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Antropologia Del Consumo
Antropologia Del Consumo
doi:10.1177/0162243909345834
Allen W. Batteau1
Abstract
Technological gaps in large-scale systems, whether ancient empires or the
modern world system, are millenia old and are usually viewed in terms of
variable rates of innovation and diffusion. When overlaid with large-scale,
tightly coupled systems, such as air transport, pharmaceutical regimes,
power grids, industrial supply chains, or food supply networks, these mis-
matches frequently have adverse consequences for the performance of the
system. This article suggests that these gaps are a consequence of the net-
work topologies that produce innovation, and more importantly that the
dynamics of these networks progressively amplify the gaps. The dark side
of technological acceleration (the geometric growth in technological per-
formance) in core regions is an expanding gap between core and periphery,
creating a unique class of hazards outside the core.
Keywords
technological gaps, technological acceleration, safety, world systems theory
1
Department of Anthropology, Institute for Information Technology and Culture, Wayne
State University, Detroit, Michigan.
Corresponding Author:
Allen W. Batteau, Department of Anthropology, Institute for Information Technology and
Culture, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI 48202. E-mail: a.batteau@wayne.edu
2 Science, Technology, & Human Values 000(00)
the mistake, and the first officer’s loss of face momentarily paralyzed him.
On the Cockpit Voice Recorder transcript, one sees the First Officer fight-
ing with the airplane, and the Captain fighting with the First Officer. The
airplane stalled and crashed to the ground, killing 264 of the 271 crew and
passengers on board (Ministry of Transport 1995).
Although this account may appear to be essentializing Chinese culture,
the relationship between culturally conditioned responses and technological
interfaces is a serious concern. Jing Hung Sying has analyzed the relation-
ship between a ‘‘guanxi gradient’’—the varying emphasis placed in differ-
ent settings between personal ties and formal procedures—and found a
strong correlation with flight safety (Jing and Chang 2006). Such cross-
cultural comparisons, however, must be handled with care, inasmuch as
they embrace mismatches between western-derived social science concepts
and a variety of local conditions. The issues of cultural contexts of advanced
technologies cannot be resolved from the perspective of any single culture.
Rather, they should be approached through cross-cultural dialogues.
Human-machine interfaces are increasingly a challenge as modern airli-
ners become increasingly, technologically complex. A simple aircraft such
as the DC-3, with manual controls (as contrasted to fly-by-wire), few auto-
mated alarms, and analog navigational displays demand few skills beyond
basic airmanship. As more systems, alarms, and control modes are added,
more skills are required, a fact that is sometimes discovered only after a
fatal crash. When China Northern 483 was on final approach into Urumqi
in November 13, 1993, it was flying too low, and the Ground Proximity
Warning System sounded an alarm: ‘‘Whoop! Whoop! Terrain! Terrain!
Pull up! Pull up!’’ Fifteen seconds later, the MD-82 crashed into the ground.
The final words on the Cockpit Voice Recorder were, ‘‘Sh? shèn mé yé sı̀
‘pull up’’’? [What does ‘‘pull up’’ mean?] (Feldman 1998).1
Another safety system that makes even more subtle linguistic assump-
tions is the Terminal Collision Avoidance System (TCAS). Two airliners
equipped with this system (required of all airliners flying in Europe and
North America) watch out, so to speak, for each other, and when their flight
paths are converging (meaning an impending midair collision), they nego-
tiate and communicate a ‘‘resolution advisory’’ with each other. One air-
craft will be instructed by the TCAS to climb, and the other to descend,
thus averting a collision. Air traffic controllers likewise in congested air-
space are on the lookout for impending midair collisions. On July 21,
2002, over Lake Constanz, a DHL Boeing 757 and a Bashkirian Airlines
Tupolev 154 were on converging flight paths. The TCAS instructed the
Russian flight to ascend and the German flight to descend. The ground
Batteau 5
The net result of these topologies and distributions is that within a scale-free
network, opportunities for developing New Things are concentrated in the
denser regions, and the network density creates an accelerating pace of
innovation. Stated simply, the positive feedback that creates technological
acceleration (New Things compounding New Things) is more likely in
regions where the circuits are smaller (i.e., denser connections among nodes
result in fewer steps required to close a loop).
The connection density at the core of this scale-free network creates an
autocatalytic set (Kauffman 1993) in which artifacts, problems, and groups
are exploring and exploiting new assemblages, new dilemmas, and new
institutional configurations. The ferment in Detroit in the early twentieth
century around a growing automotive industry derived from a confluence
of predecessor industries, large numbers of skilled craftsmen, raw material
advantages, and the urban challenges of a growing nation of immigrants.
