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Technology, its Innovation and Diffusion as the Motor of Capitalism Peter J. Hugill Comparative Technology Transfer and Society, Volume 1, Number 1, April 2003, pp. 89-113 (Article) Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: 10.1353/ctt.2003.0004 For additional information about this article Access provided by University of Crete (7 Mar 2014 05:16 GMT) http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/ctt/summary/v001/1.1hugill.html

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  • Technology, its Innovation and Diffusion as the Motor of Capitalism

    Peter J. Hugill

    Comparative Technology Transfer and Society, Volume 1, Number1, April 2003, pp. 89-113 (Article)

    Published by The Johns Hopkins University PressDOI: 10.1353/ctt.2003.0004

    For additional information about this article

    Access provided by University of Crete (7 Mar 2014 05:16 GMT)

    http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/ctt/summary/v001/1.1hugill.html

  • Technology, its Innovationand Diffusion as the Motor of Capitalism

    PETER J. HUGILL

    89

    ABSTRACT Technology is the motor of capitalist devel-opment, the mechanism Schumpeter described that creates gales ofcreative destruction in the capitalist world system, but that allowscapitalism to restore profitability through new investment, be self-replicating, and thus not be subject to Marxs Law of the Tendencyof the Rate of Profit to Fall. Such creative destruction occurs cycli-cally, as suggested by Kondratiev. Innovation, denovation, and thediffusion of both are central processes to both Kondratiev and heg-emonic or world leadership cycles, which extend over two Kondra-tiev cycles. Innovation occurs in innovation milieus, usually verycomplex urban regions, and is rare and difficult to manage. Someinnovations are shown to drive Kondratiev upswings and hegem-onic cycles much more than others. Denovation and the deindus-trialization attendant on this part of the process of creative destruc-tion is much less studied. The diffusion of innovation is more thaninnovation, but is controlled by adoption environment and the sta-tus of the sender, or geltung. Two types of technology transfer areexaminedhardware and softwarewithin two geopolitical are-nastrading polities and territorial polities. Hardware technolo-gies that deal with material production are distinguished fromthose that deal with cultural production.

    Comparative Technology Transfer and Society, volume 1, number 1 (April 2003):89113 2003 by Colorado Institute for Technology Transfer and Implementation

  • INTRODUCTION

    In volume three of Das Kapital Marx predicted, in his Law of the Ten-dency of the Rate of Profit to Fall (henceforth Law) the potential demiseof capitalism (Marx, 1959, pp. 21131). On the face of it this made sense:as new companies entered the business of producing a given good theywould be willing to take lower rates of profit until profits fell to virtuallynothing. In the 1920s, Soviet economist Nikolai Kondratiev noted thatlong-run price data did not support Marxs contention that the rate of prof-it must inexorably fall. Rather, the rate of profit fell, then rose again, and in regular cycles of 50 to 55 years in length. Kondratiev, however, ex-plained only that Marx was wrong, not why he was wrong. In the 1940s,Schumpeter supplied the missing Marxian connection between the theo-ry of the capitalist cycle and the theory of capitalist crisis, and made thedistinction he believed Marx had failed to make, between the capitalist andthe entrepreneur (Hall & Preston, 1988, p. 14). Entrepreneurs were com-mitted to the technology their entrepreneurship had brought about, capi-talists to the profits technology generated, shifting their capital to newtechnologies when profits in old ones fell in the process of Creative De-struction first identified by Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter in thelate 1930s (Schumpeter, 1976, p. 83). German economist Gerhard Menschclarified the link between technological change and creative destruction(Mensch, 1979). On the innovation side, Mensch also clarified the linkbetween technology and human agency: the ability of populations to pro-duce new technology and absorb it has always been a scarce factor . . .human capital (and not . . . physical capital) has become the main deter-minant of attainable wealth of nations (Mensch & Niehaus, 1982, pp. 3637). The implications for technology transfer are in the absorption side ofMenschs equation: for absorb read adopt.

    There are also geopolitical implications for innovations in, and trans-fer of, technology. Tuma notes, between 1860 and 1913 . . . attaining andsustaining a position of leadership in the world economy depended large-ly on the domestication of new technology (Tuma, 1987, p. 408). AsModelski (1978) pointed out, if one projects Kondratiev cycles backbeyond the onset of the first industrial revolution around 1770 to approx-imately the start of the European expansions in the late 1400s, there is apattern of two Kondratiev cycles combining to create a world leadershipcycle. In later work, Modelski and Thompson (1988) tied such cycles to astrongly navalist reading of the history of capitalism, arguing that worldleadership cycles were periods in which the power that could afford theworlds dominant navy enjoyed global hegemony. I followed this structure

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    of world history in World Trade since 1431, arguing that world leadershipcycles are better understood as hegemonic cycles and that hegemons havebeen committed to high levels of technological innovation (Hugill, 1993).Equally, the hegemonic struggle that has followed each period of hege-monic decline during the downturn of the second Kondratiev of each he-gemonic cycle has always been a technological struggle. Finally, the tran-sition between hegemonic cycles has almost always been accompanied bya war of transition (Goldstein, 1988).

    INNOVATION AND DIFFUSION OFTECHNOLOGY

    New technologies are the motor that drive the upswings in profit incapitalism; declining technologies drive the downswings. Understandingthese swings requires that we define two terms, lay down some generalconditions about the relationship between technology and science, andask and answer five main questions.

    The two terms are innovation and diffusion. These are all too fre-quently used as if they belong together, when they are quite discrete pro-cesses. Innovation is the creation of something new. Diffusion is the trans-fer of that new something over time and space. For new technology, this istechnology transfer. Cultural conditions are central to both innovation anddiffusion, sometimes encouraging them, sometimes not.

