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technology in this context, although several of thepapers listed in the bibliography provide good analysesof the difficulties and issues. The very nature of thetechnology makes it possible to do research of adifferent form with the availability of possibilities forelectronic capture of communication and output, andon-line surveys of attitudes and reactions. Such re-searchandany formsof electronicmonitoringwill needto be handled in ways that maintain trust and provideemployees with a sense of control.

See also: Industrial and Organizational Psychology:Cross-cultural

Bibliography

Baba M L 1999 Dangerous liaisons: trust, distrust and in-formation technology in American work organisations. Hu-man Organisation 58(3): 331–46

Bochner S, Hesketh B 1994 Power distance, individualism�collectivism, and job-related attitudes in a culturally diversework group. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 25(2):233–57

Cree L H, Sorenson S 2000 Effects of telecommunting on totalhours worked, flexibility, work and family balance andperformance. Paper presented at the XXVII InternationalCongress of Psychology. Stockholm, July 23–28, 2000

Emery F E 1969 Systems Thinking. Penguin, Harmondsworth,UK

Gelfand M J, Dyer N 2000 A cultural perspective on negotiation:progress, pitfalls and prospects. Applied Psychology: AnInternational Re�iew 49(1): 62–99

Hesketh B, Bochner S 1994 Technological change in a multi-cultural context: implications for training and career plan-ning. In: Triandis H, Dunnette M, Hough L (eds.) Handbookof Industrial and Organizational Psychology 2nd edn. Con-sulting Psychologist Press, Palo Alto, CA, Vol. 4

Hesket B, Neal A 1999 Technology and performance. In:Plulakos E, Ilgen D (eds.) The Changing Nature of WorkPerformance: Implications for Staffing, Moti�ation and De-�elopment. Society for Industrial and Oranizational Psy-chology New Frontiers Series, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco

Jarvanpas S L, Leidner D E 1999 Communication and trust inglobal virtual teams. Organisation Science 10(6): 791–815

Quinones M A, Ehrenstein A (eds.) 1996 Training for a RapidlyChanging Workplace: Applications of Psychological Research.American Psychological Association, Washington, DC

Schwartz S H 1994 Beyond individualism�collectivism: newcultural dimensions of values. In: U. Kim H C, Triandis C,Kagitcibasi S, Choi C, Yoon G (eds.) Indi�idualism andCollecti�ism: Theory, Method and Applications. Sage Publi-cations, Thousand Oaks, CA, pp. 85–122

Smith P, Schwartz S H 1997 Values. In: Berry J W, Segall M H,Kagitcibasi C (eds.) Handbook of Cross-Cultural Psychology.Allyn & Bacon, Needham Heights, MA, Vol. 3, pp. 77–118

Staples D S, Hulland J S, Higgins C A 1999 A self-efficacytheory explanation for the management of remote workers invirtual organisations. Organisational Science 10(6): 758–76

Triandis H C 1972 The Analysis of Subjecti�e Culture. JohnWiley, New York

Wilpert B 2000 Applied psychology: past and future societal andscientific challenges. Applied Psychology: An InternationalRe�iew 49(1): 3–22

B. Hesketh

Technological Determinism

‘Technological determinism’ refers to a pervasive, yetcontroversial, theory about the relationship betweentechnology and society. Although the term has had avariety of meanings, two related claims have beencentral to discussions of this topic: (a) the developmentof technology proceeds in an autonomous manner,determined by an internal logic independent of socialinfluence; and (b) technological change determinessocial change in a prescribed manner (Staudenmaier1985, Misa 1988, Bimber 1994). The claims addresstwo major questions about technology: how and whyis technology developed and what is the relationshipbetween technological change and social change?Arguments against the first claim have been a stapleof research in the history and sociology of tech-nology since the 1960s. The second claim has been atthe center of debates about Karl Marx’s theory ofhistory since the early twentieth century. Weaker ver-sions of technological determinism, sometimes called‘soft determinism,’ maintain that technology is amajor cause, but not the sole determinant, of socialchange.

1. History of the Concept

It is important to distinguish between widely heldbeliefs that an autonomous technology is the primarycause of social change and the use of the term‘technological determinism.’ In the United States, theEnlightenment doctrine that improvements in themechanic and industrial arts fostered social progresswas replaced over the course of the nineteenth andearly twentieth centuries by a more technocraticconcept of progress, in which improvements in tech-nical and economic efficiency became ends in them-selves, instead of the means for creating desired socialends. Through the writings of the economist and socialtheorist Thorstein Veblen and others, the word ‘tech-nology’ gradually displaced phrases like ‘mechanicarts’ in scholarly and then popular discourse in thetwentieth century. In this period, the older meaning of‘technology’ as systematic knowledge of crafts andindustry was joined to the anthropological one of theartifacts and related practices of a culture. The term’sconnotations of abstractness and scientific objectivityserved to reinforce the idea that technology was anautonomous social force.

