Technological Trajectories and the Human Environment (1997) / Chapter Skim
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Time for a Change: On the Patterns of Diffusion of Innovation
Time for a Change: On the Patterns of Diffusion of Innovation
Pages 14-32
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From page 14... ...
The innovation origin, Burgundy, was home to the four major mother houses and hosted the highest spatial concentration of settlements. From there, daughter houses were founded ("regional subinnovation centers," in the terminology of spatial diffusion)
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From page 15... ...
Some of the additions to the Cistercian rule were not genuine new settlements but "takeovers." For example, the existing Benedictine monastery of Savigny, with all its daughter houses, submitted to the rule of the Clairvaux Cistercians in l 147 and in turn became the mother house of all Cistercian settlements in the British Isles. Despite distance and differentiation, all the monasteries communicated closely.
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From page 16... ...
They are the originating and selection mechanisms of particular artifacts (or combinations thereof) and set the rate at which they become incorporated into a given socioeconomic setting.
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From page 17... ...
To appreciate the uncertainty in the early phases of technology development, let us look at a historical problem of technological hazard and environmental pollution from steam railways. In the early days of railroad expansion in the United States, sparks in the smoke from wood-burning steam locomotives caused a considerable fire hazard to both human settlements and forests (Basalla, 1988~.
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From page 18... ...
Nevertheless, the diversity and complex interactions at the micro level appear often to lead to smooth, orderly behavior at the macro level, whether of Cistercians and Luddites, or, as we shall see, canals and passenger cars. Some theorists argue that orderly macroeconomic evolution requires such microeconomic diversity, which at first glance might instead seem likely to dissipate order (see Dosi et al., 1986; Silverberg, 1991; and Silverberg et al., 1988~.
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From page 19... ...
In the simplest case, an idea, practice, or artifact represents so radical a departure from existing solutions that it largely creates its own market niche. In practice, preexisting means for meeting basic social functions, such as transport and communication, are always present; nothing is truly new or free of competitors.
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From page 20... ...
Not surprisingly, the duration of the growth of railway and surfaced road networks is somewhat slower, /\t's of fiftyfive and sixty-four years, respectively. Interestingly, we see the three major historic transport infrastructures spaced rhythmically apart in their development by a half century or so.
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From page 21... ...
For example, after reaching its maximum size, the canal network declined rapidly because of vicious competition from railways. Looking at relative "market shares" of competing alternatives rather than at absolute volumes makes the interaction visible.
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co 0.30 cn a) 0.10 ~ FIGURE 6 Diffusion of cars with first emission controls and catalytic converters in the United States, in fractional shares of total car fleet.
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From page 23... ...
Having started in 1930, the United Kingdom now parks about four hundred cars per thousand people, while Japan parks about three hundred per thousand, having started the adoption process only in the l950s. As Figure 8 suggests, empirical data from numerous countries show that later adopters manifest both an accelerated diffusion rate (shorter diffusion time)
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From page 24... ...
In the United States, the early innovation centers for railways on the East Coast and around the Great Lakes achieved by far the greatest spatial density of networks. Railway construction reached the West Coast some fifty years after the East Coast, and network densities remained significantly lower.
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From page 25... ...
The growth of the industry was based on a new production organization (Fordist mass production combined with Taylorist scientific management principles) , yielding significant real-term cost reductions that made the car affordable to more social strata, thus changing settlement patterns, consumption habits of the population, and leisure activities.
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From page 26... ...
The mean value ranged between forty and sixty years, with a standard deviation of about equal size (Figure 9~. The largest number of diffusion processes in our samples have characteristic durations, /\t's, of between fifteen and thirty years.7 If our diffusion studies had documented more of the seemingly numerous short-term phenomena such as clothing fashions, the profile of the histogram in Figure 9 would likely approach a "rank-size" or Zipf distribution in which the frequency of diffusion rates would be highest for fast processes and decline as the rates became slower.8 The good news for the human environment from our analysis is that the majority of artifacts and practices can be replaced within a few decades.
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From page 27... ...
In any case, the analyses show pronounced discontinuities and also a decline in the diffusion rate in the decades after 1970, indicating an increase in saturation phenomena in the United States since then. The fluctuations and discontinuities in the long-term rate of sociotechnical change result from the complex dynamics of the discontinuous rates at which individual innovations appear and from the different rates of absorption of these innovations in the socioeconomic system.
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From page 28... ...
Major economic expansion periods appear driven by the widespread diffusion of a host of interrelated innovations a technology cluster leading to new products, markets, industries, and infrastructures. These diffusion processes are sustained by, in fact are contingent on, mediating social and organizational diffusion processes.
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From page 29... ...
Instead, a typical S-shaped temporal pattern seems to be the rule. This basic pattern appears invariant, although the regularity and timing of diffusion processes vary greatly.
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From page 30... ...
Three parameters control the shape of the sigmoidal growth trajectory: b controls the steepness (or diffusion rate) of the model; k denotes the asymptotic limit (or saturation level)
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From page 31... ...
suggested a doubling time of twenty to thirty years for the technological component of economic growth, an estimate that our data sample corroborates.
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From page 32... ...
Technological Forecasting and Social Change 29:309-340. Nakidenovic, N
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