    The five main questions are:

    1. How should we define technology in the first place?

    2. What drives innovation, the development of new technologies?

    3. What drives denovation, the decline of old technologies?

    4. How are innovations and denovations diffused?

    5. Are some innovations and denovations more significant than others when it comes to driving Kondratiev cycles?

    The general conditions that help answer all five questions lie withinthe truism that technology is embedded deep in the economic, political,and social systems operating at any particular place and time, thus subjectto many of the same forces that change these systems. These systems oper-ate differently in trading and territorial polities, polities that inhabit verydifferent geopolitical arenas and have very different technological impera-tives based on those agendas. Most European states have, historically, been

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    dualistic: within states trading polities, often cities, have focused on gen-erating income through long-distance, usually sea-based, trade and capitalformation; territorial polities and their land-based military componentshave focused on generating tax revenue through coercion (Tilly, 1990, p.16). The coexistence of territorial and trading polities within the samestate has been noted for Wilhelmine Germany (Mackinder, 1919, pp. 1534) and pre-Revolutionary France (Fox, 1971, p. 37). Two European states,Holland and Britain, have long been dominated by their trading polities.

    Because of its role as the motor of capitalist development, technologyis both part of and somewhat to one side of the culture those economic,political, social systems, and geopolitical arenas help to define, and thattechnological imperatives help to change. Technologies are, however, dif-ferent from economic, political, and social systems inasmuch as they rep-resent the working out of increasingly scientific forces in those systems.Although the technologies of the first industrial revolution were littleinformed by science, from the second industrial revolution on technologyhas increasingly become the practical handmaiden of science. Science maybe a contingent part of the broader culture, but it is the most rule drivenof all the systems. The complex and relatively egalitarian economic andsocial structures of trading polities lend themselves much more to sciencethan the more hierarchical structures of territorial polities. Because newtechnologies increasingly follow general scientific rules in their innovationprocess they are more likely to be generated in more scientific cultures.However, because they follow economic, political, and social rules in theirimplementation phase, they may be transferred to cultures with much lessability to innovate. Needless to say, this complicates studying them.

    From a historical as well as a practical perspective, technology must beseparated from science, although in common usage the words scienceand technology have become interchangeable (Seely, 1988, p. 143).Without setting out to do so, Marx described in his concept of the Asiaticmode of production how technology developed in territorial polities.Nameless scholars under the patronage of the territorial polity appliedknowledge to the needs of the polity, for the most part to manage the irri-gation systems needed for agriculture in dry environments, an entirelypractical enterprise. Science originated in the Hellenic world, a prototypi-cal trading polity, where lone philosopher-scientists abstractly probed thetheoretical nature of the universe. Such science had little or no practicalapplication (Dorn, 1991, p. 32). From these origins, science becamelinked to philosophy and theory, technology to goals.

    In medieval Europe, in part because of constant military competitionwithin the increasingly territorially bounded states system that developed

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    out of European feudalism, in part because different polities within suchstates adopted sometimes a trading, sometimes a territorial geostrategy,technology became linked to interstate competition in a system in whichfew states were ever really pure polities. A ceaseless drive began for newmilitary devices. In the medieval Europe to which our society is intellec-tually heir, innovation became literally a life-or-death matter. MedievalEurope did not lack for science in the Greek sense: its polities supportedphilosophers, logicians, magicians, and astrologists who sought to under-stand the theoretical nature of the universe. What makes medieval Europeexceptional is that its polities displaced this occult with natural science,not least as it became evident that natural science merged with technolo-gy could deliver the practical results long promised but never delivered byoccult science. As a result, Western civilization became the first scientif-ic society in the history of the world (Williams & Steffens, 1977, p. 500).Dorn suggests that technology became applied natural science sometimeafter 1850 (Dorn, 1991, pp. 1315). Seelys work on the Bureau of PublicRoads suggests that 1850 is a more than optimistic date, however muchengineers adopted the language of science (Seely, 1988, p. 147). The liter-ature on the differences between science and technology is considerable,as shown by Staudenmaiers analysis of the discourse in the pioneeringjournal on the history of technology, Technology and Culture (Stauden-maier, 1985, pp. 83120).

    The technology of the industrial revolution remained in classical inde-pendence of the world of science; only during the nineteenth and twenti-eth centuries did thinkers and toolmakers finally forge a common culture.Then, new sciences with clearly practical potential made their appearance. . . While science was thus offering a handshake to technology, engineersfounded the first professional engineering societies and entered the uni-versities to be trained in the sciences. This . . . merger of the theoreticaland craft traditions has produced the scientific-technological culture inwhich, for better or worse, we are immersed today. (McClellan & Dorn,1999, p. 275)

    Two things are noticeable in retrospect: how much better natural sci-ence and its technology emerged in trading polities such as Holland, Brit-ain, and America, or in states that harbored effective trading polities, suchas France and Germany; and how much current technology reflects themechanistic, predictable, manageable universe of late 19th century sci-ence, not the unpredictable universe of modern science.

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    how should we define technology in the first place?

    Technology, as work such as that by Dorn and Seely indicates, is notscience, however much it now occupies the same slightly Procrustean bed.I divide technology into two main areashardware and softwareand Idivide hardware technologies into two arenasmaterial production andcultural production. The arena of material production is fairly straightfor-ward. It characterizes the main outcomes of the first and second industri-al revolutions. The arena of cultural production is anything but straight-forward. Increasingly, it characterizes the output of the third industrialrevolution.

    The first and second industrial revolutions both tended to favor large-scale production and the vertical integration of ever-larger firms, in part asa response to Marxs Law, in part from the need to spatially simplify thegeographically complex, awkward, putting-out, cottage manufacture-based system of the proto-industrial economy. It is difficult to say thatthere was a single, archetypal good in the first industrial revolution, al-though cotton textiles are as good a candidate as cheap china or iron railsand railways. All tended to larger- and larger-scale production over time,as well as to vertical integration. In the second industrial revolution, how-ever, the archetypal good was unquestionably the automobile; thus theautomobile manufacturing company became the archetypal firm. Large-scale production and vertical integration became standard operating pro-cedure. As Womack, Jones, and Roos point out in The Machine thatChanged the World (1990), the automobile industry developed throughthree clear technical phases: Fordist mass production, based on the con-tinued production of a single good, the Model T; Sloanist mass productionat General Motors (GM), with a product cycle based on the life of themachine tools; and Toyotist mass production, using much more flexiblemachine tools to allow rapid production changes within the life of themachine tools. However important the innovations of Ford and Sloan,Detroit was hard pressed to keep pace with Toyota City once Toyota devel-oped the third phase innovations. Innovations in large-scale, verticallyintegrated systems tend to have marked geographic results as productionshifts to the region of innovation. The fact that Ford and Sloan worked inthe same city, Detroit, obscured the epochal shift as Sloanist displacedFordist mass production. Fords 1927 shift from Model T to Model Amarked Fords adoption of Sloanist production techniques. Historians,rarely adept at understanding software innovations, frequently use theterm Fordist to describe clearly Sloanist production. Hounshells otherwisepioneering work misreads Sloanism as the triumph of marketing . . . over

