Social context of innovation

THE THREE ESSAYS constituting this book are concerned with the invention and introduction of new technology in the early Industrial Revolution. As the allusion of the title to Bacon's technological utopia suggests, however, our attention will focus on the institutional context of technological innovation rather than the technology itself. We shall view technology as a social product and
shall not be over much interested in the priority claims of individual inventors, for the actual course of work that leads to the conception and use of new technology always involves a group that has worked for a considerable period of time on the basic idea before success is achieved. Thus the direction and speed of technological innovation is inevitably affected by the institutional setting, even if the con catenation of ideas in anyone domain proceeds by an inner logic of its own that, like the development of science, is not explained by sociological factors. We shall be offering a social-more precisely, an institutional-interpretation of events already well known to scholars and will therefore provide not so much the results of primary research as the restudy of readily available data. The purpose of these essays, then is to contribute to the aspect of the history of technology that views technology as a social product and examines the organizations in which innovators did their work, the structures of communities, trades, and workshops in which specific technological innovations were being invented and introduced. A prime example of this approach is Merritt Roe Smith's Harper's Ferry Armory and the New Technology,'