These meanings entered popular culture throughsuch media as utopian novels, exhibits at World’s

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fairs, the Technocracy movement in the 1930s, andcompany advertisements that endlessly touted newproducts as the cure for social ills and the source of allhappiness. The organizers of the 1933 ChicagoWorld’s Fair encapsulated the gender biased, appliedscience aspect of technological determinism with themotto, ‘Science Finds, Industry Applies, Man Con-forms.’ Ironically, twentieth-century critics of tech-nology’s harmful effects, such as technologicalunemployment and environmental degradation, havetended to reify the notion that technology is anautonomous agent of change in their attempts tocontrol it (Smith 1994, Marx 1994).

The term ‘technological determinism’ is more re-cent, with roots in the turn-of-the century debatesabout Marx’s theory of history. While Europeans usedthe phrases ‘historical materialism’ and ‘economicdeterminism’ to describe Marx’s theory, many Amer-ican social scientists employed the broader phrase, the‘economic interpretation of history,’ popularized in anon-Marxist manner at the turn of the century byEdwin R. A. Seligman, editor-in-chief of the firstedition of the Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences.HistorianWerner Sombart inGermany and economistAlvin Hansen in the United States argued that Marx’stheory should more properly be called a ‘technologicalinterpretation of history’ (a phrase which Hansenseems to have coined). Although many scholarsquestioned this view, prominent Soviet theorists es-tablished a ‘technicist’ version of historical materi-alism as the dominant interpretation in orthodoxMarxism during the first half of the century (Bober1927, MacKenzie 1984, Miller 1984).

During the early Cold War, social scientists andhistorians, who were increasingly concerned abouthow to control the effects technology apparently washaving on daily life, began using the starker term,‘technological determinism’ to criticize Marxisttheories of technology and society. They also used theterm to criticize the controversial views of such authorsas Veblen, historian Lynn White, Jr, and the phil-osopher Jacques Ellul. White and Ellul said their viewswere not a strict determinism. Only a few authors,such as economist Robert Heilbroner (1967), havelabeled their position a form of ‘technological de-terminism’ (soft determinism in Heilbroner’s case).Philosopher Langdon Winner criticized scholars fordismissing the issue of technology’s social effectsbecause of the flaws in the concept of technologicaldeterminism. Saying that the ‘idea of determinism isnot one that ought to be rejected out of hand,’ Winnerargued that technology does constrain human ac-tivities (Winner 1977, p. 77).

By the mid-1970s, the issue of technological de-terminism had become a central topic in both Marxistscholarship and in the interdisciplinary study ofscience, technology, and society (Cohen 1978, Stau-denmaier 1985). In the recent turn toward socialconstructivism in the latter field, the issue of tech-

nological determinism remains a focal point aroundwhich to criticize a theory of technology and societythat is still prevalent in other disciplines and in popularculture.

2. Was Marx a Technological Determinist?

Recent scholarship is sharply divided about whetheror notKarlMarx’s theory of history, the locus classicusof technological determinism, is, indeed, technologicaldeterminism. Much of the debate centers on themeaning of an often-quoted excerpt from the prefaceto Marx’s A Contribution to the Critique of PoliticalEconomy (1859): humans enter into ‘relations ofproduction [Produktions�erha� ltnisse] which cor-respond to a definite stage of development of theirmaterial productive forces [Produkti�kra� fte]. Thesum total of these relations of production constitutesthe economic structure [of society], the real basis onwhich arises a legal and political superstructure’(quoted in Cohen 1978, p. 28).

Those who argue for a technological interpretationof Marx usually equate ‘forces of production’ with‘technology’ and interpret the verb ‘correspond’ tomean that the relations of production evolve tomaximize the productivity of the forces of production.William Shaw, who includes instruments, rawmaterials, and labor power (including knowledge) inthe category of productive forces, calls Marx’s ‘tech-nological determinism’ more properly a ‘productive-force determinism.’ Shaw acknowledges that Marxallowed for interplay between forces and relations ofproduction, but maintains that productive forces arethe ‘long-run determinant of historical change’ (Shaw1979, p. 160). Gerald Cohen defines productive forcesin a similar, broad manner, but rejects the label of‘technological determinism’ in favor of a ‘‘‘techno-logical’’ interpretation of historical materialism.’ Inthis functionalist view, social structures adapt totechnological change to increase productivity (Cohen1978, p. 29).