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    pure production (1984, p. 267). It would become this after World War IIwhen Sloan elevated Harley Earls styling department over the productionengineers who had driven GMs remarkable accomplishments in introduc-ing new production and consumer technologies through the 1920s andmuch of the 1930s. The shift to Toyotist mass production was, however,very clear, not least because of the massive problems it created for Sloanistproducers, especially those who let styling drive engineering. In the after-math of Toyotas innovations, GM and Ford, like all automobile manufac-turers who wish to survive, have worked hard to adopt Toyotism.

    Most of the early writing on the history of technology has focused onhardware technologies and the arena of material production: the applica-tion of energy to do work. Technologies of material production generatetangible products or move tangible things through space. Because theyseem to deal with intangibles, cultural production and software technolo-gies have been somewhat ignored. Cultural production really began withthe production of plays, which required consumers to come to theaters ata specific time and place to consume them. Although plays were publishedfor individuals to read, the first form of cultural production intended as atangible output for individual consumption was the novel, a massive inno-vation in its day. Novels were highly portable and could be consumed atthe time and place of the owners choice. All cultural production since hastended to follow one of these two models of consumption. For the lasthundred years, cultural production has depended increasingly on the ap-plication of material technologies at the points both of production andconsumption, be it theater, novel, periodical, film, recorded music, radio,television, video, or videogame. Entertainment also segues over into ad-vertising, which is a way of programming people to achieve certain desiredoutcomes. Clear evidence of that comes from Battleship Potemkin, the firstmajor film by Russian director Sergei Eisenstein. In Potemkin, Eisensteinwas selling the Russian Revolution. The techniques and style he developedin that film are the basis of all modern films as well as of all filmed adver-tisements. If we learn one thing about technology from the computer, it should be that the way work and consumption are organized (pro-grammed) is as important as the energy that gets the work done and themachines that apply the energy.

    Softwareprogrammingis one of the hardest areas of technology todefine and one of the most important. At its deepest and most generallevel, I include cultural programming of the sort first pointed out by MaxWeber in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1958). Protes-tantism, whatever else it is, has been from Calvin a mechanism for pro-gramming the elite in capitalist societies to reinvest capital, thus reinforc-

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    ing the investment in new technologies and disinvestment in old ones nec-essary to generate Kondratiev cycles. That such programming took strong-est hold in states with commercial economies dominated by trading poli-ties, such as Holland, Britain, and America, cannot reasonably be seen asaccidental. Trading polities are complex programming systems themselves,and which way causation runs between type of polity and ideology is hardto disentangle. As commerce gave way to industry as the dominant activi-ty of capitalism, newer forms of Protestantism such as Methodism pro-grammed workers to work effectively: to stay sober, to turn up for workon time, to marry and form stable family groups, to provide for their fam-ilies futures by saving, and the like. When Friedrich Engels wrote of TheCondition of the Working Class in England in 1845 he saw enthusiastic reli-gion, in his day and place almost entirely Methodism, as one of the waysthe working class dealt with the alienation of the capitalist workplace: theothers, which he saw as interlinked, were strong drink, which he is reput-ed to have said was the fastest way out of Manchester on a Saturdaynight, and sex (Engels, 1968, pp. 11516, 1414).

    Software programming also operates at more specific levels. RichardArkwrights factory system combined hardware and software solutions tothe problems of proto-industrialization. The hardware innovations were inboth energy and machine technologies. Arkwright used easily dammedstreams to drive large water wheels to generate, by the standards of histime, a considerable amount of power at a single geographic location,power he used to drive new, power-hungry machines. His multiple-spin-dle water-frame replaced the numerous young women, the spinsters ofproto-industry, who spun thread one spindle at a time seated at spinningwheels in numerous cottages spread all over the rural landscape. Ark-wrights more important software innovations were in the spatial simplifi-cation of proto-industry achieved by concentrating power and labor in thespace of the mill and the resulting subjection of his labor to the twin dis-ciplines of the overseer and the regular pay packet.

    A similar example can be seen in the series of innovations generated inAmerica in the early 1900s that we now collectively describe as scientificmanagement. There were three main gurus of scientific management. Fred-erick W. Taylors book, The Principles of Scientific Management, defined thefield in 1911. Taylors work was based on his experiences using theMonongahela and Allegheny Rivers as assembly lines. Frank GilbrethsMotion Study, also published in 1911, made management aware of theneed to manage movement within the factory, that is, its internal spatialstructure. Finally, Henry Ford practiced much of what Taylor and Gilbrethpreached, installing moving assembly lines in his Highland Park factory by

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    1913, going them one better in seeking to maximize whole productive sys-tems rather than merely labor productivity (Hounshell, 1984, pp. 2513).In part Ford substituted machines for men, in part he used some of his sur-plus profit to pay his workers a wage high enough for them to purchasethe fruits of their own labor, although this certainly improved labor pro-ductivity by slashing labor turnover. More recent software innovations,such as Demings continuous quality control concept, lean production, andthe just-in-time system have merely continued the process begun in Amer-ica in the early 1900s. Business schools, for example, tend to concentrateon the innovation and diffusion of such software technologies.

    what drives innovation, the development of new technologies?

