Technological Determinism

technology in this context, although several of the

papers listed in the bibliography provide good analyses
of the diculties and issues. The very nature of the
technology makes it possible to do research of a
dierent form with the availability of possibilities for
electronic capture of communication and output, and
on-line surveys of attitudes and reactions. Such research and any forms of electronic monitoring will need
to be handled in ways that maintain trust and provide
employees with a sense of control.
See also: Industrial and Organizational Psychology:
Cross-cultural

Bibliography
Baba M L 1999 Dangerous liaisons: trust, distrust and information technology in American work organisations. Human Organisation 58(3): 33146
Bochner S, Hesketh B 1994 Power distance, individualism\
collectivism, and job-related attitudes in a culturally diverse
work group. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 25(2):
23357
Cree L H, Sorenson S 2000 Eects of telecommunting on total
hours worked, exibility, work and family balance and
performance. Paper presented at the XXVII International
Congress of Psychology. Stockholm, July 2328, 2000
Emery F E 1969 Systems Thinking. Penguin, Harmondsworth,
UK
Gelfand M J, Dyer N 2000 A cultural perspective on negotiation:
progress, pitfalls and prospects. Applied Psychology: An
International Re
iew 49(1): 6299
Hesketh B, Bochner S 1994 Technological change in a multicultural context: implications for training and career planning. In: Triandis H, Dunnette M, Hough L (eds.) Handbook
of Industrial and Organizational Psychology 2nd edn. Consulting Psychologist Press, Palo Alto, CA, Vol. 4
Hesket B, Neal A 1999 Technology and performance. In:
Plulakos E, Ilgen D (eds.) The Changing Nature of Work
Performance: Implications for Stang, Moti
ation and De
elopment. Society for Industrial and Oranizational Psychology New Frontiers Series, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco
Jarvanpas S L, Leidner D E 1999 Communication and trust in
global virtual teams. Organisation Science 10(6): 791815
Quinones M A, Ehrenstein A (eds.) 1996 Training for a Rapidly
Changing Workplace: Applications of Psychological Research.
American Psychological Association, Washington, DC
Schwartz S H 1994 Beyond individualism\collectivism: new
cultural dimensions of values. In: U. Kim H C, Triandis C,
Kagitcibasi S, Choi C, Yoon G (eds.) Indi
idualism and
Collecti
ism: Theory, Method and Applications. Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks, CA, pp. 85122
Smith P, Schwartz S H 1997 Values. In: Berry J W, Segall M H,
Kagitcibasi C (eds.) Handbook of Cross-Cultural Psychology.
Allyn & Bacon, Needham Heights, MA, Vol. 3, pp. 77118
Staples D S, Hulland J S, Higgins C A 1999 A self-ecacy
theory explanation for the management of remote workers in
virtual organisations. Organisational Science 10(6): 75876
Triandis H C 1972 The Analysis of Subjecti
e Culture. John
Wiley, New York

Wilpert B 2000 Applied psychology: past and future societal and

scientic challenges. Applied Psychology: An International
Re
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B. Hesketh

Technological Determinism
Technological determinism refers to a pervasive, yet
controversial, theory about the relationship between
technology and society. Although the term has had a
variety of meanings, two related claims have been
central to discussions of this topic: (a) the development
of technology proceeds in an autonomous manner,
determined by an internal logic independent of social
inuence; and (b) technological change determines
social change in a prescribed manner (Staudenmaier
1985, Misa 1988, Bimber 1994). The claims address
two major questions about technology: how and why
is technology developed and what is the relationship
between technological change and social change?
Arguments against the rst claim have been a staple
of research in the history and sociology of technology since the 1960s. The second claim has been at
the center of debates about Karl Marxs theory of
history since the early twentieth century. Weaker versions of technological determinism, sometimes called
soft determinism, maintain that technology is a
major cause, but not the sole determinant, of social
change.