Those who argue that Marx was not a technologicaldeterminist typically have concentrated on the mannerin which he wrote history. Harry Braverman, NathanRosenberg, and Donald MacKenzie point to thedialectical aspects of Marx’s writings, especially wherehe attributed the development of productive forces tosocial relations. Indeed, MacKenzie characterizesMarx’s treatment of the history of machinery in theIndustrial Revolution as an ‘attempt to develop atheory of the social causes of organizational andtechnical changes in the labor process’ (MacKenzie1984, p. 492). Richard Miller argues that Marx was nota technological determinist because in his historicalwork, ‘economic structures do not endure becausethey provide maximum productivity. Productiveforces do not develop autonomously. Change inproductive forces, in the narrowly technological sense

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that excludes work relations, is not the basic source ofchange in society at large’ (Miller 1984, p. 188). BruceBimber, who defines technology narrowly as artifacts,argues that, for Marx, human characteristics ofaccumulation and self-expression drive the forces ofproduction. Thus Marx was an economic, not atechnological, determinist (Bimber 1994).

3. Varieties of Technological Determinism

Bimber and Thomas Misa effectively analyze varietiesof technological determinism. Bimber distinguishesbetween normative, nomological, and unintended-consequences accounts (Bimber 1994). Normativeaccounts, evident in the writings of such critics oftechnology as Lewis Mumford, Jacques Ellul, andJurgen Habermas, claim that society is relinquishingcontrol over technology, or replacing political andethical norms with those of the technologist’s goals ofefficiency and productivity. Nomological accounts,such as that by Heilbroner (1967), evoke the two-partdefinition of technological determinism given above:technology develops autonomously according to aninternal logic and forces a prescribed social change. Inunintended consequences accounts (e.g., Winner 1977)technology produces unpredictable social change, aview that challenges determinism, but reinforces theidea that technology is out of control. Bimber arguesthat the term ‘technological determinism’ should bereserved for nomological accounts, which are the onlyones that satisfy his strict definition of the term.

In his survey of scholarship about the relationshipbetween technology and social change, Misa (1988)found that sweeping, macro-level accounts were morelikely to be technologically determinist (using the two-part definition of the term) than micro-level accounts,which focused on specific practices. Philosophers,business historians, urban historians, and historians ofphysical sciences were generally more deterministicthan technological historians and labor historians.

Another form of technological determinism is whatClaude Fischer (1992) criticizes as the ‘impact-imprint’model of technology. Rather than investigating howconsumers use a technology, scholars assume that atechnology’s capability (e.g., the ability of the tele-phone to enable people to talk at a distance) leads to apredictable ‘impact’ (e.g., new, long-distance com-munication patterns).

4. Political Artifacts and Systems

Winner andThomasHughes have proposed influentialtheories of technology and society that address thequestion of technological determinism. Winner (1986)argues that artifacts have politics (i.e., are associatedwith specific social changes) in two ways. Technol-ogists can design a (plastic) artifact to promote a

certain type of politics, as when Robert Moses builtlow bridges over the Long Island Expressway in orderto prevent inner-city buses (carrying poor minorities)from traveling to Jones Beach. Secondly, the designand building of some systems seems to require acertain type of politics. Nuclear power plants, forexample, require a centralized form of government torun the reactor and prevent the proliferation of nuclearweapons. Hughes (1994) states that his concept oftechnological systems allows for the social construc-tion of a system when it is young, but technologicaldeterminism comes into play once it is established andshapes society more than being shaped by society.

5. Social Construction of Technology

The advent of the approach known as the socialconstruction of technology (SCOT) in the mid-1980s(Pinch and Bijker 1987), along with a contextualisthistory of technology (Staudenmaier 1985), has chal-lenged the technical aspect of technological deter-minism (the first part of the definition given above).Sociologists and historians of technology have pub-lished numerous case studies of the development oftechnologies that argue that their design was theoutcome of negotiations between several social groups(such as inventors, engineers, managers, salespersons,and users), rather than the product of an internal,technical logic (see Technology, Social Constructionof). When Winner (1993) and others criticized thisapproach for leaving out power relations among socialgroups, constructivists responded by investigating thesocial aspect of technological determinism (the secondpart of the definition). Bijker (1995) employed asemiotic version of Michel Foucault’s ‘micropolitics ofpower’ to show the mutual construction of artifactsand social groups. Ronald Kline and Trevor Pinch(1996) utilized theories of gender in the original SCOTapproach to show how gender relations and theautomobile were mutually constructed when farmmen in the United States before World War II adaptedthe car, as a stationary and mobile source of power, toa variety of novel uses, such as grinding grain, washingclothes, and plowing fields. Fischer (1992) employed asimilar user-heuristic to argue that callers in theUnitedStates used the telephone before 1940 to widen anddeepen existing communication patterns, rather thanto create new ones.