    Innovation is a difficult process to pin down, not least because thereare so many seemingly easy answers. Innovation is, however, far less com-mon than diffusion. Copying, even adapting a technology, is not necessar-ily hard, although adoption environments vary and diffusion is never even.What is hard is creating an innovation environment. In theory, all humansought to be equally innovative, subject to the usual considerations ofnative ability and intelligence. In practice, they are not, with culture seem-ingly the variable that explains why innovation occurs more frequently insome environments than others. The commonest answer within capitalistsocieties to why innovation occurs is economistic: innovation occurswhen the returns to capital accrue largely to individual innovators. Thisanswer, although simple and long accepted in capitalist polities, begs a lotof questions. It applies best to the innovations that drove the first indus-trial revolution at a time when innovators were likely to become entrepre-neurs. Successful innovators such as Arkwright and James Watt of steamengine fame were among the worlds richest men by the time of theirdeaths. However, as more technology has become science based, manyinnovators work outside the direct reward system of capitalism in the rel-atively socialized systems of research universities and corporate researchlaboratories. Such systems have different rewards. To take but one exam-ple, tenure in a research university can be construed as an economicreward inasmuch as it represents a lifetime guarantee of employment. Thelifetime earnings of a tenured professor, however, are scarcely comparableto the economic returns possible with a successful innovation.

    Innovations also come in clusters that are both temporal and spatial innature. Again, temporal clusters are often explained economistically. Dis-investment in old technologies and reinvestment in new ones is part of the

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    economic cycle identified by Kondratiev and Schumpeter that is driven byfalling returns to capital according to Marxs Law. A favorite of neoclassi-cal economists is to argue that low taxes spur innovation. The spatial clus-tering of innovation argues against this conclusion. Differential innovationat the state level can certainly be explained by economic forces, such asdifferences in tax laws that favor innovators in one state and not another.Within states, however, such arguments do not easily apply, althoughAmerican tax law has certainly produced a Byzantine web of spatial varia-tion that might easily mislead American neoclassical economists. How-ever, some regions, usually cities, and only very special cities or city-regions at that, have simply been much more innovative than others, atleast at some given historical moment. Halls sophisticated work on thenature and history of The City as Innovative Milieu demonstrates thisvery clearly (Hall, 1998, pp. 289500). If economic forces such as taxeswere the sole driving force of innovation, innovation fields would be even-ly spread within a given tax system: they clearly are not.

    As Hall notes, the best solution to why innovation occurs in someplaces and not others lies in the tangled undergrowth of location theory,a rather obscure sub-science, existing at the borderline of human geogra-phy and economics (Hall, 1998, p. 293). Innovations almost certainlycluster because of the effect of human agency. Like-minded folk clusterand like-minded people in a critical mass make a milieu innovative. Suchfolk may take advantage of the economic system within a given state, butthey choose to cluster in specific places within the state for almost totallynon-economic reasons. As Hall notes, neoclassical economics is too staticto be of much help in understanding the emergence of innovative milieusand Marxist economics, driven by Marxs Law, seeks only to explain de-cline. After working his way through the tangled undergrowth of locationtheory, Halls tentative conclusion . . . is that the innovative milieu hasbeen an all-pervasive principle throughout the history of capitalist devel-opment (Hall, 1998, p. 306). However, Hall notes, the evidence as towhether successful innovations can be made to stimulate a chain of con-tinuing innovation over decades and even centuries is not encouraging(Hall, 1998, p. 499). Innovations not only cluster in time, as first suggest-ed by Kondratiev, but also in space. Of the six city-regions identified byHall as unusually innovative milieus during the last 200 yearsManches-ter, Glasgow, Berlin, Detroit, Silicon Valley, and Keihin (Tokyo-Kana-gawa)only the last two have survived beyond their first innovation waveinto another. Berlin succumbed to war and the partition of Germany. Man-chester, Glasgow, and Detroit succumbed to failure to maintain their

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    respective innovative positions in cotton textiles, shipbuilding, and auto-mobiles.

    Hall is, in most of his work, concerned with hardware technologies andmaterial production. In a shorter section of his work, The Marriage of Artand Technology, he emphasizes cultural production in two great centersof innovationLos Angeles for film, television, and video, and Memphisfor recorded music (Hall, 1998, pp. 503608). Merging material produc-tion with cultural production and software technologies would, I suggest,change Halls conclusions somewhat. Hall notes that, traditionally, indus-trial production has been far more organized around the output of small,artisanal workshops than around the output of vertically integrated, large-scale factories. Factory output became important only in the first and sec-ond industrial revolutions. As the third industrial revolution develops, weshow signs of returning to artisanal production in a large number of rela-tively independent, small-scale workshops. I say relatively because theyhave to cooperate with each other to set standards and provide productsneeded in larger-scale assembly operations in a timely fashion. Just-in-time production is, primarily, a software technology for regularizing arti-sanal production to suit the needs of large-scale, second industrial revolu-tion production systems. The perceived advantage to second industrialrevolution producers of the just-in-time system is that it reduces capitalinvestment in plant and inventory, but it also allows many independentproducers to avoid being sucked into large-scale systems where their iden-tity vanishes and their artisanal skills are less valued, if they are at all. AsHall notes, purely on structural grounds, the multiple experiments in pro-duction, labor relations, capital formation, and the like that artisanal pro-duction makes possible are more likely to produce innovation than thehighly centralized, top-down production style of first and second indus-trial revolution systems. However, artisanal production is not always andonly about production per se. Within any artisanal community, there arealways producers whose links are to cultural as well as material produc-tion, who take pride in the artistic as well as the practical component oftheir output. All artisanal production needs to occur in interlinked com-munities of artisans, but the needs of the cultural production componentdrives those communities to also need to be in places where cultural inno-vation is strong, hence the long-remarked tendency of major cities to becenters of artistic as well as other forms of innovation. In this reading, Iwould suggest that cities such as Manchester, Glasgow, and Detroit failedto upgrade their technologies from the first and second industrial revolu-tions and shift to the more artisanal production and innovation forms of

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    the third industrial revolution in part because they failed to develop ascenters of complex artistic and cultural innovation in the way needed forartisanal production. Innovative milieus are innovative in much more thanhardware technologies and material production.

    what drives denovation, the decline of old technologies?