1. History of the Concept

It is important to distinguish between widely held
beliefs that an autonomous technology is the primary
cause of social change and the use of the term
technological determinism. In the United States, the
Enlightenment doctrine that improvements in the
mechanic and industrial arts fostered social progress
was replaced over the course of the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries by a more technocratic
concept of progress, in which improvements in technical and economic eciency became ends in themselves, instead of the means for creating desired social
ends. Through the writings of the economist and social
theorist Thorstein Veblen and others, the word technology gradually displaced phrases like mechanic
arts in scholarly and then popular discourse in the
twentieth century. In this period, the older meaning of
technology as systematic knowledge of crafts and
industry was joined to the anthropological one of the
artifacts and related practices of a culture. The terms
connotations of abstractness and scientic objectivity
served to reinforce the idea that technology was an
autonomous social force.
These meanings entered popular culture through
such media as utopian novels, exhibits at Worlds
15495

Technological Determinism
fairs, the Technocracy movement in the 1930s, and
company advertisements that endlessly touted new
products as the cure for social ills and the source of all
happiness. The organizers of the 1933 Chicago
Worlds Fair encapsulated the gender biased, applied
science aspect of technological determinism with the
motto, Science Finds, Industry Applies, Man Conforms. Ironically, twentieth-century critics of technologys harmful eects, such as technological
unemployment and environmental degradation, have
tended to reify the notion that technology is an
autonomous agent of change in their attempts to
control it (Smith 1994, Marx 1994).
The term technological determinism is more recent, with roots in the turn-of-the century debates
about Marxs theory of history. While Europeans used
the phrases historical materialism and economic
determinism to describe Marxs theory, many American social scientists employed the broader phrase, the
economic interpretation of history, popularized in a
non-Marxist manner at the turn of the century by
Edwin R. A. Seligman, editor-in-chief of the rst
edition of the Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences.
Historian Werner Sombart in Germany and economist
Alvin Hansen in the United States argued that Marxs
theory should more properly be called a technological
interpretation of history (a phrase which Hansen
seems to have coined). Although many scholars
questioned this view, prominent Soviet theorists established a technicist version of historical materialism as the dominant interpretation in orthodox
Marxism during the rst half of the century (Bober
1927, MacKenzie 1984, Miller 1984).
During the early Cold War, social scientists and
historians, who were increasingly concerned about
how to control the eects technology apparently was
having on daily life, began using the starker term,
technological determinism to criticize Marxist
theories of technology and society. They also used the
term to criticize the controversial views of such authors
as Veblen, historian Lynn White, Jr, and the philosopher Jacques Ellul. White and Ellul said their views
were not a strict determinism. Only a few authors,
such as economist Robert Heilbroner (1967), have
labeled their position a form of technological determinism (soft determinism in Heilbroners case).
Philosopher Langdon Winner criticized scholars for
dismissing the issue of technologys social eects
because of the aws in the concept of technological
determinism. Saying that the idea of determinism is
not one that ought to be rejected out of hand, Winner
argued that technology does constrain human activities (Winner 1977, p. 77).
By the mid-1970s, the issue of technological determinism had become a central topic in both Marxist
scholarship and in the interdisciplinary study of
science, technology, and society (Cohen 1978, Staudenmaier 1985). In the recent turn toward social
constructivism in the latter eld, the issue of tech15496

nological determinism remains a focal point around

which to criticize a theory of technology and society
that is still prevalent in other disciplines and in popular
culture.

2. Was Marx a Technological Determinist?

Recent scholarship is sharply divided about whether
or not Karl Marxs theory of history, the locus classicus
of technological determinism, is, indeed, technological
determinism. Much of the debate centers on the
meaning of an often-quoted excerpt from the preface
to Marxs A Contribution to the Critique of Political
Economy (1859): humans enter into relations of
production [Produktions
erhaW ltnisse] which correspond to a denite stage of development of their
material productive forces [Produkti
kraW fte]. The
sum total of these relations of production constitutes
the economic structure [of society], the real basis on
which arises a legal and political superstructure
(quoted in Cohen 1978, p. 28).
Those who argue for a technological interpretation
of Marx usually equate forces of production with
technology and interpret the verb correspond to
mean that the relations of production evolve to
maximize the productivity of the forces of production.
William Shaw, who includes instruments, raw
materials, and labor power (including knowledge) in
the category of productive forces, calls Marxs technological determinism more properly a productiveforce determinism. Shaw acknowledges that Marx
allowed for interplay between forces and relations of
production, but maintains that productive forces are
the long-run determinant of historical change (Shaw
1979, p. 160). Gerald Cohen denes productive forces
in a similar, broad manner, but rejects the label of
technological determinism in favor of a technological interpretation of historical materialism. In
this functionalist view, social structures adapt to
technological change to increase productivity (Cohen
1978, p. 29).
Those who argue that Marx was not a technological
determinist typically have concentrated on the manner
in which he wrote history. Harry Braverman, Nathan
Rosenberg, and Donald MacKenzie point to the
dialectical aspects of Marxs writings, especially where
he attributed the development of productive forces to
social relations. Indeed, MacKenzie characterizes
Marxs treatment of the history of machinery in the
Industrial Revolution as an attempt to develop a
theory of the social causes of organizational and
technical changes in the labor process (MacKenzie
1984, p. 492). Richard Miller argues that Marx was not
a technological determinist because in his historical
work, economic structures do not endure because
they provide maximum productivity. Productive
forces do not develop autonomously. Change in
productive forces, in the narrowly technological sense

