note: all images for this article are lost. It makes it kind of goofy at certain points (especially concerning the carrot).
Technology Transfer
During the course of this post I will address technology with the goal of ultimately addressing people’s creating and transferring technology. In other words, I am assuming that technology is a human, social, activity from the start, to work towards an understanding of it that might be useful in an Human Resource Development practice. Because technology is a human activity it is always forming and emerging, like art. Work begats more work, and the artifacts of this labor serve myriad purposes beyond those originally intended for it. Like art, technology is always under revision. You can’t pin it down. Thinking about it is like chasing a carrot on a stick. It is no wonder that the Greeks developed the myth of Prometheus in a way that put the hero into a state of infinite, cyclical vicissitude. However, during this paper I will seek to develop an understanding of technology that, although complex, might contribute to our understanding of technology transfer some workable notion of success.
Unbundling Technology
Let’s begin and approach technology as it has been addressed in Western philosophy, and ask “What is technology”? In doing so I’ll set up the proverbial carrot on the stick; writing about it like this, I can only look at it from an intellectual distance but not grab it. At this distance, perhaps, we must concede that this is not a technological question, but “is a qualitatively different question which cannot be answered from within technology; a question for which technology itself cannot provide an answer.” (Frey p.1,2) [i]
Given the shear complexity of technology, how can we understand it in a way that is not only comprehensive but also useful as a way of approaching technology transfer?
“Rather than define technology in a way that attempts to capture the Platonic essence in a few sentences…,” Frey chooses to “provide characterizations of technology” based on Mitcham’s taxonomy of philosophical questions, namely those questions that are markedly “metaphysical/epistemological.”
Frey examines technology in terms of “(a) as object, (b) as process, (c) as knowledge, and (d) as volition.”
* Object: “These physical objects may be tools, machines, consumer products, instruments or any object humanly produced.” (Frey p. 9)
* Process: “Artifacts are the result or product of some technological activity; they are things made…. Action or praxis is important ... because artifacts are possible only through the physical activity of a maker. Mitcham (1980, p. 308) argues that engineers place stress on making and social scientists on using.”
* Knowledge: “…[t]echnology has a knowledge base and structure independent of science.
* Volition: “At the greatest depth is that character of technology which seeks to tie together all aspects of technology: object, process, knowledge. Mitcham (1980, p. 316) argues that it is volition which proves this link: volition which incorporates aims, intensions, desires and choices.” (Frey p.16)
In developing a conception of technology within which one can discuss values (notably, whether technology is value-free), Frey considers “value as integral to volition” (Frey p.17). The question then becomes whether human will, and thus, volition, is sufficiently informed by reason. In short, the author concludes, it is not:
In the ordinary acting out of human experience we operate on the Principle of Insufficient Reason. Here we recognize the limited nature of our ability to know, the insufficiency of data and time in which to reflect on the data, competing values and the probabilistic nature of phenomena…. Human decision making and acting under the Principle of Insufficient Reason recognizes the incompleteness of our knowledge and consideration of potential consequences. At the convergence of Insufficiencies we recognize the limitations of reason while realizing that action must still be taken. Within this ambiguous context is found the role of human will. We must still make decisions and act, and this takes an act of will rather than strict reliance on reason. (Frey, p. 19)
But even this placing technology under a metaphysical calculus of sorts still sets science against technology, conceptually, in ways that must be situated back into human intention, thought and action in a particular time and place. We still are left with questions concerning humans, knowing, and valuing together. How do people with different and perhaps competing wills work together to create and move technological artifacts around? What do we do with values? Given that we cannot possibly draw on sufficient knowledge in a given situation, do we instead abandon the attempt to exercise reason and react or can we reconcile knowledge (reason) and the act of knowing? Perhaps we might take a step towards the carrot in front of us by exploring this taxonomy with these concerns in mind.
Without turning to the many debates concerning anthropology, we can be reasonably sure that our ancestors developed reflective consciousness as they crafted and used tools for specific purposes. Further, we can be reasonably sure that they concomitantly developed means of communicating. Most, if not all, civilizations have used the bow and arrow to hunt and to conduct warfare. Additionally, all civilizations have controlled fire and have used it for innumerable purposes in nearly all spheres of life. The ancient Greeks called this process of tool-making techne. Although they isolated the act of tool-making in this way they were careful to avoid confusing techne, or technique, with technology, or the broader knowledge of making things. Technology thus is broader and refers not just to the specific act of making a tool but to the human capacity for responding to needs more generally. The case of fire serves as a good example. Someone who wishes to start a fire may employ a specific technique to do so. That person may fling sparks onto carefully prepared material using flint, or he or she may spin a rod of wood between yet more wood to generate heat between the two surfaces. In either case, the person is employing a very particular technique to start a fire. However, he or she does so only when social, economic, and environmental conditions exist that both allow and demand that he or she employ that particular technique. Technology – if we may consider it as the knowledge of tool-making – is a product of people both responding to and revising these conditions.
