In This Issue

In This Issue

During the 1950s, technology transfer assumed significant importance in the various efforts launched by Western states, various NGOs, and the Soviet Union alike to promote economic growth and technical development in Asia, Africa, and other parts of the developing world. These were the same years when sociologist Everett Rogers began his pathbreaking studies of the social processes related to the acceptance of innovations. His first book, Diffusion of Innovations (1962), laid out his findings, based in large part upon his studies among rural farmers in the United States. That book provided much of the vocabulary that scholars interested in the movement and adoption of new technologies have found useful ever since— by early adopters, for example—as well as the clear insight that innovation was a social as much as an economic process. Nor surprisingly, Rogers' influential book remains in print, with the fifth edition appearing in 2003. Among Rogers's key insights was his recognition of the vital role hat communication played in this process. He spent a good part of his career in university departments of communications, and in 1971 published an equally important volume on the role of communications in innovation. Indeed, his last academic position was at the University of New Mexico, where he worked to establish a doctoral program in international communications. Rogers, one of the most important figures in the arena of technology transfer and a member of the CTTS senior editorial advisory board after 2003, passed away on October 21, 2004, but his work continues to help shape the intellectual terrain covered by this journal.¹

From the first issue of Comparative Technology Transfer and Society, the editors have identified the field of communications as a topic of importance for this journal. And with this issue, we are offering two articles from scholars who come to the question of technology transfer from a communications perspective. In her article Communicating Green Innovation: Technology Transfer in a University–Business–Government Consortium, Nancy W. Coppola (New Jersey Institute of Technology) provides an especially clear case study of the movement of technical ideas within a university–government–business consortium—one of the prototypical institutional structures for commercialization in today's world. Her study analyzes how movements occurred among team members in the development of products in the green-technologies area by considering the various scholarly interpretations that might be used to understand the case. In the process, Coppola overturns some of the assumptions we might bring to the process of interorganizational efforts to move a technology from idea to commercial product. Her general conclusion highlights the vital importance of local circumstances and context, and emphasizes the limits of any general theory of transfer. Her concluding comment is that there is no "master model that fits all organizations and occasions, and prevents us from fully appreciating the subtle complexities of technology transfer." Coppola's emphasis upon the importance of the "flow of communication" in every individual case provides a mechanism for developing an appropriate understanding of each local situation.

Bernadette Longo (University of Minnesota) offers another study that demonstrates how attention to communication adds insights about the process of technological change and adoption. In Metaphors, Robots, and the Transfer of Computers to Civilian Life, Longo explores how people—users and the general public—work through the process of accepting a novel technology. Her case study involves robots and computers, subjects that have attracted significant attention from many commentators. Relying upon the concepts of scholars in communications and in science and technology studies, Longo emphasizes how language shapes any attempt to introduce new technologies, and how metaphors enable individuals and societies to wrestle with the meanings and potential consequences of new technologies. Like Coppola, Longo recognizes the deeply social process that surrounds the adoption of new technologies. In this case, she suggests the connections to robots that the public linked to the adoption of computers as tools for large organizations during the 1950s. As she notes in her conclusion: "The language tropes that...