Technological Determinism
that excludes work relations, is not the basic source of
change in society at large (Miller 1984, p. 188). Bruce
Bimber, who denes technology narrowly as artifacts,
argues that, for Marx, human characteristics of
accumulation and self-expression drive the forces of
production. Thus Marx was an economic, not a
technological, determinist (Bimber 1994).

3. Varieties of Technological Determinism

Bimber and Thomas Misa eectively analyze varieties
of technological determinism. Bimber distinguishes
between normative, nomological, and unintendedconsequences accounts (Bimber 1994). Normative
accounts, evident in the writings of such critics of
technology as Lewis Mumford, Jacques Ellul, and
Jurgen Habermas, claim that society is relinquishing
control over technology, or replacing political and
ethical norms with those of the technologists goals of
eciency and productivity. Nomological accounts,
such as that by Heilbroner (1967), evoke the two-part
denition of technological determinism given above:
technology develops autonomously according to an
internal logic and forces a prescribed social change. In
unintended consequences accounts (e.g., Winner 1977)
technology produces unpredictable social change, a
view that challenges determinism, but reinforces the
idea that technology is out of control. Bimber argues
that the term technological determinism should be
reserved for nomological accounts, which are the only
ones that satisfy his strict denition of the term.
In his survey of scholarship about the relationship
between technology and social change, Misa (1988)
found that sweeping, macro-level accounts were more
likely to be technologically determinist (using the twopart denition of the term) than micro-level accounts,
which focused on specic practices. Philosophers,
business historians, urban historians, and historians of
physical sciences were generally more deterministic
than technological historians and labor historians.
Another form of technological determinism is what
Claude Fischer (1992) criticizes as the impact-imprint
model of technology. Rather than investigating how
consumers use a technology, scholars assume that a
technologys capability (e.g., the ability of the telephone to enable people to talk at a distance) leads to a
predictable impact (e.g., new, long-distance communication patterns).

certain type of politics, as when Robert Moses built

low bridges over the Long Island Expressway in order
to prevent inner-city buses (carrying poor minorities)
from traveling to Jones Beach. Secondly, the design
and building of some systems seems to require a
certain type of politics. Nuclear power plants, for
example, require a centralized form of government to
run the reactor and prevent the proliferation of nuclear
weapons. Hughes (1994) states that his concept of
technological systems allows for the social construction of a system when it is young, but technological
determinism comes into play once it is established and
shapes society more than being shaped by society.

5. Social Construction of Technology

The advent of the approach known as the social
construction of technology (SCOT) in the mid-1980s
(Pinch and Bijker 1987), along with a contextualist
history of technology (Staudenmaier 1985), has challenged the technical aspect of technological determinism (the rst part of the denition given above).
Sociologists and historians of technology have published numerous case studies of the development of
technologies that argue that their design was the
outcome of negotiations between several social groups
(such as inventors, engineers, managers, salespersons,
and users), rather than the product of an internal,
technical logic (see Technology, Social Construction
of). When Winner (1993) and others criticized this
approach for leaving out power relations among social
groups, constructivists responded by investigating the
social aspect of technological determinism (the second
part of the denition). Bijker (1995) employed a
semiotic version of Michel Foucaults micropolitics of
power to show the mutual construction of artifacts
and social groups. Ronald Kline and Trevor Pinch
(1996) utilized theories of gender in the original SCOT
approach to show how gender relations and the
automobile were mutually constructed when farm
men in the United States before World War II adapted
the car, as a stationary and mobile source of power, to
a variety of novel uses, such as grinding grain, washing
clothes, and plowing elds. Fischer (1992) employed a
similar user-heuristic to argue that callers in the United
States used the telephone before 1940 to widen and
deepen existing communication patterns, rather than
to create new ones.

4. Political Artifacts and Systems

Winner and Thomas Hughes have proposed inuential
theories of technology and society that address the
question of technological determinism. Winner (1986)
argues that artifacts have politics (i.e., are associated
with specic social changes) in two ways. Technologists can design a (plastic) artifact to promote a

6. Conclusion
Although historians and sociologists of technology
have discredited the tenet of technological determinism, so much so that it has become a critics term and
a term of abuse in their academic circles, the idea that
an autonomous technology drives social change per15497

Technological Determinism
vades other elds of scholarship and popular culture.
This is especially evident in discourses claiming that
new information technologies have created an information society in the United States and Europe. It
remains to be seen if this scholarship will overturn the
widely held belief in forms of technological determinism.

