Cultures of Technology and the Quest for Innovation (review)

Cultures of Technology and the Quest for Innovation is a book that is fundamental to the understanding of technologically developed societies. It comprises essays by Thomas P. Hughes, Rosalind Williams, Wiebe E. Bijker, Delphine Gardey, Judy Wajcman, John V. Pickstone, Jean-Jacques Salomon, Patrick Kupper, Hans Ulrich Vogel, and Joachim Nettelbeck, as well as the editor, Helga Nowotny. Despite the diversity of perspectives in these essays, the book has a coherence founded on two themes: first, the importance of the quest for innovation in technologically developed societies, and, second, the authors' insistence on the impossibility of understanding technological innovation without analyzing the cultural meaning that different societies attribute to it. As Hughes puts it, "cultivating innovation requires different approaches in contrasting cultures" (p. 36).

"Everything changes, nothing remains the same" is a remark that can be applied to all societies dominated by the quest for innovation. More and more sociological analysis questions the traditional concept of "society" as static and fixed rather than dynamic. Thus, we hear of liquid social relations and social flows, we hear of an uncertainty that is produced by "our public belief . . . that innovation enables us to negotiate the future" (Nowotny, pp. 4–5). This is a paradox, as Nettelbeck points out (p. 192), a paradox that derives from a crisis of faith in possibilities for planning the future. We recognize that uncertainty cannot be eliminated, and that only through faith in innovation, in "the option of change," can we hope to negotiate the future. Bijker presents a splendid analysis of the vulnerability of technological culture as a social construction that is dependent on cultural values. Societies dependent on tightly coupled technical complexes may be inherently vulnerable, he writes, but this vulnerability does not have to be regarded "as something to be avoided, repaired and fought" (p. 65).

Innovation and the acceptance of the concomitant vulnerability is a cultural issue, as Williams shows in her study of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the way the MIT faculty felt about two major technolog-ical-organizational innovations that the leadership sought to introduce. To the faculty, these innovations made no sense because they resulted in the destruction of the cultural patterns that sustain the "production" of innovation. As Williams so beautifully characterizes the paradox: "MIT is famous as a culture that produces technological innovation: it is less famous as a culture that confronts the effects of technology" (p. 49). The more general point is that the appropriation of technological innovations differs according to the cultures that receive them. The essays by Kupper and Vogel—about nuclear technology in Switzerland and the traditional mining industry in China, respectively—confirm from a historical perspective the conclusions of Williams's more ethnographic analysis.

Culture is also the creator of gender relationships, and technology plays a leading role in their consolidation through the attribution of meanings to personal and object relationships. This is demonstrated in the brilliant study of Gardey about the gendering of typewriters in French offices, and that of the always balanced, serious, and incisive Wajcman on the utopian proposals of feminists in cyberspace.

In another vein, Pickstone shows that the cultural construction of science has concealed diverse other ways of knowing that are equally essential for addressing the complex problems of innovation. Salomon stresses the ways in which scientific-technological innovation depends to a large extent on the culture of war. With reference to scientists such as Freeman Dyson and J. Robert Oppenheimer, Salomon suggests that it is "technical sweetness" which continually draws scientists into an alliance with the military. Science allied with the culture of war will make—echoes of Camus—the twenty-first century the century of fear.

Innovation matters. Culture matters. And only an understanding of the links between culture and innovation can help us make sense of the world we are building.