What might such a technique look like in terms of a model that begins to situate the act – the technique – into a broader milieu, and one that acknowledges human knowing?
“The Technological Method Model… graphically displays the essential model for ‘doing’ technology, as well as for contributing to the body of knowledge about technology. It is, therefore, a theory and practice model.” (Savage p.13)[ii]. Using this six-step model we may address types of problems and outcomes in terms of a social problem solving:
1. Define problem
2. Develop alternative solutions
3. Select a solution
4. Implement and evaluate the solution
5. Redesign the solution
6. Interpret the solution
This model echoes some of Frey’s allusion to human will: “Human wants and needs lead to the identification of technological problems and opportunities.” So, though very much a process model, the author based it on certain activities of people’s volition that are both observable and also imply experiential undertones. Through it we might begin to see technology as a process of people responding to the conditions around them and both interpreting and cataloguing their experience of doing so. With a Technological Method Model, we can begin to address human reasoning as an integral part of technology: “[the] process of problem solving provides the parallel in technology to the scientific method in science…. [However,] [w]hen humans are engaged in technological practice, they utilize technological processes in an ordered way to produce technological outcomes” (Savage pp.15-17).
Technology, then, implies both ways of knowing conditions and also ways of responding to them. Understanding technology in terms of knowing allows us to, among other things, link technology and science in a useful way, but left abstracted through the lens of a particular method, we are left unable to explain technology moving through the human world. Let’s go back to our example above, of fire. We can be sure that people were starting and controlling fire before they were aware of what we call scientific principles. In the case of a person starting a fire, we can say that he or she is employing what we are now considering to be scientific knowledge – the principles that involve heat and work – to do so and that, additionally, that person does not need to know these principles to start a fire. This way of knowing, then, cannot be simply “the application of scientific knowledge” nor is it a shear act of unreflective human will, but instead involves a person’s knowing how to select and use materials with no necessary recourse to formal scientific knowledge – and doing so within social contexts. Further, aim or intention begins to figure. Accordingly, let’s assume that the two modes of understanding – technological and scientific – are not mutually exclusive but are held in tension and practiced as the situation demands. Let’s use the work of another author to compare scientific ways of knowing with technological ways of knowing:
Comparing Technological and Scientific Aims
“The concept of technology and science being at different ends of the same continuum is probably false. What is probably true is (1) that technology is one of the sciences, as are biology, psychology, sociology and other disciplines concerned with human behavior, and (2) that the source of the problem is the term science as it is commonly used (DeVore pp. 29-30).”
“As Skolimowski reminds us, ‘Science concerns itself with what is, technology with what is to be.’ Technology, having grown past craft and primitive agriculture, is a specific form of knowledge that concerns itself with questions of knowing “how”, but “at a more complex and sophisticated level” also knowing “what” and knowing “why” (DeVore p. 33[iii]).
Accordingly, this kind of knowledge – Technological Knowledge – is (1) knowing that something is true in a given context and (2) knowing how to accomplish a preconceived end (DeVore p. 35). Technology tries to predict and thus tries to formulate rules and points to a “centrality of theory over empiricism (DeVore p. 34).”
In this way, we distinguish science and technology “particularly with reference to goals, nature of the problem and problem setting.” Technology concerns itself with human capacities for creation where science seeks “to obtain fundamental understanding of nature and the physical universe.” (DeVore p. 40). Thus, here technology is a form of knowledge, it is similar to science in terms of its procedures, but differs from science in terms of goals:
The discipline of technology is the systematic study of the creation, utilization and behavior of adaptive systems. It includes the tools, machines, materials, techniques and technical means along with the behavior of these elements and systems in relation to human beings, society and the environment. (Devore p. 43, author’s emphasis)
Technology here defined begins to give us a tool to understand technological activity within society. However, it doesn’t give us a tool to understand people doing technological things in social contexts, nor does it give us a way to understand how those contexts give rise to certain technologies. By accepting this definition at face value, we are left confused and unable to move beyond the technical and to the social. If, for example, we accept that “[s]imilar viewpoints exist with respect to science….[and that] each view-point differs depending on the perception of the individual espousing that viewpoint,” are we then obligated to accept that these “many diverse viewpoints are of little help to those concerned with establishing public or corporate policy with respect to industrial or technological research”? That similar viewpoints exists should be coming clear by now. But it does not follow that since people tend to approach their work and lives within their own value system, that the “goal of maintaining technological prominence and contributing to the improvement of human existence” is itself understood similarly by policy makers nor by anyone. (Devore p. 42)
Linking Practice to Society
In terms of technology transfer, such various and conflicting viewpoints should prompt us to examine more carefully technology in relation to human understanding. In these terms, goals, and the principles drawn from to achieve them, are negotiated with the means we use throughout the process, amongst other people of often markedly different methodological persuasions. If a transfer is to be successful, we can assume that people would take great care to incorporate and balance views and understandings throughout the process. Accordingly, the process itself must incorporate means of collaborative reflection and investigation. While engaging in the practice of transferring technology we span the boundaries of science and technology, and other boundaries; we are thus obliged to understand technology in a way that allows us to do so. We press on…
[T]hat the difference between science and technology can be best grasped by examining the idea of scientific progress and the idea of technological progress.”
