican culture perspective: a case study

The objective of this work is to analyse and provide solutions to the problems encountered during the engineering processes undertaken by global companies established in Mexico. The considerations for this study are not only centred on the engineering work but also on its relation to the culture and the people within which this process takes place. One automobile consortium with a huge assembly plant in Mexico is researched, and a case study is developed for its engineering change process. The time delays in carrying out an engineering change are analysed. Important findings are reported in the areas of software operation, design process, engineers training, teamwork, adaptation to different cultures, technology transfer and language barriers. Concurrent engineering is proposed as a means to gain the time reduction sought by the plant in Mexico. Special attention is recommended for the education of personnel and their preparation for an important organisational change.

Social shaping perspectives in Danish technology assessment

The term ‘social shaping of technology’ has been used broadly as a response to techno-economic deterministic understandings of the relations between technology and society. The social shaping perspective has increasingly explored the social choices involved in the co-evolution of technology and society. Consequently, social shaping has brought together analysts from different backgrounds who share a common interest in the role of social and political action for technology change. The authors of this article suggest that the social shaping perspective draws on lessons from technology assessments of earlier decades, lessons about the role of technology debate, participation and democratic control. For example, it is shown how a range of players articulate, interact and negotiate form a diversity of interests and from environmental, organizational, ethical and democratic concerns. We suggest that these lessons from TA are important for technology policy initiatives at the beginning of the new millennium, as prerequisites for socially feasible and desirable technology development and innovation. On the basis of the Danish technology assessments of the 1980s, it is argued that technology assessments and the social shaping perspectives in these projects contributed to new insights into the processes of technological change and thus to policy formulation. The social shaping perspective and technology assessment experiences are suggested as important guides to future technology strategies.

Modeling the Size of Wars: From Billiard Balls to Sandpiles

Richardson's finding that the severity of interstate wars is power law distributed belongs to the most striking empirical regularities in world politics. This is a regularity in search of a theory. Drawing on the principles of self-organized criticality, I propose an agent-based model of war and state formation that exhibits power-law regularities. The computational findings suggest that the scale-free behavior depends on a process of technological change that leads to contextually dependent, stochastic decisions to wage war.Early drafts of this paper were prepared for presentation at the University of Michigan, the University of Chicago, Ohio State University, Yale University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Cornell University. I am grateful to the participants in those meetings and to Robert Axelrod, Claudio Cioffi-Revilla, Fredrik Liljeros, and the editor and the anonymous reviewers of this journal for excellent comments. Laszlo Gulyas helped me reimplement the model in Java and Repast. Finally, I would like to acknowledge the generous support of the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies. Nevertheless, I bear the full responsibility for any inaccuracies and omissions.

Integrated Assessment Modeling for Global Climate Change: An Infinite Horizon Optimization Viewpoint

In this paper one uses an infinite time horizon optimal control paradigm to deal with three important issues in global climate change integrated assessment, namely the equitable treatment of all the generations involved, the representation of technical progress, and the uncertainty concerning technological progress and climate change processes. The notion of economic sustainability is associated with the concept of turnpike in infinite horizon optimization models. The issue of deciding on the proper discount rate is addressed in this context and a method is proposed to reconcile long term sustainability and short term time preference for current generations. One also formulates a model where environmental damage and/or technical progress are represented as stochastic jump processes. One calls this random evolution a mode switching process. In this context, sustainability is represented by a family of turnpikes, and the economy will be driven from one steady state to the other as the modes switch. These concepts are illustrated on the DICE model and their possible implementation in other types of integrated assessment models is discussed.

Body/Politics: Studies in Reproduction, Production, and (Re)Construction By Thomas C. Shevory. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2000. 249p. $59.95.

Body/Politics is a well-researched book that brings together a significant range of topics to explicate the connections between changes occurring with the biological body and within body politics. The theoretical structure of the book is Marxist/feminist with heavy reliance on critical theory for Thomas Shevory's legal analysis in some of the chapters. According to the author, the central thesis of the book is that “the process of technological change will be creatively destructive, opening new avenues for equality, diversity, self-expression, resistance to hierarchy and control, while also offering new means for domination, exploitation, oppression, and dehumanization” (p. 3). He thus rejects the more extreme stances of the “technoprogressives” who see nothing but good and the “technophobes” who see nothing but bad coming from these developments. He argues quite convincingly that the historical processes we face through these technological changes are dialectical and thus subject to human political intervention. In other words, if we so choose, we do have the capacity to shape technologies, though it is far from clear that we now actually have the will to do so.

Learning Organisations: The Process of Innovation and Technological Change

In the present scenario of globalisation, knowledge has become the prime factor of production for competitive advantage. This calls for acquisition and utilisation of knowledge for innovation and technical change on a constant basis, which is only possible in a ‘learning organisation’. Innovative activities of a learning organisation are influenced by three main factors: (1) internal learning; (2) external learning; and (3) the innovation strategies decided upon by the enterprise management. An assumption has been made that, particularly in developing countries, absorption and adaptation of technologies, i.e. indigenisation, take place through a process of ‘learning by doing’. Taking this into consideration, this paper focuses on a few case studies carried out at NISTADS, New Delhi, India, on small enterprises in the formal as well as traditional sectors, highlighting the learning process in an organisational context and how it brings in innovation and technological change at enterprise level. The study demonstrates that the learning environment in an organisational context is an indispensable process to be innovative and building up capabilities for technological change. This in turn also calls for strong networking of the enterprises with academia, R&D institutions and other enterprises, to create knowledge clusters. This builds up a strong case for a network approach of learning organisations not only at the regional level but also at the cross-cultural level for constant innovation and technical change.

Economic growth and technological change: A comparison of insights from a neo-classical and an evolutionary perspective

Over the last two decades, dissatisfaction with the traditional Solow-Swan model of economic growth resulted in two new classes of models of economic growth and technological change: neo-classical endogenous growth models, and evolutionary growth models. The first class of models has been labeled endogenous, because of its key feature of endogenizing technological change. The second class of models endogenizes technological change as well, but according to an evolutionary view on economic growth and technological change. In this paper we discuss the insights from both the neo-classical and the evolutionary perspectives. It is argued that in evolutionary models technological and behavioral diversity, uncertainty, path dependency, and irreversibility are elaborated in a more sophisticated and explicit way than in neo-classical growth models. However, this level of microeconomic diversity comes at a certain price. Due to the complexity of the models, which preclude analytical tractability, the mechanisms behind the aggregate dynamics are not always clearly exposed. In addition, it will be argued that the neo-classical and the evolutionary approach are converging in the Schumpeterian framework. The latter framework is developed in both classes of models as a means for theorizing on technological change. A challenging task for further research is to combine the fruitful insights of both the neo-classical and the evolutionary approach to improve our understanding of complex processes of technological change in relation to other micro- and macroeconomic processes.

Science and knowledge flows: evidence from the French case

Public research is often considered as essential in the technological change process. Yet, few studies have been undertaken to measure its real impact on innovation. The objective of this study is therefore to evaluate the presence of public technological externalities. From the results, it appears that public research produces positive effects both directly in increasing innovation level and indirectly in favoring private research. However, these externalities are not widespread. They are geographically localized.