    Denovation has been little studied. Torsten Hgerstrand, the founder oftheoretical mathematical diffusion studies (1962, 1967), has noted morerecently that innovations imply de-novations . . . [an] almost totally neg-lected area for research . . . I do not think we shall have a mature scienceof cultural transfer and transformation until we are able to view both theconstructive and destructive side of the process (Hgerstrand, 1988, p.231). As Hgerstrand notes, denovation represents disinvestments and de-industrialization. But as Schumpeter recognized, denovation also repre-sents the opportunity for reinvestment in more profitable, newer technol-ogies. Denovation is the obverse of innovation, and just as important.

    Hagerstrands argument is that both innovation and denovation are tiedto the Principle of Limited Possibilities proposed by Goldenweiser (1913).Innovation requires that some preexisting time-uses involving persons,things, and space may have to be abandoned, which shuts off other pos-sibilities: in consequence, innovations nearly always have some unin-tended, and frequently deplorable consequences (Hgerstrand, 1988, p.231). In this regard, for all their problems, denovations reopen the field ofpossibilities that previous innovations had restricted.

    Denovation in the experience of capitalist societies is linked inextrica-bly and most broadly with deindustrialization, a fairly recent term, al-though not a particularly recent phenomenon. Until the Thatcher govern-ment in Britain and, to a lesser extent, the Reagan administration in Amer-ica, deindustrialization was presumed to be a serious problem for indus-trial societies. Deindustrialization meant job loss, particularly blue-collarjobs, which meant union unrest and, especially in Britain, high transferpayments to redundant workers. At the time, such job loss was not muchassociated with the process of creative destruction and the creation of anew economy as described by Schumpeter. A further wave of creative de-struction swept through the American economy in the 1980s, the Kondra-tiev peak having been reached in 1981 (Berry, 1991, p. 143), although thisrestructuring reduced middle management rather than blue-collar jobs.The new economy that emerged, that of the dot-coms and the Clintonboom, was the first clear sign the third industrial revolution was underway, with its emphasis on cultural production, software technologies, and

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    much more flexible production milieus of the sort described by Hall(1998).

    Deindustrialization means that some capital, both financial as compa-nies wind down and physical as factories are abandoned, is released forinnovatory enterprise. More to the point, it means that much human cap-ital is also released. Human capital, like physical capital, needs restructur-ing, a process we describe as reeducation at the level of the individual. Ata societal level, the entire educational system may need reforming to meetthe needs of the new economy. Inertia restricts the extent to which indi-viduals can be reeducated and educational systems reformed, but enoughreeducation and reform occurred in the 1990s to prove the point. AnyAmerican academic teaching in a graduate program with expertise in theinformation economy is aware of the number of mature students seekingreeducation. In my own discipline of geography, the growth of interest inGeographic Information Science has been spectacular. The Americangrade school system, kindergarten through the end of high school, wassubstantially reformed in the 1990s. The bipartisan initiative that startedwhen Governor Clinton of Arkansas chaired the National Governors Con-ference matured as Goals 2000 under President Clinton and was signedinto law as Education 2000 under President George H. W. Bush. Such edu-cational reforms temper the impact of the wave of creative destruction.

    Capitalisms earlier experiences with denovation and creative destruc-tion were, however, nowhere near so positive. The most harrowing was theseries of events surrounding the end of World War I that culminated in theGreat Depression. Neither Kondratiev nor Schumpeters work on long-term change in capitalist economies had been done, although Keynes usedhis experiences in managing the war economy to begin to build microeco-nomic theory to allow us to manage short-term change in capitalist econo-mies. Without the right macroeconomic theory, it was hard for anyone torealize what, exactly, was occurring in the world economy of the 1920s.Britain, for example, clung desperately to the economic policies of globalliberalism that had sustained its economy through the long period of Vic-torian and Edwardian prosperity and which could even be argued to havebrought success in World War I. Because a cornerstone of those policieswas the maintenance of sterling as the global reserve currency through theuse of the gold standard, Britain even returned to the gold standard in the1920s (Bernstein, 2000), in retrospect a disastrous error of economic judg-ment in the face of the increasingly tariff-protected economies of its mainglobal competitors, America and Germany.

    Before World War I, America and Germany had ridden the rising eco-nomic tide of two new industrial technologies created behind those tariff

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    walls. One technology was based on electricity, the other on the internalcombustion engine. Some British companies, notably Marconi, successful-ly innovated in the information sector of the new electrical economy (Hu-gill, 1999), but few innovated in the use of electricity for power, Ferrantibeing a notable exception (Byatt, 1979), and none in the use of electricityfor transportation. British companies were also notably absent in the earlydevelopment of the internal combustion engine; even Rolls Royce drewheavily on French experience for its first automobiles and German designsfor its first aircraft engines. The consequence of all this was that, especial-ly before World War I, American, German and, to a lesser extent, Frenchcompanies sought to transfer their innovations to the highly profitableBritish market by developing British subsidiaries or licensing their tech-nologies to British companies.

    Companies that sought to transfer their innovations to Britain encoun-tered substantial problems because of Britains failureor unwillingnessto denovate. Two examples suffice. In railroads, German and Americancompanies developed the technologies needed for electric traction, Ameri-can companies the multiple unit controller that allowed one motorman tocontrol multiple electric motors mounted under the carriages of a suburbanor subway train. In the most notable such transfer, between 1901 and 1905Londons tube system was laid out, developed, and financed by a Chicagotraction financier, Charles T. Yerkes, so crooked he was run out of Chicagoin 1897 (Hugill, 1993, p. 196). In the automobile industry, Britains lack ofdenovation and failure to reform its educational system meant a severeshortage of automotive engineers. GM, wishing to enter the British marketto compete with Ford, which had established an assembly plant in Britainin 1913, and unable to buy the British mass producer, Austin, bought Vaux-hall Motors in 1925. Vauxhall produced very small numbers of high-pricedsporting cars, a far cry from GMs mass-market vehicles. Even in America,seasoned automotive engineers were in short supply in the 1920s autoboom, and they were impossible to find in Britain. What GM was reallybuying was Vauxhalls seasoned staff (Hugill, 1988, p. 127).