“The study of technology should be studied from a perspective of praxiology…. Praxiology analyzes action from the point of view of efficiency.” (Skolimowski p.375[iv])
These statements begin to reach towards a conception of technology that links its practice to society, in terms of progress and sciences of technology, but do not yet extend beyond particular technical practice and into technological practice. One astute author draws attention to difficulties in looking at technology in terms of progress:
These ways of thinking about progress have very serious weaknesses, however. They tend to be over-selective, and lead us to overlook the fact that improvements in one dimension are sometimes accompanied by less desirable development elsewhere. In agriculture, for example, the amount of food produced can be judged in relation to land, labour or energy. In Britain, as in other western countries, grain output has increased enormously in the present century, especially in relation to the area of land cultivated…and the number of people employed. But grain output per unit of energy consumed on farms has decreased (Pacey, p.14, author’s emphasis).
The question concerning progress is one not of technical progress but a more holistic one. It can neither be extracted from science nor understood in terms of praxiology exclusively.
To be sure, contrasting science and technology in this way is useful, especially for those in professions and disciplines that require specialized ways of understanding the world, but it does little to help explain some important phenomena, like for instance how scientists go about the business of knowing what. In practice, that is, in the act of doing something, you may find elements of both science and technology. (See, for example, Rasmussen, 1999).
People may need, in the course of practice – whether that practice is of research or engineering, discovering or crafting – to draw on different ways of knowing and bring them to bear on a given problem. This ultimately results in markedly different sciences and technologies. Doing science, for example, is not necessarily a matter of following a single scientific method. People in different scientific fields, for example those of botany and astronomy, may actually use different methods of inquiry (Pitt, 2001[v]). Further, engineering knowledge may be true in a given technical context – that is, among, engineers who are working on a specific object – but neither the causes nor consequences of its application, nor the measure of its successful transferability, may be known. Does praxiology offer a way out?
Not necessarily. Praxiology is a study of technical efficiency and, among other things, would be useful only to the extent that everyone involved in transfer understood it in the same way. Further, once technology is considered, or practiced, outside of a very specific laboratory culture, it’s a new game. Evaluating and practicing technology involves issues that can’t be understood this way – issues that people will eventually face. One author puts the matter clearly from an ethical perspective:
As for praxiology, or action theory, it is supposed to investigate the general concepts of individual and collective action, as well as the conditions of efficient action regardless of its moral value…. In this regard praxiology is nothing but the philosophical counterpart of management technology (usually called "management science"). Examples: the investigation of the means-goal (or input-output) relation in general terms, and the search for general principles of efficient action, such as that of ‘satisficing’ (instead of maximizing).
Now, an action can be efficient and satisficing to its agent, yet morally defective for being selfish, just as it can be morally well motivated but inefficient or even counterproductive. This shows that ethics and praxiology should not be conducted in isolation from one another, as they usually are. Only the union of the two fields can tackle the problems surrounding the full legitimacy--both praxiological and moral--of action. One such problem is the design of the new behavior norms called for by the introduction of new practices or products that are bound to alter the everyday lives of many people…. (Bunge[vi])
This author draws attention to the need for ethos. Many science and engineering departments share his concern and yet few of them (one exception being Georgia Tech) consider the issue outside of moral philosophies, which themselves can be quite prescriptive, technical and abstract. Can we design ethical behavior as we do a system? At the crossroads implied in these narrow terms – we are left standing quite unable to explain the nature of technological practice in a lab much less outside of it:
“The analysis of the structure of thinking in technology is hampered by the fact that nowadays the construction of bridges, highways, automobiles, or even domestic gadgets is inseparably linked with the consideration of beauty and comfort which are basically “non-technical” categories.”
“The technological phenomenon no longer is identical with the technical phenomenon and cannot be analyzed entirely in terms of the engineering sciences. The social context, the economic structure of a society, the existing social mores and aesthetic predilection – all have their imprint on the technological phenomenon and, to a certain extent, determine its character.” (Skolimowski p.382).