6. Conclusion

Although historians and sociologists of technologyhave discredited the tenet of technological determin-ism, so much so that it has become a critic’s term anda term of abuse in their academic circles, the idea thatan autonomous technology drives social change per-

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vades other fields of scholarship and popular culture.This is especially evident in discourses claiming thatnew information technologies have created an in-formation society in the United States and Europe. Itremains to be seen if this scholarship will overturn thewidely held belief in forms of technological deter-minism.

See also: Technology, Social Construction of

Bibliography

Bijker W E 1995 Of Bicycles, Bakelite, and Bulbs: Towards aTheory of Sociotechnical Change. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA

Bimber B 1994 Three faces of technological determinism. In:Smith M R, Marx L (eds.) Does Technology Dri�e History?The Dilemma of Technological Determinism. MIT Press,Cambridge, MA

Bober M M 1927 Karl Marx’s Interpretation of History. HarvardUniversity Press, Cambridge, MA

Cohen G A 1978 Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence.Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ

Fischer C S 1992 America Calling: A Social History of theTelephone to 1940. University of California Press, Berkeley,CA

Heilbroner R L 1967 Do machines make history? Technologyand Culture 8: 335–45

Hughes T P 1994 Technological momentum. In: Smith M R,Marx L (eds.) Does Technology Dri�e History? The Dilemma ofTechnological Determinism. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA

Kline R R, Pinch T J 1996 Users as agents of technologicalchange: The social construction of the automobile in the ruralUnited States. Technology and Culture 37: 763–95

MacKenzie D 1984 Marx and the machine. Technology andCulture 25: 473–503

Marx L 1994 The idea of ‘technology’ and postmodern pes-simism. In: Smith M R, Marx L (eds.) Does TechnologyDri�e History? The Dilemma of Technological Determinism.MIT Press, Cambridge, MA

Miller R W 1984 Analyzing Marx: Morality, Power, and History.Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ

Misa T J 1988 How machines make history and howhistorians (and others) help them to do so. Science,Technology, and Human Values 13: 308–31

Pinch T J, Bijker W E 1987 The social construction of factsand artifacts: Or how the sociology of science and thesociology of technology might benefit each other. In: BijkerW E, Hughes T P, Pinch T J (eds.) The Social Construction ofTechnological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology andHistory of Technology. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA

Shaw W H 1979 ‘The handmill gives you the feudal lord’:Marx’s technological determinism. History and Theory 18:155–66

Smith M R 1994 Technological determinism in Americanculture. In: Smith M R, Marx L (eds.) Does TechnologyDri�e History? The Dilemma of Technological Determinism.MIT Press, Cambridge, MA

Staudenmaier J M 1985 Technology’s Storytellers: Rewea�ingthe Human Fabric. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA

Winner L 1977 Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-controlas a Theme in Political Thought. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA

Winner L 1986 Do artifacts have politics In: Winner L TheWhale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of HighTechnology. University of Chicago Press, Chicago

Winner L 1993 Upon opening the black box and finding itempty: Social constructivism and the philosophy of tech-nology. Science, Technology, and Human Values 18: 362–78

R. R. Kline

Technological Innovation

Technological innovation is the successful implemen-tation (in commerce or management) of a technicalidea new to the institution creating it. Innovations aredistinguished from inventions, technology and re-search, but may arise from any of the three. A varietyof models of the innovation process are described, forthey are useful in developing public policies forencouraging innovations as well as for managing theircreation. The more advanced of these models includeconsideration of complementary assets and socialcapital, which helps explain the differences in inno-vative capacity in different societies. The Americansociety is particularly given to the use of banners underwhich to rally public opinion to the advance ofeconomic well being. In the middle 1970s, when ‘hightech’ industries emerged as the key to growth, andAmerican firms were immediately challenged by thetechnically adroit Japanese, the banner was ‘criticaltechnologies’ derived from defense and space research.When the economic challenge became serious in the1980s and early 1990s the banner was ‘competitive-ness’; even conservative President Reagan launched aWhite House taskforce to suggest how governmentcould enhance American competitiveness in the face ofserious price and quality competition in technologyintensive industries, especially in Asia. As we prepareto enter the next millenium, the new banner, innations rich and poor, is ‘innovation.’

1. Definitions

While a firm can become more competitive bycornering a market or slashing worker’s wages, inno-vation implies a transformation in the market—theinvocation of imagination and daring in the adoptionof new ways of doing things. The word innovation hasan old history. The Oxford English Dictionary uses abroad definition: ‘A change in the nature or fashion ofanything; something newly introduced, a novel prac-tice, method, etc.’ and traces its first use back to 1553.In its contemporary usage, Burke is quoted as writingin 1796 ‘It is a revolt of innovation; and thereby the

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Copyright � 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd.

All rights reserved.

International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences ISBN: 0-08-043076-7

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