Culture and Innovation

Thomas P. Hughes

In this chapter, I first define culture, technology, and innovation and then turn to a discussion of innovation in several cultural contexts. These include innovation in a nature-based culture, innovation in a technology-based culture, innovation during technological revolutions, innovation in national cultures, innovation in urban cultures, and innovation in a politically driven culture.

Defining Culture, Technology, and Innovation
Conventionally culture is understood to be the fine arts, especially painting and music. Less often culture is associated with architecture and rarely with technology. On the other hand, culture conceived of anthropologically involves a range of socially transmitted human activities including architecture and technology. So conceived, culture involves a style, or an overarching set of values or themes, shaping its many components. For example, religious values determined a medieval style discernible in architecture, literature, law, and politics.1 Helga Nowotny rightly suggested in her introduction to the conference on "The Technology of Culture" that innovation should also, like technology, be thought of as a component of culture and as having an identifiable cultural style.

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The Unintended Consequences of Innovation

Change and Community at MIT

Rosalind Williams

Introductory Remarks: Culture as a Cause of Innovation
The title of this workshop features four nouns — cultures, technology, quest, and innovation — that have interactive uses and interwoven histories. As an ensemble, these words demonstrate the kind of clustering and reflexivity that Raymond Williams so memorably discussed in nineteenth-century English terminology in Culture and Society, 1780-1950 (1958) and in Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1985 [1976]). In these works Williams highlighted the circular relationship between significant terms of social analysis (culture, society, industry, art, etc.) and the changes they supposedly describe. In addition, he showed how such key terms exert mutual influence, shifting their meanings in response to alterations in the others. So does language actively participate in the coevolution of social and material relationships, whereby emerging sciences and technologies alter the institutions producing them.1

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The Vulnerability of Technological Culture*

Wiebe E. Bijker

The attacks on New York and Washington, D.C., 11 September 2001 ("9/11"), as well as other attacks throughout the world since, have demonstrated how vulnerable our modern societies are. These events shattered many people's basic feelings of security and safeness, though 9/11 probably did not radically change the view of scholars in science, technology, and society studies (STS). This chapter was written in response to these attacks, when several historians and sociologists of technology and science asked in what ways their research could be relevant to understanding these events.1 I will argue that it is worth while to investigate the vulnerability of technological culture, and that this can be done fruitfully from an STS perspective. My main point, however, is different. I want to suggest that vulnerability is not to be taken as something purely negative. Living in a technological culture, I will argue, inevitably implies living in a vulnerable world. And vulnerability is not only an inevitable characteristic; it is even an important asset of our technological culture as a prerequisite for living with the quest for innovation. To live in an open, changing, and innovative culture, we must pay the price of vulnerability.

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Culture of Gender, and Culture of Technology

The Gendering of Things in France's Office Spaces between 1890 and 1930

Delphine Gardey*

In the wake of the Industrial Revolution the workplace has become a technological environment characterized by the presence of machines and other artifacts. Starting at the end of the nineteenth century, this feature of industrial spaces, and the worker's world more generally, spread to other areas of work, and to other sectors of the economy in Western capitalist societies. My research into office work and into the world of employees has been aimed at understanding the social, technological, and social changes that occurred in French offices starting in the 1890s. These changes took place in a context that was heavily influenced by the American model governing the rationalization of administrative work. A transformation contemporary to these others was the feminization of both the social group of office workers and the administrative tasks themselves, a development that is common to all of the Western capitalist economies and that seems to be irreversible.

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Suspending Gender?

Reflecting on Innovations in Cyberspace

Judy Wajcman*

Women's lives have changed irrevocably during the twentieth century, rendering traditional sex roles increasingly untenable. Dramatic advances in technology, the challenge of feminism, and consciousness of the mutating character of the natural world have prompted visionary thinking. Feminist theorists have asked whether digitalization will finally sever the link between technology and male privilege, indeed whether new technologies have undergone a sex change. Yet, even as this question is contemplated, there is a suspicion that existing societal patterns of inequality are being reproduced in a new technological guise.

Feminist theories of the woman-machine relationship have long oscillated between pessimistic fatalism and utopian optimism. The same technological innovations have been categorically rejected as oppressive to women and uncritically embraced as inherently liberating. At the heart of these complex and fraught deliberations lies a concern with the connection between gender and technoscience.

