Technology, its Uses and the Institutions of the Market Economy

The very term ‘technology’ implies usefulness of some kind, for someone, most obvious at the level of the artefact, an object by definition given form by humankind and whose creation necessarily implies some human purpose, some human use. Innovation in its widest sense is then some change in the way technology relates to its uses. The questions this formulation begs are of social context – useful how and to whom? This book begins by following the convention that ‘management studies’ should be concerned with organisations operating within the market economy and in recent periods of time, a convention that follows the incessant demands for the subject to be immediately relevant to management practice. There is nothing wrong with such a demand in itself, but it does risk that we take the organisation and performance of the market economy for granted and forget that this is only one way of organising society and technology. One of the standard economics texts defines a market economy as one in which ‘people specialise in productive activities and meet most of their material wants through exchanges voluntarily agreed upon by the contracting parties’ (Lipsey 1989: 786). This clarifies the nature of the economic motivation for technology development for those directly dependent on the market economy for their financial resources – to improve, or to add to the stock of market tradable goods and services. Yet it ignores the institutional arrangements that are essential to a functioning market economy.