This kind of conclusion moves us closer, perhaps – closer to the carrot. Thus we see technology as being the product of different attributes of society. However, this sort of conclusion is apt to cause more confusion than clarification. According to it, we can only understand technology to the extent that we can understand the context, structure, mores, and aesthetic predilections of society in abstract terms. The question is at what level of analysis can we see these conditions? Economic structures, for instance, are abstract terms. Without empirical observation and without a theoretical way to link that observation and explain it, we are left with a metaphysical definition of technology even still and we need to push on and square it with experience. The reason, plainly, is that I have seen people – their actions and the artifacts they produce. I have seen the consequences of technological mishaps and successes. Further, I have talked to enough of them (people) to know that they do have ideas of society and of the economy that they produce as a consequence of their own innate nature combining with education and experience and emerging in different contexts. I have seen the artifacts of different impulses – those of efficiency, of beauty, of peace, of war – and I have talk to enough people to have some idea that these impulses are creative ones that originate from somewhere I cannot understand, but whose artifacts I can see and hear.
Moving from definition to observation
The carrot, we are discovering, is neither tethered to us, as we thought at the beginning, nor is it really dangling there in the first place. Its nature is revealed as we apprehend it; it eludes our gaze as it does our grasp. And yet, there it is. It exists as a metaphor – a sign. To emerge from the quagmire of relativism and subjectivism we have to turn toward our attention to it and draw on an understanding of language as it relates to human material artifacts.
Let’s look at one particularly striking example of someone exploring this relationship:
For the middle class, the SUV is interpreted culturally as strong and invincible, yet civilized. In the case of middle class alienation from the inner city, the SUV is an urban assault vehicle. The driver is transformed into a trooper, combating an increasingly dangerous world. This sense of security felt when driving the SUV continues on when not being driven. The SUV's symbols of strength, power, command and security become an important part of the self-sign. As the world is perceived to be increasingly threatening, these symbols offer a way to safeguard the self-sign. These symbols are a way of sealing off the self from ever multiplying threats. The SUV becomes an anesthetic for the danger, fragmentation, and danger of fragmentation the suburban-self fears. With the identification of enemies within our own borders, this vehicle has become a way of protecting members of the middle class from any threat to their lifestyle. As the middle class comes to see this country as an increasingly dangerous place, the SUV becomes a portable civilization, a way to stabilize the meaning of the suburban self=sign. (Garnar, 2000)[vii]
Here, we can begin to see the semiotic function of technology. Recognizing technological artifacts (in this case, the SUV) as symbols is essential for dealing with technology transfer. As people attempt to move technology from one culture to another, they relate to it, to each other, and to themselves through the object as a symbol. The SUV moved from the military culture, in the form of a Jeep, and into the American suburban culture as a symbol of status and security. To be sure, this is not just to say that a sign is just a word. After all, people do actually drive their SUVs and go places. However, it is to say that people use create and use artifacts in cultural, not technical, space -- a sign is something that mediates human relationships and identities.
To fully appreciate the magnitude and importance of this insight is to begin to understand the cultural aspect of technology: “technology is thus not merely a means to an end; technical design standards define major portions of the social environment.” (Feenburg, 1995, quoted in Hickman, p. 171). If we are to take this semiotic aspect of technology seriously, we should understand that technological objects are working this way among people in laboratories, in corn fields, and everywhere else.
To do so, we must recognize technology as a practice that operates at many different levels, not just those concerning technical planning, design, and development. Further, and just as important for our purposes, we must recognize that this process of meaning making works among everyone concerned with, and producing, technology transfer processes, including the scientists, the engineers, the change agents, the sponsors, the clients, etc. In fact, we may be so bold as to say that kinds of technological practice actually shape these roles as much as the people occupying them shape them:
In his recent book on the philosophy of technology and in numerous articles, Joseph Pitt argues that technology should be defined as "humanity at work" (Pitt 1983; 1988; 2000). One strength of this very broad definition is that it allows us to see disparate things like governments and buildings as technologies. The automobile, generally, and the SUV, specifically, clearly qualify as technologies. (Garnar, 2000)
This example of the SUV illustrates metaphor operating at multiple levels. First, we have the author’s own use of metaphor as a way to begin interpreting a technological artifact. Secondly, we see the results of the author’s interpretation of that artifact. Thirdly, we see the author’s assumptions about what technology is. The general process of interpretation occurring at these three levels illustrates not only what occurs in the mind of a person apprehending technology, it also points to a fourth layer – that between the author and us, the reader. As we read this passage, we are no doubt struck by the author’s assumption that technology may be defined as broadly as "humanity at work." Our being struck by this definition implies that we are also interpreting – working – along with the author through our own experience, education and value system.