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Innovation, Diverse Knowledges, and the Presumed Singularity of Science

John V. Pickstone

We live in a world characterized by innovation — by rapid changes in work and personal life; new forms of communication and globalization, and new techniques in informatics, agriculture, and medicine. Much of this novelty we associate with science and with scientific technology; we tend to see science as the major driver of innovation, including social and cultural innovations that may well have different roots. At least in Britain, governments dealing with contentious technical issues such as foot and mouth diseases or genetic engineering now summon expert reports on "science" as a basis for policy. Science thus tends to be reified — as if coming in packages to which nonscientists must accommodate themselves. It comes from "scientists" as from a club that includes physicists but not economists or literary analysts.

In this chapter I suggest that we might benefit from focusing on these formulations and asking whether they are inevitable. I do not suggest that our handling of innovative technologies depends heavily on our understanding of science, but I do think the links are significant, both at the level of discourse and of institutions. So perhaps scholars could contribute to present debates, albeit indirectly, by calling into question the framing of the issues, and especially by historical reflection on the meanings of "science."

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Scientists on the Battlefield

Cultures and Conflicts

Jean-Jacques Salomon*

The Culture of War
There are very few more instrumental and determinant forces underlying technical innovations than those that lead nations to fight against one another. It is on the battlefield, more than in any other domain, where one finds the multiple and changing interfaces along which the technosciences meet with economic and political pressures and opportunities. And, although the culture of war has always accorded pride of place to technological progress, our age has seen a proliferation of innovations, as well as the ever-increasing centrality of the role played by war as a motor force in economic progress in general: from nuclear energy and transportation systems to information and communications technologies, there are very few sectors of economic, social, and cultural endeavor that have not been transformed in the twentieth century by research programs initiated or supported by the military. Furthermore, thanks to the progress of science and technology, to prepare for war in order to assure peace (in keeping with the famous maxim) is no longer enough. In our day one must threaten one's enemy with total annihilation, no matter how destructive that enemy's first strike; and thus the potential outcome of a given war has become directly related to the technological and managerial capacity of the countries involved to anticipate all of their adversaries' potential innovations, both civilian and military.

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From Prophecies of the Future to Incarnations of the Past

Cultures of Nuclear Technology

Patrick Kupper

"You've never had it so good!" This was the motto used by the English conservative prime minister Harold Macmillan during his successful election campaign in 1959.1 Political stability and economic growth were the characteristics of that time. In "Age of Extremes," Eric J. Hobsbawm describes this period as "the golden years" of the "short" twentieth century. In Hobsbawm's opinion, the 1950s and 1960s were reassuringly different compared to the preceding "age of catastrophe," but also to the time after 1973, which he labels "the crises decades."2

"You've never had it so good!" Indeed, societies in the Western Hemisphere prospered from an unparalleled growth in affluence. One year of booming economy was followed by another and after an initial skepticism, which was nourished by memories of the recent past, people grew more and more confident. Finally, at the beginning of the 1960s perpetual economic growth was considered to be the norm.

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The Mining Industry in Traditional China

Intra- and Intercultural Comparisons

Hans Ulrich Vogel

In the Encyclopaedia Britannica "culture" is defined as a behavior peculiar to Homo sapiens and includes language, ideas, beliefs, customs, codes, institutions, tools, techniques, works of art, rituals, and ceremonies. As a term describing the unique mental ability of humans the word "symboling" has been proposed, by which is meant the assigning to things and events of certain meanings that cannot be grasped with the senses alone.1 Heinrich Rickert in his Kulturwissenschaft und Naturwissenschaft of 1926 speaks of value-free nature (wertfreie Natur) and value-loaded culture (wertbehaftete Kultur). Therefore, for him, nature is all that is free of meaning, that can only be perceived, and that cannot be comprehended (verstehen) (or, perhaps, better: cannot be assigned with value), while culture is all that is meaningful and that can be comprehended (or: assigned with value). Objects like nature are accessible to the organs of perception, but are totally free of sense and meaning. Objects of culture, on the other hand, refer to meanings that are loaded with value and go beyond sensual perception. Without a relationship of objects to values there is nothing that can be comprehended (or: evaluated) in a meaningful sense.2 For Rickert, religion, the church, law, the state, customs, science, language, literature, art, and the economy, but also all the technical means that are necessary to keep up the economy's operations are — at least at a certain stage of their development — cultural objects or goods, exactly in the sense that the value that sticks to them is acknowledged — or expected or demanded to be acknowledged — as valid by all members of a society.

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