In this post, I will quote from ‘Paths of Fire: An Anthropologist’s Inquiry into Western Technology’ (1996) by Robert McCormick Adams. "With this exemplary emphasis on R & D has gone a corresponding Japanese readiness systematically to pursue the acquisition of foreign technology. Nearly three times the amount of technical information is purchased by Japan from the United States, for example, than by the United States from Japan. Even more important is Japan's consistent de-emphasis on investing in fundamental or basic research, relying instead on open scientific literature, graduate training abroad, and continuing contacts with colleagues and programs in foreign (especially U.S.) laboratories. This sharp contrast with the priorities that have been followed unswervingly in the United States since World War Il must be highlighted. It strongly supports the suggestion that international leadership in major areas of basic scientific research is not a sufficient condition for economic growth, although the advantage it sometimes confers in gaining time over competitors may be making it increasingly desirable or even necessary. This is not to imply that fundamental science and applied science or technology are seen in Japan as somehow opposed to one another. Quite the contrary, they are seen as constituents of a single community, but with different valuations of their respective contributions. The Japanese cultural mindset of "learning by doing" as compared to the American mindset of "learning from principles" has proved to have a profound influence on technological innovation. It has led to the Japanese accepting, even enthusing about, incremental innovations which have a large cumulative effect. This is contrasted with an American predilection for home grown breakthroughs. It has also led to a Japanese willingness to undertake the manufacture of advanced materials for insignificant markets as a way of learning, with confidence that as learning proceeds and costs and quality improve, markets will develop. A second profound cultural difference that permeates the mode of technological development is the strong American emphasis on individual achievement vs. the strong Japanese emphasis on group achievement… This has been commented on by many observers, as has the difference in the Japanese system of lifetime employment and promotion based mostly on seniority as compared with the American system of contract employment, frequent job changes and promotion based on individual accomplishments. At first seemingly inconsistent with the importance Japan attaches to R & D, but on further reflection in underlying harmony with its favoring of pragmatic incrementalism over pursuing greater breakthroughs through basic research, is the disjunction between Japan's corporate sector and its universities. Technology-intensive firms seek out university graduates, but prefer to maintain control over their final, specialized training as well as the research in which they later engage. Ph.D.s are, therefore, produced in relatively small numbers. As one of the country's most respected and senior engineering statesmen has described relations between Japanese universities and the corporate sector with regard to R & D, "the linkage is very tenuous, to the point of being negligible. Transfers from the private sector to the centers of higher education amounted to 0.55 percent of the private sector's total R & D spending for 1988, representing 3.3 percent of the corresponding budget of the educational institutions - the U.S. figures for the same year are 2.78 percent and 9.9 percent respectively." Takashi Mukaibo, former president of Tokyo University and head of Japan's Academy of Engineering, goes on to characterize the universities as having been "singularly inactive in their quest to procure funds from the private sector," although more recently “some are timidly adopting steps in this direction.” As recounted in this and the preceding chapter, the conditions under which technology originally contributed to the origins of mass production in the United States have undergone a profound transformation. At the outset, the frame within which action was enclosed was a largely internal one. A vigorous and growing population supplied both an urbanized industrial work force and a vast, relatively undiscriminating domestic market. Supplying it, as well as drawing upon abundant natural resources, required only an efficient internal transportation grid. The historic achievement of creating the latter helped to provide geographically dispersed models of management for the complex systems that would soon appear in other industrial sectors as well. Technological innovations were largely directed toward substituting machines for hand-processing to achieve uniformity as well as to lower costs, and economies of scale were the central objective of unprecedented industrial expansion. Partly as a result of having been insulated from the destructiveness of two world wars, the United States moved into a position not only of technological ascendancy but of dominance in many world markets for what were then high-technology products. Across-the-board U.S. support for free trade remained - although it was compromised in many particulars - a generally popular and sustainable position. Today the position is different in several major respects. Laura Tyson, defining herself as a "cautious activist," has candidly and succinctly summarized them: “During the last decade, new developments in trade theory have demonstrated that, under conditions of increasing returns, technological externalities, and imperfect competition, free trade is not necessarily and automatically the best policy. Promotional and protectionist policies by foreign governments can harm domestic economic welfare by shifting industries with high returns and beneficial externalities away from domestic producers and domestic production locations. Conversely, comparable policies at home can improve domestic economic welfare, sometimes at the expense of other nations.” This alteration of our circumstances, and the changes in fundamental outlook that it may invite, have become a repeated focus of debate in newspaper and magazine columns and the subject of abrasive international negotiations. While our scientific leadership remains largely intact, the technological lead once thought to have stemmed directly from it has been substantially dissipated. Some role of trade restrictions in having brought this about is widely conceded, although the extent of the resultant losses and the details of its incidence on particular industrial sectors are tenaciously argued in internal as well as international fora. Trade restrictions of one kind or another are ubiquitous, and we are far short of the state of international understanding in which considerations of equity and the greater good of the greater number are likely to outweigh narrowly conceived national self-interest on any country's part. A continuing series of less than wholly satisfactory interim outcomes is almost inevitable. Their details will take the form of complex trade-offs, reflecting not only the bilateral or multilateral leveraging of overall economic power but the political strength of internal constituencies. The undeniable reality is that in many key, high-tech (other than military) fields, the United States is repeatedly finding that its basic ability to remain competitive in international markets is in serious jeopardy. This is a problem that must be grappled with primarily in its own terms, at home. It cannot be effectively dealt with if it is viewed as a problem requiring only a readiness on the part of U.S. competitors and trading partners to alter their policies in its favor. Advanced design, sensitivity to rapidly changing