Comment: Mediating Innovation: Reflections on the Complex Relationships of User and Supplier

Let me begin by thanking JoAnne Yates for raising this topic, for framing it so effectively, and for pointing the way to an inclusive approach that promises to open productive links across several disciplines. In every respect, the paper has 'JoAnne Yates' written all over it—and that is high praise, indeed.

What might not be quite so apparent to those of you who have merely heard her remarks today are two other characteristic qualities of JoAnne. One is unusual diligence; the other, even rarer among scholars, is a capacity for genuine growth in thought about a chosen subject.

I have had the pleasure of observing JoAnne's thinking about today's topic as it has evolved from her pioneering early essays on computer adoption through her fine recent book (which I read in manuscript) and on to the paper presented here. This latest iteration began as a presidential address to the Business History Conference. It says all you need to know about JoAnne's diligence to note that she prepared this address while also organizing virtually every aspect of the annual meeting, from assembling the program to fundraising for the banquet. JoAnne not only managed to produce an address of such substance that it became a basis for a half-day conference; she has subsequently expanded her ideas substantially. What struck me in the spring of 2005 in Minneapolis as merely a forward-looking call for inquiry now reads more like a rediscovery and reframing of a forgotten line of investigation. We see now how the topic connects to important precedents such as the work of Nathan Rosenberg.¹ This deepening of the intellectual base, far from rendering the topic "old hat," provides us with a richer wellspring from which to re-engage the subject. It is here we glimpse not only her diligence but her capacity for growth of thought—for as I hope to make clear in my remarks, it is through works such as Rosenberg's that we can most fruitfully engage the topic.

JoAnne initially went looking for insight in a body of work—the social construction of technology (SCOT)—that is closely associated with more recent scholarship in the history of technology. Readers of that discipline's flagship journal, Technology and Culture, can readily attest to the influence of social constructionism upon the field. JoAnne, while expressing some sympathy for this approach, ultimately finds it lacking in certain vital respects. I suppose that in my present capacity (I am president-elect of the society that publishes the journal), I might be expected to rally to its defense. As it happens, however, I share JoAnne's perspective on almost every count. Not many practitioners of the social construction approach are comfortable wading into the messy complexity of consumption in the private marketplace. Those who do consider consumers often seem most interested in portraying them as powerless victims, easily manipulated by more organized interests, or as noble resistors (such as farmers) who incorporate technologies into their lives in ways not intended by their suppliers. Missing, for the most part, is a sense that supplier and consumer might engage in a mutual process of shaping technology through use.²

Where social construction can be of help, I believe JoAnne and I would agree, is in its ability to suggest how complex organizations—and parties operating within those organizations—actively shape technologies. If technologies have politics—as Langdon Winner famously asserted—they acquire those politics through organizational behaviors that themselves have political dimensions.³ By this, I mean that people operating in large organizations behave in complex ways that will not yield easily to simple economic analysis.

Which brings us to business history, with its interest in documenting organizational behavior across time. It is here that JoAnne sees great promise. "By taking our knowledge of firms as institutions," she writes, "and combining it with the popular demand-side turn, business historians can examine in even more depth the role and influence of firms as buyers and users, not just as producers and sellers, of technological artifacts...