This is not a carrot
The carrot, then, finally reveals itself for what it is: an artifact of an inquiry – my inquiry, itself being partially both scientific and technological, as much creative as analytical – always hinging on the metaphor of a carrot. It is language in use. I produced it in order to both think and to communicate that thought to you. Further, I produced it within the certain social conditions of a class, a program, a career, a community. This idea of metaphor is important, as it traces a path across science, technology, and even art. Important for our purposes – for coming to a useful understanding of technology – how does this idea apply to technology transfer?
Technology Transfer
One way of looking at technology transfer is akin to a basic sender/receiver communication model:
“Most universities now have technology transfer centers or offices that adopt a rather narrow view of technology transfer…. In its most basic form, technology transfer includes the transfer item itself, the developer of the technology, various channels to accomplish the transfer, and the technology recipient.” (Johnson et al, p. 37[viii])
During this paper, I’ve thought about technology transfer – and technological practice – as a human endeavor that is mediated by signs. One way of understanding it would be to see the process mainly as a rhetorical one:
[Technology transfer] “processes are highly rhetorical in nature…. That is, at their core these processes involve individuals and groups negotiating their visions of technologies and applications, markets and users in what they all hope are a common enterprise. This means that the reality of a transfer does not exist apart from the perceptions of the participants. Instead, the reality – what the transfer means to the participants – is the result of continual conceptualizing, negotiating, and reconceptualizing.( Doheny-Farina p. 4 [ix]).”
However, we must still go a step further. Although meaning-making is indeed a large part of the activity that goes on in socio-technological contexts, we need to understand those contexts in semiotic terms that also allow us to understand both why and how people produce and use technological artifacts.
This metaphorical nature of technology becomes apparent when we consider technology transfer in an anthropological and historical sense. Technology has been transferred since the dawn of civilization. Though no one knows exactly how this has occurred we can assume it is so just by looking at the proliferation of the use of bows and arrows and of the controlled use of fire and pottery throughout the globe. Technology transfer, however, is typically a formal discourse, a collective activity that people use for a variety of purposes, including gaining recognition and power, for education and economic development -- social change in general.
Like the practice of technology described above, technology transfer is itself a form of technological knowing. The difference between technology and technology transfer is, as the term implies, one of movement across cultural and geographical boundaries. What purposes do these boundaries themselves serve and how are they maintained? Diffusion of innovations usually occurs most successfully within homogenous conditions where, basically, everyone is culturally similar and maintains similar interests (Rogers 18). An innovation -- “an idea perceived as new by the individual” -- diffuses throughout a culturally homogenous situation in ways that largely conform to a group’s own cultural processes. In the case of the diffusion of innovations, nothing actually “jumps” from one culture but instead emerges, through communication, in the heads of an audience who perceives the need for the innovation accepts it and revises its own practices in relation to it. In this model, and diffusion is limited to the model itself, as “the process by which an innovation spreads.” Technology transfer, on the other hand, differs in that it implies changes of a more general and material nature, though the broader nature of the process is usually ignored:
Technology Transfer typically focuses on the transfer of tools, techniques, and artifacts, but not the transfer of inquiry into such things…. This may be one of the reasons why technology transfer … turns out to have consequences that are both unanticipated and undesirable. (Hickman, 10)
Given that conventional definitions of technology transfer most often focus on just “tools, techniques, and artifacts,” how can we come to understand it in a way that will allow us see inquiry as a crucial, even inexorable, component of the process?
Technological Practice
To more fully understand the magnitude of technology transfer, let’s consider Arnold Pacey’s description of technological practice. Using the example of medicine, Pacey considers medical science and the field’s more technical aspects in terms of a more general, technological, practice:
In medicine, a distinction of the kind required is often made by talking about 'medical practice' when a general term is required, and employing the phrase 'medical science' for the more strictly technical aspects of the subject. Sometimes, references to 'medical practice' only denote the organization necessary to use medical knowledge and skill for treating patients. Sometimes, however, and more usefully, the term refers to the whole activity of medicine, including its basis in technical knowledge, its organization, and its cultural aspects. The latter comprise the doctor's sense of vocation, his personal values and satisfactions, and the ethical code of his profession. Thus 'practice' may be a broad and inclusive concept.
Once this distinction is established, it is clear that although medical practice differs quite markedly from one country to another, medical science consists of knowledge and techniques which are likely to be useful in many countries. It is true that medical science in many western countries is biased by the way that most research is centred on large hospitals. Even so, most of the basic knowledge is widely applicable and relatively independent of local cultures. Similarly, the design of snowmobiles reflects the way technology is practised in an industrialized country -- standardized machines are produced which neglect some of the special needs of Eskimos and Lapps. But one can still point to a substratum of knowledge, technique and underlying principle in engineering which has universal validity, and which may be applied anywhere in the world.
