The Development Of Large Technical Systems

Renate Mayntz, Thomas Hughes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367306700
• eBook ISBN: 9781000315875
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book is an outcome of the conference on the development of large technical systems held in Berlin in 1986. It focuses on the comparative analysis of the development of large technical systems, particularly electrical power, railroad, air traffic, telephone, and other forms of telecommunication.

Chapter 1
Large Technical Systems: Concepts and Issues

Bernward Joerges

Most persons think that a state in order to be happy ought to be large; but even if they are right, they have no idea of what is a large and what a small state… To the size of states there is a limit, as there is to other things - plants, animals, implements; for none of these retain their natural power when they are too large or too small, but they either wholly lose their nature, or are spoiled.

(Aristotle, in Politics)

1 Introduction

Large technical systems (LTS) are huge implements, and the public debates of the past decade or so around what is vaguely called “Big Technology” echo the age-old concern with the proper limits to the size of things. Of course, metaphors like “small is beautiful” capture many people’s belief that happiness is not a matter of largeness, especially not with technical systems. But what is a large and what a small technical system? How do LTS differ from smaller techniques? Can we explain the growth and dynamics of such systems, and what does “large scale” explain? The chapter takes a broad view of conceptual issues in a social study of LTS. After shortly relating recent public controversies about “Big Technology” to the state of affairs in social science technology research, I will turn to a rare and exemplary historical approach to the study of large, integrated systems: Thomas P. Hughes’s model of the evolution of local, regional and national electricity generation systems. Hughes goes far beyond mere historical description or interpretation against broad societal change. He puts forward systematic concepts generalizable to other systems of similar scale and provides a rationale for delineating technological systems from other social systems, small or large. This sets the scene for an examination of basic terms and explanatory issues. I will point out, with reference to current social science conceptualizations of technology, that it is far from clear what the basic terms “technical” and “large technical” mean and that for this reason the resolution of certain explanatory issues in the study of LTS meets with difficulties. Finally, LTS are exposed as a distinct type of technical system, and some conjectures as to their peculiar dynamics are offered.

It is fair to say that not only LTS, but technical phenomena in general are a neglected object of study. Social scientists have discovered public debates about “Big Technology” in the 1970s, and some have contributed to the imagery, the rhetorics and the dramatization of such debates. In the course, the term has become a Kampfbegriff a battle term in the politics and “management of meaning” surrounding nuclear energy, computerization, genetic engineering and the like. In the public eye, Big Technology is high risk and high threat technology, carrying more uncertainty of consequences and more certain danger in terms of health, environmental damage, social identity, and finance - rarely in terms of political stability - than conventional production technologies. While public controversies are highly situated, and subject to marked cycles of attention, they provide the material for more comprehensive typifications and more reflexive interpretations of Big Technologies.¹ Still, the term warrants much scrutiny before it is exercised as an analytical concept.

A general question arises: Should Big Technology debates be understood as substitute debates for cultural conflict unrelated to specific LTS, or as precursor debates of more adequate sociological theorizing about them? It seems to me that public representations and rhetorics regarding BT are both: insufficient conceptually and substantially well directed. Consequently, social science research in this domaine should aim at two things. In the first place - drawing on Durkheim - turn from “images of things” to things themselves, in this case technical things.² Secondly, specify the notion of technical scale and explore the implications of large and growing scale in technical and other social phenomena. This may sound trivial, but in fact implies a detour in research strategy. At present, research focuses primarily on the debates surrounding large scale technologies, just scratching the surface of LTS, as it were. In contrast, aiming at a more thorough theoretical explication of LTS as a particular type of social systems could, in time, lead back to a better understanding of the public issues they produce.

2 Networks of power

Contrary to sociology and other disciplines bent towards systematic generalization, historical approaches have produced considerable evidence for the development of specific kinds of LTS. Railroads, for instance, have been studied extensively by economic historians. The history of the emergence of large corporate organizations is inextricably linked to the large technical structures they have built up, as evidenced by Chandler’s, Galambos’s and Salsbur’s work.³ To the extent that such studies raise theoretical issues beyond explanation in terms of general historical forces, they tend to relate to controversies in economics or organization theory, and by the same token concern less the “technical” aspects of LTS but rather organizational structures, management strategies, economies of scale, contribution to national income and economic growth. Technology tends to be a “given”.

