Framing Production: Technology, Culture, and Change in the British Bicycle Industry (review)

Despite its subtitle, Framing Production is not a narrative history of the English bicycle industry, and readers seeking such a book should turn to Roger Lloyd-Jones and M. J. Lewis's recent Raleigh and the British Bicycle Industry: An Economic and Business History, 1870-1960. Perhaps a better title for Paul Rosen's work would have been Who Killed Raleigh? In 1951 the Nottingham firm was the largest bicycle maker in the world, but by 1999 it was a mere assembler of components supplied by other firms, mostly Asian.

To explain how this happened, Rosen applies the social construction of technology (SCOT) methodology popularized by Wiebe Bijker and Trevor Pinch. This approach assumes that historians rely too heavily on objective standards of success or failure to explain the importance or irrelevance of technological artifacts, because such standards are themselves merely social conventions. The historical examination of a technical artifact requires a close analysis of the society that developed it in order to isolate the relevant "technological frames" and identify their influence. Rosen asks a further question: having identified these conventions, can we change them to alter the process through which a society accepts or rejects new innovations?

Rosen links two disparate periods. In the first, from 1930 to 1939, Raleigh expanded its production fourfold and sent bicycles to every corner of the world. During the second, from 1988 to 1999, the firm failed to grasp the surging popularity of the mountain bike and resolve its own internal dysfunction. Rosen connects the two through a Marxist analysis that identifies both as episodic periods of productive crisis. In the 1930s Raleigh was torn between a tradition of craftsmanship and the need to develop high-capacity production to dominate domestic and imperial markets. The result was a conflicted compromise of conveyor lines and automated machinery making hundreds of different bicycle models in batches as small as a few dozen. Rosen's Marxist perspective gives him a sharp eye for labor, and his portrayal of the daily experience of the shop-floor worker within the bicycle industry of the period is the best I have read. It is vivid, perceptive, and well supported by archival and cultural documentation. (Much of this portrayal is obscured by poor editing, however. Typographical errors abound. Monetary units are not converted from pounds sterling into dollars, or even pre-1971 pound-shilling prices into their current pound-decimal equivalents. I was forced to my Webster's to verify that there are 14 pounds of weight to the stone. This an inadequate performance for a leading American university press.)

As mountain bikes evolved out of the "clunkers" cobbled together and ridden down the impossibly steep fire roads of northern California, it was their young inventors, working with Japanese (and later Taiwanese) bicycle and bicycle-component makers who captured the new market. Their firms were design studios that contracted actual production out to fast, highly flexible factories. Raleigh, shackled by a rigid physical plant and torn by labor strife, crumbled. Rosen finds the result tragic and expresses a hope that, by managing the process of technological development, repetition can be avoided. In the end, he proves to be a liberal utopian, with a faith that the manipulation of technological frames will lead us away from the capitalistic dead end that his Marxist analysis predicts.

Rosen states explicitly what Pinch and Bijker only imply: that technological studies are not merely an extension of historical analysis, but a freestanding social science independent of the contingencies of historicism. I am reminded of the rebuke delivered by political scientist John Burgess to the 1896 meeting of the American Historical Association: "history is the name of a residuum which has been left when one group of facts after another has been taken possession of by some science." In an age when Burgess's political scientists have largely...