Some of the ‘‘solutions’’ to these problems actually reinforced the problem
(more factories brought in more immigrants which led to more problems in
urban planning which created a need for more transport); this created an
explosive dynamic that led to rapid growth in a new industry. Some of the
configurations or initial conditions accepted at that time (e.g., cultural gaps
between labor and management) set patterns that continue even today. Like-
wise, an early alliance between aviators and the military dating back to the
earliest years of experimentation laid the groundwork for an aerospace
industry that is at the core of the military industrial complex. This institu-
tional complex, enabled by the sort of public revenues that are available
only within wealthy nations, is very fecund of new problems (cramming
more airplanes into crowded skies, and more passengers into larger
Batteau 9
Percentage adoption
Time
Percentage adoption
Distance
the core. The well-known logistic curve of adoption for specific technolo-
gies (figure 1) is, by the same dynamics that create it, reversed when one
considers levels of adoption as a function of network distance from the
locus of innovation (figure 2):
‘‘Distance,’’ I must make clear, refers to social and institutional distance
and linkages, a traversing of networked nodes, rather than to geography
(although geography has an influence here). The more links in a network
that an innovation must travel, the less likely its adoption at any point in
time, and the less likely the social environment that promotes adoption.
To state this figuratively, just as diffusion over time is a self-reinforcing
process once a critical inflection point is reached and social pressures
promote adoption (Rogers 1995, 320), diffusion over distance is an ‘‘other-
cancelling’’ process beyond a critical point, which we might call a ‘‘deflec-
tion point,’’ beyond which preexisting technological and institutional
arrangements have not yet succumbed to the innovation, and (perhaps only
temporarily) are able to mount an effective resistance, hence deflecting the
innovation. Well-known (if apocryphal) examples of ‘‘resistance to innova-
tion’’ include factory managers who keep a paper schedule in their hip
pocket, because they do not trust the automated production scheduling sys-
tem, or farmers who ‘‘stubbornly cling’’ to ‘‘old fashioned methods.’’ Any-
one who has attempted to introduce a new idea or method into an aging
Batteau 11
are emerging (Mumbai for software, Sao Paulo for aircraft, or Dongfeng,
China’s ‘‘space city’’ for rocketry), demonstrates that this is a dynamic and
not a deterministic process. The dense coordination behind these achieve-
ments rests on multiple political, geographic, and cultural factors that could
be studied profitably by other regions seeking to achieve or maintain tech-
nological leadership.
In sum, the widening gaps in technological capability between cores and
peripheries, although brought into dramatic relief by the occasional airliner
crash, more typically result in stable configurations in which peripheral
regions play new, subordinate roles, supplying those functions (notably
maintenance) that are labor-intensive, and accepting higher rates of hazard
in return. Various schemes of technology transfer, development, microcre-
dit, and local self-sufficiency may mitigate some of the effects of core
development. National efforts to promote a specific industry, such as the
software industry in Mumbai, can create new centers of innovation even
in the Third World. The unrelenting advance of technological capabilities,
whether in microdevices or innovative materials or medical procedures or
industrial automation or pharmaceutical regimes or nanotechnologies, will
continue to widen the gaps between the centers that produce them and far
fringes to which they are exported.
Peoples Republic of Korea will follow suit. Although Iran and Pakistan
might be considered semiperiphery, North Korea is clearly the periphery
of the periphery. In Pakistan and Iran, the formula is roughly equivalent:
a unique source of wealth, plus Western-educated scientists, plus despotic
government, plus a singular focus, add up to one technological success.
North Korea substituted extreme repression for wealth, and Moscow Uni-
versity for Oxbridge, but otherwise mirrored the singularity of Iran’s and
Pakistan’s achievements. In none of these cases does the singularity even
approach an educational-technological-industrial complex capable of sus-
tained generation of invention and innovation.
These singularities also highlight the role of the least portable, most
complex, and most diffusion-resistant elements of a technological complex
to wit academic institutions and government laboratories. The core of the
core, in terms of generating technologies that bestride the narrow world, are
the complexes of universities, government (including military) laboratories,
and their allied corporations that make technological leadership their busi-
ness. These institutional complexes are fixed in place, both by virtue of the
greater wealth of cores (whether in Europe or Asia, for which petroleum
revenues might substitute) and the unique cultural and institutional charac-
teristics of the core regions.