    Such problems in denovation occurred elsewhere than Britain. In Ger-many, part of Hitlers response to the Depression was to reform the educa-tional system along ideological lines, preferring volkisch disciplines to sci-entific ones. Disciplines smacking of mathematics or physics were likelyto be accused of being Jewish in Spirit. Another part of Hitlers responseto the Depression was motorieserungpolitik, building autobahnen and acheap vehicle for the National Socialist masses to use on them. By the late1930s, so few automotive engineers were being trained in Germany and sofew were willing to work for so clearly a Nazi interest that many of the

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    engineers for the new Volkswagenwerke had to be recruited from German-speaking engineers in Detroit.

    In America, denovation took a classic turn in railroading. Baldwin Lo-comotive Company and the American Locomotive Company (ALCO)built some of the finest steam locomotives ever, mostly for long-distancework, and were among the largest corporations in America by the early1900s. Both failed to denovate from steam engine production as innova-tions occurred in electric traction and the internal combustion engine.GMs successful innovation of the diesel-electric locomotive in the late1920s and the development of their Electro-Motive Division destroyedboth older companies, although Baldwin tried to develop diesel-electricsand ALCO, bizarrely, flirted briefly with automobiles in the first decade ofthe 20th century.

    how are innovations and denovations transferred from place to place, a process generally describedby academics as diffusion?

    Diffusion is central to many academic disciplines and has generated anextensive literature. The earliest study of diffusion was in anthropologyand cultural geography, but it now turns up in many other social sciencedisciplines. History has been underrepresented (Hugill, 1996). Historiansof technology have rarely referenced this strong social science literatureand have thus underestimated the complexity of the processes surround-ing technology transfer (Staudenmaier, 1985, p. 123). In the pioneeringstudy of diffusion in the very early 1900s, cultural geography tended toone polar position, anthropology to another. In retrospect, anthropologistswere seeking to explain innovation, cultural geographers the spatial move-ment of innovations we refer to as diffusion. Cultural geographers andsome early anthropologists propounded the epidemic theory of diffusion,arguing there were a limited number of areas of innovation on the planet,perhaps only one, from which all major cultural traits had diffused uni-formly by a process akin to the transmission of contagious disease (Dick-son, 1988). This kulturkreisculture circlesschool described humans asuninventive and innovations as rare, but diffusion as easy and people asreadily accepting new ideas (Hugill, 1996). At the other extreme, anthro-pologists have increasingly held that all human beings are innately andequally innovative. From this perspective, the utopian theory of culturechange, innovation is continuous or triggered by such exogenous variablesas population pressure (Dickson, 1988). In such circumstances diffusiondoes not need to be explained. An extensive modern literature dealing

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    with the practical aspects of diffusion (Rogers, 1995) tends to follow theepidemic model. As early as 1853, Marx predicted that European industryand railroads would spread easily to India as the English millocracysought to restore profitability to a declining cotton industry, and that sucha technology transfer would inevitably transform India (quoted in Head-rick, 1988, p. 3). However, as Headrick points out,

    the transfer of technology is not one process but two. One of these is therelocation, from one area to another, of equipment and methods, alongwith the experts to operate them. The other is the diffusion from onesociety to another of the knowledge, skills, and attitudes related to a particular device or process. (Headrick, 1988, p. 9)

    Headricks distinction is a useful one. It reminds us that relocation dif-fusion of the sort Marx foresaw for cotton is quite common and has virtu-ally no impact on the society to which that transfer occurs. The trans-forming diffusion of knowledge, skills, and attitudes is rare and difficult.Much of the technology transfer out of the industrial world has been viarelocation diffusion, which looks like epidemic diffusion. Western capitalbuilds a plant to exploit cheap local resources but makes no attempt totransfer any understanding of how the technology in question works.Transforming diffusion is the transfer of the knowledge base that allowspeople to make the technology work, replicate it, and improve on it.

    The advantage of the utopian theory over the kulturkreis school is thatthe former has a theory of innovation that removes the need for diffusion;the latter has a theory of diffusion but not of innovation. Carl Sauer wasthe first to seek to redress the problems of the kulturkreis school, separat-ing innovation from diffusion and seeking theories for both (Sauer, 1952).Sauer, the founder of the Berkeley School of cultural geography in the1920s, regarded innovation as difficult, rare, and most likely to happen incommunities of like-minded folk with plentiful leisure time to experi-ment. His concept of what are clearly innovative milieus for agricultureprefigures Halls innovative milieus for industry (1998). Sauer believed dif-fusion was easier than innovation, but not that it was contagious. Not allpeople were equally infected by a given innovation. Although there hasbeen no single school of diffusion studies within geography as a whole(Entrikin, 1988), the Berkeley School has been historically dominant aswell as marked by three distinct approaches to the study of diffusion: theirearly acceptance of the work of Torsten Hgerstrand, who pioneered themathematical modeling of diffusion paths; their acceptance of the conceptof the adoption environment on the basis that, for whatever reason, not allpeople are equally willing to accept any given innovation, thus that non-

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    epidemic diffusion is the norm; and their argument that accepting a giveninnovation is a form of human social interaction, in which the perceivedstatus of the sender of the innovation is paramount to its acceptance (Wag-ner, 1996). The most significant failing of Sauer and his students was anobsession with the preindustrial world that blinded them to problems ofinnovation and diffusion in more complex commercial and industrial soci-eties (Hugill, 1996).

    Hgerstrands early work simply mathematized the epidemic theory ofdiffusion using a study of the spread of radios in rural Sweden (Hger-strand, 1962). The first publication of his work in English was in the land-mark volume of essays by Berkeley School alumnae and fellow travelers,Readings in Cultural Geography (Wagner & Mikesell, 1962). Observed spa-tial anomalies in the spread of radios and other innovations brought Hg-erstrand and his students to the realization that adoption environmentplayed a much more important role in diffusion than even the BerkeleySchool had previously realized. Although Hgerstrand had substantialinfluence on cultural geography, his influence on the field of economicgeography, especially location theory, was much more profound and hiswork sparked a substantial body of mathematical diffusion research, muchof it at Ohio State University (Brown, 1981). This work has concentratedheavily on analyzing the spatial patterns of diffusion.

