In this Issue

This symposium issue of Comparative Technology Transfer and Society--the first such special issue--contains several case studies that focus on the diffusion of engineering knowledge and design practice related to highways from the United States to Europe during the two decades after World War II. Yet these articles are about so much more than that, for they also highlight the manner in which cultural and social factors prove essential to the transfer and diffusion process. The papers are case studies of transfer activities in Scandinavia--more specifically in Norway and Sweden. Three of the four papers originated in a session at the October 2003 annual meeting of the Society for the History of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia, and the author of the remaining article (Seely) provided a comment at that time. As a case of the diffusion of technology, the stories told here document successes, at least as measured by the ability of engineers in the recipient countries to borrow and adapt engineering approaches from elsewhere to fit their own needs. Taken together, the revised papers provide insights into the dynamics of technology transfer when both parties to the process are eager and supportive of the changes required to permit successful diffusion. As is always the case, these papers demonstrate that the successful movement of technology (even rather esoteric engineering principles and design practices) across boundaries, institutional or national, requires the alignment of an array of cultural, political, and social forces. In this case, we can witness the process from the viewpoint of both sides of the transfer process.

The opening article by CTTS Co-Editor-in-Chief Bruce Seely ("Push" and "Pull" Factors in Technology Transfer: Moving American-Style Highway Engineering to Europe, 1945­1965) examines the forces and actors pushing American road building and highway engineering toward other nations during the years after World War II. Americans had not produced every innovation related to cars and highways, but the United States was the first nation to create a "car culture." Loosely defined, a car culture is marked not only by large-sale adoption of motor vehicles for transportation, but also by a variety of social, political, and economic adjustments that bring automobiles into a paramount position in the nation's economy and the lives of its citizens. This mass adoption of the automobile began to emerge in the United States in the 1920s and was fully evident by the 1940s. Even countries that had developed strong automotive sectors did not encounter this challenge until later. But when they did, the prior experiences of the United States, not only in terms of the techniques for producing cars (the assembly line) but also in terms of a number of necessary social, technical, political, and economic adjustments (including the fields of road building and highway engineering), provided examples that many other nations could emulate or learn from. Seely documents that the diffusion of American engineering know-how in the realm of roads and traffic was not a passive process. Rather, two primary institutions actively sought to export American highway engineering expertise to other nations during the decades after World War II: the Bureau of Public Roads, the federal agency charged with developing the American road system; and the International Road Federation, a business-based group that lobbied effectively through both international and national forums for road improvements. A third organization, the Bureau for Street Traffic Research at Yale, played a vital educational role. Seely shows the variety of mechanisms adopted for this task of diffusion, which generally succeeded in transplanting American approaches to planning and designing roads in nations around the world.

The other three articles in this issue examine the process of highway development in Norway and Sweden as engineers made significant efforts to develop versions of the car culture in the two decades after the Second World War. These articles show the complex process of adopting and adapting ideals and technical approaches to road design and engineering in those countries. The role that American engineering styles and approaches played is evident in each essay, yet the actual diffusion of technical ideas proved to be...