Abstract
Innovation is everywhere. Innovation is discussed in scientific and technical literature, in social sciences such as sociology, management and economics, and in the humanities and arts. Innovation is also a central idea in the popular imaginary, in the media and in public policy. How has innovation acquired such a central place in our society? This paper looks at innovation as category, and suggests an outline for a genealogical history.
Case Study of “The quest for innovation”
Cultures of Technology
Culture matters—this has been one of the most often-heard messages. It matters in its attempts to explain why economic opportunities have been seized in one country or region, and why economic failures have occurred in another. It matters not only for economic development, but also for political development. It promotes change—or impedes it. It matters when corporations with different organizational cultures merge or fail to do so. With organizations increasingly moving in global environment, they are well-advised to broaden their cultural range and to question the assumption that their concepts are universally valid. In the field of organizational learning, for instance, a shift has occurred toward a concept of organizational culture as the unit in which learning occurs. The culture of an organization is said to be pivotal to understanding how a particular organization adapts to ongoing changes. It shapes perceptions of past and current events. The emphasis is on shared conceptions of what needs to be learned, how it is to be learned, and why. Culture is understood here in its most encompassing sense: a shared scheme of interpretation that enables the organization to cope with change.
Culture matters—and indeed it permeates an enormously wide range of social activities. It binds together communities or sets them apart. It makes communities different from each other, shaping their interaction not only among members, but between the community and outsiders. It is linked to innovation in often unforeseeable ways in the sense that it can be predisposed to finding certain innovative solutions to a problem while eschewing others.
To approach technology from a cultural perspective it is at once self-evident and highly demanding: self-evident, because technology is one of the most consequential cultural practices to have evolved since the beginnings of humanity. The extension of human capacities which allowed humans to overcome and to extend their given biologic constraints, as well as those of the natural habitat in which they found themselves, is truly impressive. Merlin Donald has drawn attention to the rise of symbolic technologies, the invention and manipulation of external symbols that have changed the way in which we think, remember, and experience reality. This rise of symbolic technologies has triggered a powerful cognitive transition (the first was the origin of language), liberating consciousness from the limitations of the brain’s biologic memory system. Symbolic technologies have opened the gateway to allow the merging of symbolic virtuality with material reality.
Cultures of technology are about arrangements. To speak about different cultures of technology breaks down the distinction between the material tool or its built-in technological efficiency, and the social organization, including the individual user and their social interactions. Cultures of technology are about shared meanings. Culture organizes practices. The processes and the range of ways in which this is done, also matters. To focus on cultures of technology does not imply a neglect of the subtle impact that technology has on our lives, nor does it ignore the first steps in the genesis of emerging new technology. Rather, the emphasis is on what John Pickstone (in the alternative frame he has developed to take a fresh historical look across the entire spectrum of science, technology, and medicine), calls “ways of doing”.
Technology works—and we expect it to work. It works on different levels and in different ways. They work through the tight or loose coupling of the elements that make up a technological system. They work through the ways in which people organize their work and through the division of labor in manufacturing or in service industries. They work by mediating social interaction. But they also work in a very powerful way by generating symbolic and cultural meanings. Any comprehensive account of technological innovation, as John Pick-stone writes in this book, must allow for these meanings, including their supposed derivation from science. If we can see how the various elements of technology — from long-standing and usually traditional crafts, by way of systematic invention dating from about 1870 and demanding considerable social organization and education, to the present situation of high-tech, high-science complexity spreading across many sectors with the increasing use of computers at its base — fit together in history and our present, then we will have a good model for understanding technological innovation, including its cultural meaning.
Cultures of technology should therefore prepare us to understand where the quest for innovation comes from, pushing us forcefully to go far beyond any imagined “endless frontier.” Innovation is no longer a goal, since it has, by its very nature, espoused a striving for the unpredictable and the unknown. Perhaps it has become a means — however; it can only constitute a tentative attempt to cope with the idea of a future that has become full of surprises.
Situation Today
Today, the modern management of risk, notwithstanding the many unresolved problems, has become highly professionalized and, as we have seen, is thriving in one sector that has transformed it into a business of its own, the management of financial markets. But technology, often lumped together indiscriminately with the concept of a unified science or seen as merely applied science, has become associated, if not tarnished, with the negative consequences they have also had on the social fabric of modern societies. The confidence in the achievement of sustainable technological progress is a precarious one, punctuated time and again by scandals involving the political management and regulation of risks associated with technological advances. The quest for ongoing innovation promises a way out. Its very open-endedness suggests a new flexibility and may point in the direction of improved and safe technology. It may gesture toward collective learning processes, which span the public and private domains and may bring with them social innovations of a kind as yet unknown.
Conclusion
The goal of this paper is to identify cultures of technology as a way of working across the entire societal spectrum, linking the technical intricacies with the requirements of the social and economic fabric of societies, uncovering the meanings that people attribute to how technology works, including how it affects their lives. They cover a wide range of human experience in the project of promoting certain cultures of technologies or confronting their consequences. One part of this experience is gender-specific. Only the culture of war seems to be a human constant over time, although it also alters its manifestations and increases the power of its destructive force. As will become abundantly clear, speaking about cultures of technology never means speaking about technology alone. Admitting that technology can also be vulnerable reveals its entangled interdependence with the wider society — for better or for worse.