We would understand much of this more clearly, I suggest, if the concept of practice were to be used in all branches of technology as it has traditionally been used in medicine. We might then be better able to see which aspects of technology are tied up with cultural values, and which aspects are, in some respects, value-free. We would be better able to appreciate technology as a human activity and as part of life. We might then see it not only as comprising machines, techniques and crisply precise knowledge, but also as involving characteristic patterns of organization and imprecise values.
This perspective offers a way of conceptualizing technology as a form of knowing that is at once emerging in cultural practices and yet relates to objective, generalizable experiences gained in science and engineering practice. This is helpful because transfer of technology entails a jump from one culture to another (and, arguably, a mixing of the cultures themselves), and not necessarily just a diffusion or adoption from one brain to another. For example, where military practice may be fairly homogenous in different countries, transfer of technological artifacts may be a relatively simple matter. During a technology transfer class here at the University of Illinois, for example, a discussion centered on the purchase of American military aircraft by the Kenyan air force. Although the places were very different, the sub-cultures were similar. The practices and values of both sub-cultures were similar enough that the actual movement of the complex planes and the skills needed to fly them were relatively unproblematic. And yet during that same class another discussion about a simple technology transfer between the two countries led to a very different understanding. In this latter case, two Kenyans suggested that technical artifacts were very difficult to maintain because there was, in their native language, no word for maintenance. One way of explaining the disjoint or miscommunication comes from understanding technology as a whole process that involves not only material and principles, but also language and values. Let’s press a bit further to draw out this connection.
Meaning and Material
This linguistic aspect of technology is by no means ancillary but instead represents a core driver of technological practice, and of technology transfer. Meaning – arguably a root of social existence – derives largely from language and linguistic practices but informs material reality as well. Human values in turn shape the way people use language. Given access to the same language – for instance, English – people may use it differently and interpret the world differently. Someone from Kenya may demonstrate a strong command of English, as evidenced by a standardized test, but use it differently as they interpret and share their experience. The meaning they construct, and apply, in a given situation may differ markedly from those around them, and yet we must still recognize that their utterance of that understanding emerges in a specific context, in relation to the activities going on around a person.
This does not mean, however, that communication or technology practice is a matter of people talking past one another or subjecting one another to brute force; it means that we consider technology transfer in terms of human development, human development that draws on the very real practices of different sciences and engineering while it considers the human, organizational contexts involved. These issues represent the real work of a change agent, especially when considering technology transfer, for how do we define what is a successful technology transfer? If by success we mean achieving mutual understanding of a problem and then developing and implementing an answer to that problem, we are obliged to consider not only the application of scientific and technological principles (for example, of heat and of material) but also the construction of meaning throughout the process:
Does not electricity mean more now than it did in the days of Franklin? Man makes the word, and the word means nothing which the man has not made it mean, and that only to some man. But since man can think only by means of words or other external symbols, these might turn round and say: "You mean nothing which we have not taught you, and then only so far as you address some word as the interpretant of your thought." In fact, therefore, men and words reciprocally educate each other; each increase of a man's information involves and is involved by, a corresponding increase of a word's information (Peirce, 1868).[x]
Facilitating technology transfer
In this final part I will discuss three ways of facilitating technology transfer that were offered in class and then suggest a fourth one, the activity system. Here I’ll draw all the previous discussion together and to do so I’ll need to use another metaphor. This time we won’t use a word or picture of something, like a carrot, but instead will think about different models by using the water pump.
First, the Diffusion of Innovations Model. Using this process, a water pump may be seen as an innovation introduced into a system by a change agent. To be successful, an innovation should be perceived to maintain certain characteristics (Relative Advantage, Compatibility, Complexity, Trialability, and Observability). Individuals within a social system do not adopt an innovation simultaneously. Rather, they adopt in a linear, over-time sequence, so that individuals can be classified into adopter categories based on when they first begin using an idea.
We should recognize both the utility and limitations of this heuristic. Its strengths lie in its ability to describe a way to categorize people, using a rigorously proven and documented positivistic method, in such a way that we may foster the introduction of an innovation into a system. It further gives ways to define characteristics of that system (namely, Centralization, Complexity, Formalization, Interconnectedness, and Organizational slack). The model’s limitations lie in that it privileges “the innovation” in a way that can lead to unforeseen consequences. It helps us understand why anything happens only in terms of acceptant or rejection of an innovation. Both of these and other limitations are discussed at length in Rogers’ book, especially in chapter four.
Its greatest limitation, however, is not discussed in the book, and this limitation concerns the value we place on human knowing, learning and innovating. Examining only decision-making process, the diffusion model is largely a behavioral model and as such may lead one to assume that people are, more or less, conduits along which innovations may travel.