Winner L 1986 Do artifacts have politics In: Winner L The

Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High
Technology. University of Chicago Press, Chicago
Winner L 1993 Upon opening the black box and nding it
empty: Social constructivism and the philosophy of technology. Science, Technology, and Human Values 18: 36278

See also: Technology, Social Construction of

Copyright # 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd.

All rights reserved.

Bibliography

Technological Innovation

Bijker W E 1995 Of Bicycles, Bakelite, and Bulbs: Towards a

Theory of Sociotechnical Change. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA
Bimber B 1994 Three faces of technological determinism. In:
Smith M R, Marx L (eds.) Does Technology Dri
e History?
The Dilemma of Technological Determinism. MIT Press,
Cambridge, MA
Bober M M 1927 Karl Marxs Interpretation of History. Harvard
University Press, Cambridge, MA
Cohen G A 1978 Karl Marxs Theory of History: A Defence.
Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ
Fischer C S 1992 America Calling: A Social History of the
Telephone to 1940. University of California Press, Berkeley,
CA
Heilbroner R L 1967 Do machines make history? Technology
and Culture 8: 33545
Hughes T P 1994 Technological momentum. In: Smith M R,
Marx L (eds.) Does Technology Dri
e History? The Dilemma of
Technological Determinism. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA
Kline R R, Pinch T J 1996 Users as agents of technological
change: The social construction of the automobile in the rural
United States. Technology and Culture 37: 76395
MacKenzie D 1984 Marx and the machine. Technology and
Culture 25: 473503
Marx L 1994 The idea of technology and postmodern pessimism. In: Smith M R, Marx L (eds.) Does Technology
Dri
e History? The Dilemma of Technological Determinism.
MIT Press, Cambridge, MA
Miller R W 1984 Analyzing Marx: Morality, Power, and History.
Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ
Misa T J 1988 How machines make history and how
historians (and others) help them to do so. Science,
Technology, and Human Values 13: 30831
Pinch T J, Bijker W E 1987 The social construction of facts
and artifacts: Or how the sociology of science and the
sociology of technology might benet each other. In: Bijker
W E, Hughes T P, Pinch T J (eds.) The Social Construction of
Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and
History of Technology. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA
Shaw W H 1979 The handmill gives you the feudal lord:
Marxs technological determinism. History and Theory 18:
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Smith M R 1994 Technological determinism in American
culture. In: Smith M R, Marx L (eds.) Does Technology
Dri
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MIT Press, Cambridge, MA
Staudenmaier J M 1985 Technologys Storytellers: Rewea
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the Human Fabric. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA
Winner L 1977 Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-control
as a Theme in Political Thought. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA

R. R. Kline

Technological innovation is the successful implementation (in commerce or management) of a technical

idea new to the institution creating it. Innovations are
distinguished from inventions, technology and research, but may arise from any of the three. A variety
of models of the innovation process are described, for
they are useful in developing public policies for
encouraging innovations as well as for managing their
creation. The more advanced of these models include
consideration of complementary assets and social
capital, which helps explain the dierences in innovative capacity in dierent societies. The American
society is particularly given to the use of banners under
which to rally public opinion to the advance of
economic well being. In the middle 1970s, when high
tech industries emerged as the key to growth, and
American rms were immediately challenged by the
technically adroit Japanese, the banner was critical
technologies derived from defense and space research.
When the economic challenge became serious in the
1980s and early 1990s the banner was competitiveness; even conservative President Reagan launched a
White House taskforce to suggest how government
could enhance American competitiveness in the face of
serious price and quality competition in technology
intensive industries, especially in Asia. As we prepare
to enter the next millenium, the new banner, in
nations rich and poor, is innovation.

1. Denitions
While a rm can become more competitive by
cornering a market or slashing workers wages, innovation implies a transformation in the marketthe
invocation of imagination and daring in the adoption
of new ways of doing things. The word innovation has
an old history. The Oxford English Dictionary uses a
broad denition: A change in the nature or fashion of
anything; something newly introduced, a novel practice, method, etc. and traces its rst use back to 1553.
In its contemporary usage, Burke is quoted as writing
in 1796 It is a revolt of innovation; and thereby the

15498

International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences

ISBN: 0-08-043076-7