    The work of Hgerstrand, Brown, and others has tended to be strong-ly positivistic, paying little attention to human agency in the diffusionprocess. One of the first to redress that lack of attention was Meir, in aseries of articles in which he sought to merge the positivist and humanisttraditions in the study of diffusion. The result was his formulation of theconcept of the adoption environment.

    Information about the innovation and its availability is necessary but nota sufficient condition for adoption. Other . . . factors . . . are the individ-uals experience, norms, values, and intentions regarding the particularobject, the individuals socio-economic status, and the public and institu-tional organizational frameworks within which the individual is situated,and which represent cultural, societal, political, and geographical contextspertaining to the particular innovation. Individual adopters are not actingwithin a vacuum or on an isotropic plain. Rather, their actions are con-ducted within an environmental context that assumes a multidimensionalnature, each dimension exerting varying degrees of influence on theactions of different individuals. (Meir, 1988, pp. 23940)

    Meir thus split the impact of any given innovation on a given adopterinto two: the information effect (the neighborhood and hierarchicaleffect) . . . [and the] environmental effect that together constitute the

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    adoption environment. The adoption environment may change the timeof adoption or the innovation adoption intensity at any given period(Meir, 1988, p. 245).

    Although Meir expressed interest in the status of the adopter in hisconcept of adoption environments, the third distinct approach generatedout of Berkeley School geography looks at the perceived status of thesender. To this end Wagner introduced his concept of geltung, the self-presentations made by people . . . the relative magnitude of certain quali-ties attributed to individuals in and by discourse or action in general(Wagner, 1996, p. 12). Wagner further notes the centrality of diffusion tothe genesis and maintenance of human cultures. Culture . . . at a givenmoment and locality amounts simply to the temporary and complex lega-cy of a multitude of . . . imitative diffusions of invented routines over time,from many disparate sources (Wagner, 1996, p. 3). Individuals with highlevels of geltung simply will be more listened to when it comes to innova-tion. In capitalist economies, the phenomenon is familiar. Advertisers whospend large amounts of money to have celebrities endorse their productare using geltung of a certain type to persuade people to adopt a givengood.

    McNeill, the American historian who has written more extensively onthe role of diffusion in history than any other, notes simply that it is thecentral process of human history (McNeill, 1988, p. 75). The principleproblem in understanding diffusion is that, although it is central it is also,because of the nature of capitalist entrepreneurship, as concealed as pos-sible. Copying products made by another company, a special case of diffu-sion, will bring legal trouble to the copier if the product is under patent orcopyright protection. Even if it is not, few companies admit to copyinganother companys product because it is likely to lower the perceived sta-tus of their own product in the marketplace should the fact becomeknown. In a case study of the automobile industry, I demonstrated thatcopying and covering up are exceedingly common (Hugill, 1988).

    are some innovations and denovations more significant than others when it comes to driving Kondratiev cycles?

    The case for the significance of some denovations over others is hard-er to make than that for innovations, although the case is easily made thatsome polities have maintained investments in declining technologies toolong, thus denying their economy crucially needed investments in up-swing technologies. Britain is the classic example. In the late 1800s, Britishinvestors preferred what seemed like secure and higher returns from over-

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    seas investment to recapitalizing Britains declining manufacturing econo-my. Much of that overseas investment was then dissipated to pay the ap-palling financial as well as human costs of World War I (Ferguson, 1999).Britains traditional method of waging war was as a trading polity, using its navy to isolate itself from Europe, continuing to make money fromlong-distance trade, and leaving to others the huge expense of a standingarmy and the land-based military campaigning of territorial polities.World War I saw a reversal of that traditional policy, with disastrous finan-cial consequences. To compound the problem, British domestic reinvest-ment was managed very poorly. In the Edwardian boom years immediate-ly before World War I, a phenomenal amount of reinvestment went intothe British cotton textile industry, but into the existing technologies ofmule spinning and non-automatic power looms. In the same period,American mills abandoned mule spinners and non-automatic looms formore profitable ring spinners and automatic looms. The up-and-comingJapanese cotton textile industry simply invested in them de novo. By the1930s, Toyoda, the great Japanese textile machinery manufacturer, waslicensing its automatic looms to the rest of the world. The British rein-vestment of the Edwardian period was lost with almost no chance ofreturn in the radical downsizing of the British textile industry in the1920s. The Great Depression finished off most of the rest of Britains tex-tile industry, although it would die a long painful death through the 1960s.

    British loss of industrial power thus dates to three failures: to developor even invest in the technologies of the second industrial revolution thatdeveloped from the innovation cluster around 1875; a preference for high-er short-term returns, in this case from foreign investment; and the finan-cial disaster of a World War I fought as if Britain was a territorial polity.The mistake of failing to denovate old technologies in the Edwardianboom was compounded by the mistake of reinvestment in old technolo-gies, deepening Britains decline. Britains loss of industrial hegemony wasaccompanied by a loss of global political and military hegemony. As Brit-ains economic strength waned, she could no longer afford to maintain theworlds largest and most powerful navy.

    British hegemony was clearly failing by 1917. By that year only Ameri-cas economy and productive capacity was keeping Britain in World War Iagainst a vastly superior German industrial economy. The massive spend-ing down of Britains huge foreign investments to pay for the war allowedAmerica to achieve economic hegemony by wars end. Yet America, whichcould have parlayed that economic hegemony into political and militaryhegemony, failed to do so. True American hegemony had to wait until 1945and the end of the second phase of the war of hegemonic transition we con-

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    ventionally call World Wars I and II. The conventional American historicalinterpretation for this delay draws on two policy failures: a domestic poli-cy of isolationism and a foreign policy that produced the Washington NavalTreaty of 1922. In this Treaty, America agreed to naval parity with Britainon a tonnage basis, to allow three tons of Japanese naval shipping to everyfive American, and to have few constraints on the growth of naval aviation.Both policies were remarkably misbegotten.