Secondly, the Concerns-Based Adoption Model. A water pump in this case would be introduced into a system using essentially a top-down approach. In other words, this is largely a client-centered model, but from a management perspective. In terms of staff development, any changes in the medium and methodology of teaching constitute a personal experience for staff involving their feelings, needs, perceptions and attitudes. Again, this model is useful in specific circumstances but largely ignores the social ecology in which technological activity takes place. Though its development pays careful attention to human emotion, its unreflective use could produce a bias worth noting: that teachers are incapable of producing innovations themselves and must be divided, as the author states, “the individual must be the primary target of interventions designed to facilitate change in the classroom” (Hall & Loucks, 1979, p. 38). By so individualizing people, its application could fail to harness the natural creativity of people when they get together and address a problem.
Thirdly, Pacey’s “Innovative Dialogue” model. Of the models presented in class, this one is the most carefully deduced, humane and educationally vibrant. It should be approached, though, with an understanding of the assumptions behind it and not only as a technique in itself: An important part of Pacey’s work is to invite the reader to reconsider the abstraction of models from context, to look at cultural activity on the ground level:
So it was with the hand-pumps. The technical aspect of the problem was exemplified by poor design and manufacture. There was the organizational difficulty about maintenance. Also important, though, was the cultural aspect of technology as it was practiced by the engineers involved (Pacey, p. 8).
He clearly makes a distinction between appropriate technology and “high technology [that] is concerned with high performance and complexity for its own sake” (Pacey 137) though he is no ludite by any means. He sees instead, the matter in terms of a paradox and calls for a way of making a better fit, though “interactive innovation” that is “part of life” that people value. (p.144) Careful attention is paid to organization, though sometimes hardware is produced. The point is to be concerned with need.
The most ironic aspect of many technological project that fail because of a lack of any real understanding or dialogue between professional and people is that the failure is often blamed on the people. They are said to lack willingness to change, and sometimes sociologists are brought in to study the cultural blockages or vested interests that are assumed to be opposed to progress. Yet the real problem is often with the technologists, who has never sat down with people to discover what their lives are about and what they want and need. (p. 150)
Actor Network Theory[xi]
This may seem to be a highly esoteric theory; however, it offers ways of understanding complex relationships within cultural dynamics. It takes up theoretically from Pacey’s observations and sees a water pump is an actor within a network. Specifically it is a mobile. It can be seen a mutable mobile or an immutable mobile. This theory allows us to understand how a network produces and sustains itself through configurations called mobiles. At its broadest, the theory allows us to consider how even scientific configurations work in this way:
Bruno Latour caught the issue in question when he asked how it is that the laws of Newton work just as well in the Gabon as in London (4). And the answer is that it takes effort, work, to maintain a stable configuration. It takes effort at each end (an experiment that works in a laboratory in London will only work in a laboratory in the Gabon if the configuration that produced it in London is reproduced, no doubt at great expense, in the Gabon). And it takes effort along the way, for whatever it is that moves between the two locations – a letter, an email – has to hold its shape, or there is no communication between the two.
In its earlier articulations, ANT theory looked at artifacts in terms of their immutability – in other words, how mobiles kept their shape. Later, ANT theorists looked at immutability itself as a way that networks sustain themselves along multiple planes or spaces. The case of the water pump in Zimbabwe serves as an example:
Within Euclidean and network space alike, the bush pump is an object that changes shape. It looks different from one village to the next, and it works differently from one set-up to the next. Thus one might describe it as a failed network. Remember that the network comes with configurational invariance. But the bush pump shows configurational variance. It is a mutable mobile. Is it the same in two places? A network analyst would say no. And yet it makes sense to say that it is ‘the same pump’. It is the ‘Zimbabwe bush pump’ that moves to so many places in rural Zimbabwe and that moves (so runs the argument) precisely because it is not an invariant shape either in network or in Euclidean space. It changes. It is different.
This analysis postulates topological systems: network space, Euclidian space, and a third, “fluid space” to examine mobiles in relation to networks. The first two spaces imply invariance and the third variance or malleability as necessary to sustain a network. The concern here is with explaining continuity within the network. Fluidity roughly explains the malleability or changeability of an object within a cultural system
[s]o there are no great breaks or disruptions. Instead there is a process of gradual adaptation (20). Shape invariance is secured in a fluid topology in a process of more or less gentle flow. It is secured by displacement which holds enough constant for long enough, which resists rupture. A topology of fluidity resonates with a world in which shape continuity precisely demands gradual change: a world in which invariance is likely to lead to rupture, difference, and distance. In which the attempt to hold relations constant is likely to erode continuity. To lead to death (21).
