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Technological transitions


Technological innovations have occurred throughout history and rapidly increased over the modern age. New technologies are developed and co-exist with the old before supplanting them. Transport offers several examples; from sailing to steam ships to automobiles replacing horse-based transportation. Technological transitions (TT) describe how these technological innovations occur and are incorporated into society. Alongside the technological developments TT considers wider societal changes such as “user practices, regulation, industrial networks (supply, production, distribution), infrastructure, and symbolic meaning or culture”. For a technology to have use, it must be linked to social structures human agency and organisations to fulfil a specific need. Hughes refers to the ‘seamless web’ where physical artefacts, organisations, scientific communities, and social practices combine. A technological system includes technical and non-technical aspects, and it a major shift in the socio-technical configurations (involving at least one new technology) is when a technological transition occurs.

Work on technological transitions draws on a number of fields including history of science, technology studies, and evolutionary economics. The focus of evolutionary economics is on economic change, but as a driver of this technological change has been considered in the literature. Joseph Schumpeter, in his classic Theory of Economic Development placed the emphasis on non-economic forces as the driver for growth. The human actor, the entrepreneur is seen as the cause of economic development which occurs as a cyclical process. Schumpeter proposed that radical innovations were the catalyst for Kondratiev cycles.

The Russian economist Kondratiev proposed that economic growth operated in boom and bust cycles of approximately 50 year periods. These cycles were characterised by periods of expansion, stagnation and recession. The period of expansion is associated with the introduction of a new technology, e.g. steam power or the microprocessor. At the time of publication, Kondratiev had considered that two cycles had occurred in the nineteenth century and third was beginning at the turn of the twentieth. Modern writers, such as Freeman and Perez outlined five cycles in the modern age:

Freeman and Perez proposed that each cycle consists of pervasive technologies, their production and economic structures that support them. Termed ‘techno-economic paradigms’, they suggest that the shift from one paradigm to another is the result of emergent new technologies.


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