One also observes that peripheries are more creative than cores. In the
history of aviation, two bicycle mechanics from the provinces succeeded
where Dr. Samuel Langley, the Director of the Smithsonian Institution,
failed. A farmer, Cyrus McCormick, along with a Negro blacksmith, Jo
Anderson, in a semiperipheral region, the antebellum American South,
invented a reaper that transformed agriculture around the world. For a bril-
liant invention originating on the periphery to become a durable technology,
however, requires adoption by core institutions, whether the Army Signal
Corps (for the airplane) or American Telephone and Telegraph (for the
transistor).
The ebb and flow of artifacts, influence, and ideas around the world,
along with the rise and decline of industrial cores, make it clear that tech-
nological peripheralization is not a unidirectional affair. A reverse flow of
technology is illustrated by the efforts of automakers in the United States to
implement the ‘‘Toyota Production System’’ (TPS), more typically known
and adapted as ‘‘Lean Manufacturing’’ (LM). In its original (core) context,
the TPS was a complete ensemble of work practices, work relationships,
and management methods oriented toward the elimination of waste and the
management of complexity. The TPS evolved in a context of considerable
cultural similarities within companies, minimal social distances between
16 Science, Technology, & Human Values 000(00)
4. Conclusion
In sum, the perspective of technological peripheralization supplies an alter-
native to both melioristic views of technological ‘‘progress’’ and utilitarian
understandings of ‘‘technology.’’ Technology is seen here not simply as
tools or useful artifacts, but as made up of stable objects on which are
inscribed arrays of social values, social institutions, social problems, polit-
ical motivations, and social identities. The greater the technological devel-
opment (in terms of complexity and scope), the greater the requirement for
institutional investment in training, regulation, planning, support, and
infrastructure.
This perspective of technological peripheralization has several implica-
tions for conventional views of technological ‘‘progress,’’ only three of
which can be touched on here. One implication is that modern technologies,
which promise so much at the core, may actually deliver peril at the periph-
ery. The example of air transport in Nigeria is illustration of this. This
increased hazard may be offset by an increase in productivity or some other
positive value. More typically, the advantages and costs of the technology
are differentially allocated and socially accounted within different regions
of the network and within different stages of the technology’s life cycle.
The ‘‘ship breakers’’ in Gujarat, vividly described by Langewiesche
(2004, 197ff.), who disassemble rusting freighters and tankers, in the pro-
cess ingesting toxic materials and sustaining predictable injuries, are at the
end of the road of a manufacturing and transportation system that sustains
(but only for others) the inexpensive abundance of a global economy.
18 Science, Technology, & Human Values 000(00)
Notes
1. This is a back-translation; the available published reports are in English.
2. I gratefully acknowledge the contribution of my students Daniel Davis and
Elizabeth Nanas to this section.
Author’s Note
Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this material
are mine, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Founda-
tion (NSF). I would also like to express my appreciation to participants in a work-
shop on Technological Peripheries, held at Universidad Iberoamericana on March
12-14, 2004: Mehdi Alaoui, Carmen Bueno, Ricardo Dominguez, John Forje, Julia
Gluesing, Jing Hung-Sying, Barbara Kanki, Mykola Kulyk, Saad Laraqui, Caroline
Moricot, Olugbenga Mejabi, Ashleigh Merritt, Servando Ortoll, Carolyn Psenka,
David Robertson, Galina Suslova, Thomas Wang, and Lisa Whittaker, and
Batteau 19
particularly to Capt. Alejandro Perez Chavez for his extraordinary efforts in support
of the workshop. The influence of Alain Fras and Charles Perrow in conceptualizing
the workshop is gratefully acknowledged, as is the timely assistance of Carolyn
Psenka in the revision of this manuscript. Additional support for the workshop
on Technological Peripheries was provided by el Consejo Nacional Ciencia y
Tecnologı́a, as well as by Aeromexico Airlines. The comments of the anonymous
reviewers for Science, Technology, and Human Values have made a substantial con-
tribution to the improvement of an earlier draft of this article.
Funding
Research for this article was supported in part by a grant from the National Science
Foundation, Grant #0340902. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommenda-
tions expressed in this material are the author’s, and do not necessarily reflect the
views of the National Science Foundation (NSF).
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Bio
Allen W. Batteau is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Wayne State Uni-
versity and the Director of the university’s Institute for Information Technology and
Culture. His books include The Invention of Appalachia (University of Arizona
Press, 1980), and Technology and Culture (Waveland Press, 2010).