    In The Carrier Wave, Hall and Preston (1988) argue that some innova-tions, notably information technologies, were more important than othersin driving Kondratiev upswings. As I argued in Global Communicationssince 1844 (Hugill, 1999), telecommunications was by far the most signif-icant of those information technologies. Trading polities have a particularinterest in long-distance communication because they need to control dis-tant exchanges of goods and services and the flows such exchanges repre-sent. They need reliable, rapid communication, because higher profits ac-crue to merchants who get information early. Britain thus invested heavi-ly in long-distance telecommunications from their outset, first as subma-rine telegraph cables, then as wireless. British investment in wireless tookseveral forms, had substantial connections to merchant shipping and themilitary, both naval and air arms, and evolved very rapidly indeed. Untilthe German and American development of technologies to generate con-tinuous radio waves around 1910, the first wireless technology, developedby Marconi in Britain, was limited to Morse transmission and was hard totune. In effect, all stations received all signals. Continuous waves alloweddiscrete tuning, thus many more channels, and as vacuum tubes devel-oped after 1910 they also allowed the higher frequencies and greater band-width needed for voice transmission. Had World War I gone into 1919, theAllies proposed to break out of the trenches using combined advances byaircraft and tanks. These would have been coordinated by the use of largenumbers of radios designed for speech transmission. Massive numbers ofsuch radios and the vacuum tubes needed for them were in production bylate 1918. Radios designed to receive speech could as easily receive music,and war surplus tubes were sold at incredibly low prices. A major conse-quence was the explosive growth of the broadcast radio industry from1922 on, once transmission frequencies had been divided up appropriate-ly between military and commercial interests.

    Also in the early 1920s the British company, Marconi, using vacuumtubes, began to experiment successfully with even higher frequency trans-mission, on what we now call the short-wave band. Together with beamantennae, short waves were ideal for very cheap, very long distance Morsetransmission, perfect for a trading polity. But short waves brought prob-

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    lems. En route around the curvature of the planet short waves bounced offthe ionosphere, a very variable region of the atmosphere. Britains NationalPhysical Laboratory, directed by Robert Watson-Watt, was thus chargedwith mapping out diurnal and longer-term variations in the ionosphereusing very short bursts of radio waves. Noting that these bursts of radioenergy bounced back early when aircraft flew overhead led Watson-Watteventually to radar, although it was the geopolitical concerns of the Britishstate about building Nazi air aggression that caused the Imperial DefenceCommittee to contact Watson-Watt, invest in, and operationalize his tech-nology (Hugill, 1999).

    Of all the innovations in information technology, radar was the mostcrucial in the innovation cluster that occurred around 1935, although itsclose relation, television, occurred in the same cluster. Radar ensured Brit-ain would not lose the first critical battle of World War II, the air Battle ofBritain, loss of which would have almost certainly led to German victoryin the war itself. Although several major innovations in television, such asRCAs iconoscope, were American, the iconoscope was first used in a com-mercial television system in Britain in 1936. The greatest British innova-tion was the magnetron that allowed very-high-power radar. In 1940, theTizard Mission transferred all British radar technology to America (Hugill,1999, p. 162). Although American firms did much to develop such radar,its origins were almost entirely British.

    Radar helped to keep open the Atlantic supply lines and the aerial as-sault on Germany by American and British strategic bombers. I argue inGlobal Communications since 1844 (Hugill, 1999) that British radar onlymoved ahead of German radar in a hardware sense after the developmentof the magnetron in 1940, but that British radar was always ahead in soft-ware terms. This illustrates the crucial balance between hardware and soft-ware needed in implementing any innovation. British radar, technicallymuch clumsier than German radar in the late 1930s, developed to meet aclear geopolitical need, restoring Britains status as a trading polity occu-pying an island almost immune from invasion, a status Britain believedlost with the emergence of aircraft in the very early 1900s. British radarwas also developed using a very successful software technology pioneeredby the Telecommunications Research Establishment, where there was afrank exchange between all involved from theoretical physicists to opera-tional aircrew. As with the hardware technology of radar, this softwaretechnology was also diffused to America by the Tizard Mission, resultingin the setting up of the Radiation Laboratory at the Massachusetts Instituteof Technology. In the parallel development of radar in Germany, the bigelectronic firms were told what the military staff officers thought their air-

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    crew needed (Hugill, 1999, p, 23). In addition, the British created anoperational reserve of technicians trained to work on radar when theyimplemented the worlds first broadcast electronic television system in1936. All British radar display systems of World War II were converteddomestic television chassis.

    Americas failure to become fully hegemonic after 1919 was thus notentirely a failure to adopt competent domestic and foreign policies. It alsopresents an interesting case of failure to innovate in television and radar,which turned out to be, in Hall and Prestons term, carrier wave technolo-gies (1988). Both of Britains hegemonic challengers, America and Ger-many, were simply behind in the most crucial arena of information tech-nology in the innovation cluster around 1935. America absolutely, andGermany in the software technologies that turned out to be critical whenit came to implementing radar.

    CONCLUSION

    Technology is thus not only the motor of capitalism but also muchmore. It provides the opportunities for investment and disinvestment thatdrive the long cycles in the world economy. It preserves capitalism fromdestruction by the otherwise inexorable workings of Marxs Law when theinvestments that occur on the Kondratiev upswing restore profitability tothe system. It ensures that Schumpeters process of creative destruction iscreative as well as destructive. Finally, by driving Kondratiev upswingsthat have been, because of the operations of human agency and the pastdifficulty of diffusion, hitherto almost always localized in a single state,technology has, over the last 500 years, also driven hegemonic cycles.

    Although there is evidence that we may be about to exit the system ofhegemonic cycles as a result of much more widespread diffusion of inno-vations in a globalized economic system, a more even adoption environ-ment, and more effective policies to encourage innovation, that exit is notyet clear. As Goldstein points out, a regrettable feature of the system ofhegemonic cycles is that previous hegemonic transitions have all been ac-companied by wars of transition (Goldstein, 1988). On that basis, exitingthe system of hegemonic cycles makes a deal of sense, and it makes thematter of developing, implementing, and transferring new technologiesmuch more than a matter of the simple restoration of profitability to thecapitalist world system.

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