There are also two other spaces being proposed within the theory – a fire space, roughly a “discontinous transformation as a flickering relation between presence and absence,” particularly noteworthy in design efforts, and spatialities of globalities that serve to connect the “universal to the local” through micro/macro-level analysis. Using this theory, people have been able to articulate compelling descriptions of phenomena that other models are incapable of describing. One of its weaknesses is that it in privileging a network, one using it may not be able to account for agency, values, and intentions of people.
Activity Theory
Activity theory “is particularly concerned with the ways in which tools, collectivities, and historical and material conditions together form actions and contexts of problem solving and knowing.” (Star p. 311-312) This theory begins with people and their activities as a base for understanding. Concerning a “pragmatic theory of action,
“It is not a question of the interaction of organism and environment that create the individual; rather, it is a question of what Rogers Hall (1990) has called ‘ecologies of representations’: people, symbols, machines, things producing understandings that are simultaneously structured and novel.”(Star 308). “This means that understanding is both dynamic and local. As Yrjo Engestrom (1987) writes, this means that objects and situations develop together” ‘We are not talking of an eternal and content-indifferent logic but of a developmental logic of the object itself. This logic is stored nowhere in the form of ready-made formulas to be imposed upon the object’ (p.242)….[O]bjects must be considered historically,… ‘in dialectical logic, the concrete is an interconnected systemic whole. But the interconnections are not of any arbitrary kind. At the core of the interconnections there are internal contradictions’ (p.242). The contradictions arise as a tension between the situated connections of the concrete, which allows for interconnectedness, and the experience of wholeness, and the abstractions which are imported (synchronic) or a priori (diachronic). As one is (necessarily) open to novel experience, the kind of consistency associated with unified, top-down, or dichotomous models becomes impossible. (Star 309[xii])
Activity Theory in its basic, Vygotskian form implies a triad of subject, tool, and object that, further elaborated, gives insights into technological development and transfer as an Activity System:
work activity of primary care physician
Figure 4: The work activity of a primary care physician (Engeström)[xiii].
Successful technology transfer starts with not only good definitions of technology, and transfer, but also of “success.”
The pattern exhibited by the general method of intelligence, now taken to be inclusive of the technoscientific and other disciplines, is itself a logical tool, an abstraction that has been constructed on the basis of past outcomes that have proven successful. But this pattern is generated as a by-product of inquiry, not as a direct result of it. Just as in agricultural practice, the aim of a particular sequence of inquiry is the resolution and reconstruction of a particular problem. And just as in the case of agriculture, when tools appropriate to a problem are invented or improved, they are the by-products, not the direct goal, of the relevant practice. (Hickman 70-71)[xiv].
In doing so we recognize that technological artifacts are a product constant adaptation to the flux of ever-shifting human contexts. This perspective suggests that some of what innovation and diffusion researchers think of as negative (namely the changing of innovations) is actually inevitable. The act of human creativity, of human innovation, is constant. In this sense, what we may consider an innovation is just a snap-shot, -- an artifact of mutual understanding and problem-solving -- whereas the act of innovation informed by a variety of conditions and understandings more accurately describes a successful technology transfer.
Conclusion
Through the course of this paper I have thought about technology and its transfer. The importance of this topic is immense: Technology transfer can be a powerful practice of economic development. It can be a practice, as in the case of appropriate technology, that affords well being and concern for cultural continuity. It can also be used as a tool for control and exploitation. The promises and perils of this practice are as many as there are people, arguably, and yet anyone who takes up the practice is, in my opinion, obliged to consider their actions – their tools, the intentions – not just in social and economic terms, but cultural and environmental terms as well.
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[ix] Doheny-Farina, Stephen. Rhetoric, Innovation, Technology: Case Studies of Technical Communication in Technology Transfers. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. 1992.
[x]Peirce, Charles S. Some Consequences of Four Incapacities. Journal of Speculative Philosophy (1868) 2, 140-157. http://www.peirce.org/writings/p27.html March 25, 2002
[xi] John Law and Annemarie Mol. 'Situating Technoscience: an Inquiry into Spatialities' (draft) published by the Centre for Science Studies and the Department of Sociology,
Lancaster University, and the Department of Philosophy, the University of Twente, at:
http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/sociology/soc052jl.html
[xii] S. L. Star, "Working Together: Symbolic Interactionism, Activity Theory and Information Systems," pp. 206-257 in Yrjo Engestrom and David Middleton, eds. Communication and Cognition at Work. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996
[xiii] Cultural-Historical Activity Theory. Available at http://www.edu.helsinki.fi/activity/6b.htm
[xiv] Larry A. Hickman. Philosophical Tools for Technological Culture. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 2001.