consumer preferences, and superior manufacturing technology all have played a part in the successes of Japan and other U.S. competitors. But behind and alongside these attributes are other strengths, in the domains of long-range corporate strategy and organization. Greater flexibility, and a readiness for more sustained efforts of greater vision, risk, and scope are characteristics that are shared by our most effective industrial competitors - by no means all of them Japanese. In relation to the U.S. chemical industry, for example, German and Swiss concerns have been remarkably more successful in their diversification strategies. This effectiveness derives, in particular, from long-established organizational capabilities, close cooperation between firms - increasing the scope of their enterprises - and availability of capital. High rates of depreciation and a high degree of leveraging gave the German companies the cash flow that they needed to expand across a broad front. The great American chemical company might be disappearing, leaving the traditional field to the Germans, who rely on the scope of their varied chemical enterprises to give them long-enduring competitive advantages. Granting that conditions have changed in many essential respects, it is impossible to reflect on this account without recalling its obvious parallelism with the process, recounted at the end of chapter 4, by which the British dye industry permanently gave way to German competitors in the 1870s and 1880s. However, there is a complex mix of secular changes affecting the position of technology in the U.S. industrial economy, on various time-scales, and some are of a more positive and perhaps representative character than this example suggests. Consistent with the very long time perspective that is a principal feature of this study, one that is almost certainly of cumulative and fundamental importance has recently been identified by Moses Abramovitz: "In the nineteenth century, technological progress was heavily biased in a physical capital-using direction… the bias of technological advance in the present century worked to reduce the relative marginal productivity of tangible capital compared with that of intangible capital, much of the latter embodied in labor. Technological change tended to raise the relative marginal productivity of capital in the form of education and training of the labor force at all levels; in the form of practical knowledge acquired by deliberate investment of resources in research and development; and in other forms of intangible capital, such as the creation and support of corporate managerial structures and cultures and the development of product markets, which are the infrastructure of the economies of scale and scope." Of similarly long-term significance is the widespread introduction of corporate measures for the organized generation of new technology, a theme introduced at the outset of this chapter. More clearly than ever, technological change emerges as "a channeled historical process that exhibits strong aspects of inertia and continuity but that also is capable of generating abrupt changes in pace and direction. Technological progress augments and is complementary with capital investment, accelerating the rate of advance of the most developed countries. While the distinction remains real and strong for many individuals and institutions, we have seen that there are broad areas of R & D in which science and technology have blurred into a near-continuum. Pronouncements from key agencies and legislators in favor of a shift toward greater funding of "strategic" research accelerate the trend. Synergies multiply as computers, lasers, sensors, and many kinds of advanced materials find new uses other than those for which they were originally designed, and lead to further innovations and economies. Fixed R & D investments steadily mount, for manufacturing process improvements as well as new products. The implementation of process innovations such as robotics drives down the cost of labor, creating the incentive of increasing returns if market share can be captured and assured. Other radical infusions into traditional manufacturing processes speed the introduction of new product and make possible the cost savings of mass production with greater flexibility to adjust to a wide variety of changing consumer preferences. Competitiveness in world markets becomes not merely a consuming corporate preoccupation but a national one. Even as this happens, many of the corporate entities involved tend to lose their national identity through mergers, buyouts, joint ventures, and cross-licensing. But technology itself, as has always been the case, provides means and not ends. It is we as concerned citizenry, electing executives and legislators, appearing before regulatory commissions, conducting independent research, participating in nongovernmental organizations - who must set the goals and develop the mechanisms to assure that the benefits of well-being that can indeed be associated with technological progress will be wisely and equitably distributed. The general course of technological advance, as it emerges from this study, has never been an orderly, predictable process. Technology itself is a multilevel phenomenon. Moving upward from a slowly evolving infrastructure of tools and techniques that has played little part in our account, one enters a more dynamic, vital field in which it is the more consciously designed battery of reproducible elements that plays the critical part in putting into effect every practical policy and purpose. Here, where technology is identified with systematic processes of analysis, choice, and implementation of plans and programs, it is inextricably a part of the larger social fabric. Here, too, it at least approaches Braudel's hyperbole - intersecting continuously with all the forces of change in history, if not quite covering as wide a domain as history. Our concern has been primarily directed at successive impulses or surges of technological innovation, in historically and culturally varied settings. Their gathering momentum - the shortening, now almost disappearing, intervals between them; the progressively widened frontier of innovation and discovery; and the thickening network of interconnections and positive feedbacks - is most apparent in long historical retrospect and has not been adequately recognized. The waves or impulses form an accelerating, in some loose sense cumulative - but hardly inevitable or unidirectional - series. At least from the standpoint of understanding the dominant forces that have converged to shape our present world, we have dealt with what appear to be some of the most decisive - permanently transformative - of those impulses. But it should not be forgotten that these are a small, selected sample. On a global scale, they reflect the historical experience of a geographically and culturally restricted segment of what could, and one day should, receive similar attention. Furthermore, having been chosen to demonstrate slowly accelerating, century and even millennium-long cadences of change, they testify more adequately to the major avenues of earlier technological advance than to the simultaneous proliferation of fundamental changes in many fields to which we are now growing accustomed. An underlying rationale in undertaking this study has been the need for a broadly contextual view of the predisposing conditions as well as the concomitants of technological advance. I believe that rationale has been amply justified. Limitations in the available sources of information, as well as the subsequent emergence of progressively greater institutional complexity, make comparison with pre-eighteenth-century episodes of rapid change difficult."