Studies in the history of technology, by contrast, seem to have focussed very much on individual inventors and singular technical implements. It is one of Thomas P. Hughes’s contributions to have brought to historical studies of technology an explicit “systems” perspective, linking technical apparatus to engineering systems, and in turn these to manifold organizational, economic and political actors and structures. Only opening up the historian-of-technology’s perspective to ever larger “non-technical” contexts has allowed Hughes to embrace the complexity of evolving LTS such as, in the end, nationwide integrated electricity generation, but also other powerful networks.⁴

The starting point of Hughes’s historical reconstructions, both in the sense of his initial research interest and of the elementary building block in what would later become the edifice of LTS, are successful inventor-engineers. The world of inventive engineering is seen as a peculiar world, with characteristic motive forces, resources and problem solving styles.⁵ Hughes shows that the beginnings of LTS, and sometimes also their transfer, can be traced to a “type”, a brand of technologists he variously calls “inventor-entrepreneurs”, “independent professional inventors” or “system builders”. The term “system” refers here as much to the creation, fitting together and projecting into the worlds of business, local politics and consumers of a vast number of heterogeneous technical elements as to the non-engineering activities these key actors characteristically engage in. They are as “entrepreneural” in matters technological as in dealing with outside worlds.

One may of course quarrel with Hughes that this entails a “heroization” of one group of actors - ingenious technologists - not warranted by “the facts”. But his point here seems less a substantive finding than a conceptual decision. In order to understand why some attempts to install in society complex technical systems succeed while others fail, even given strong political will, business acuity, consumer demand and the like, the social nature of that subsystem he calls “technological” must be understood in the first place.

Having traced in rich detail the transition of many local to a few regional and in the end integrated electricity systems of national scope under widely varying and changing conditions in the US, France and Germany between 1880 and 1930, Hughes offers a generalized model of this process in distinguishing three main phases. The first phase goes from radical invention, culminating in new technological systems, through development, which especially involves providing technological systems with the economic and political embeddings needed for survival, to innovation - putting the system into efficient use. Dominant system builders in these stages are technical inventor-entrepreneurs. The next phase (which may occur at different times in the overall history of systems) is transfer. In order to elucidate the problems and solutions in the adaptation of systems to environments different from the ones a system has been developed in, Hughes applies the concept of “technological style”: the widely varying shape “one and the same” technology takes under different geographical, political, legal and historical conditions. The concept of style also points again to the “creative latitude” of system builders, both in engineering and in organization or finance. The third phase proceeds from growth through competition to consolidation. Rationalization, efficiency, and capital intensification become dominant system goals, engineer-entrepreneurs are no longer in the center of activities and give way to manager-entrepreneurs and finally finander-entrepreneurs.

Again one is tempted to argue that in later phases of restructuring “mature” LTS the relative importance of “technological” protagonists may not decrease to the extent suggested by this scheme. But there is little doubt that with the growth of local systems into LTS, not only do more and more diversified actors enter into the game, but also wholly new, themselves large-scale actors such as holdings, banks, governments.

Moving up with his subject matter to ever larger systems and systems of systems, Hughes turns his conceptual focus away, then, from the shaping of technologies by identifiable actors to a great many structural features and tensions of evolving electricity systems. I will mention three: “reverse salients”, “load factor”, and “momentum”. With the help of these concepts mainly, Hughes proposes to proceed from historical description to causal analysis, and these are the concepts that he holds useful for explaining the growth in scale of other technological systems (than electricity) as well.

As technical systems become larger, as other powerful interests and actor groups become involved in their expansion, and large organizations are built up for their gestation and drawn in from their environments, a number of phenomena and responses to them typically arise which Hughes subsumes under the term “reverse salients”. Reverse salients are technical or organizational anomalies resulting from uneven elaboration or evolution of a system: Progress on one front may produce backwardness elsewhere. Reverse salients require the identification and solution of underlying “critical problems” and they drive continued inventive activity and system growth. In each phase of system development, the reverse salients “elicit the emergence of a sequence of appropriate types of problem solvers, among them inventors, engineers, managers, financiers, and persons with experience in legislative and legal matters.”⁶ The fruitfulness of this concept lies then in its applicability to (and therefore differentiability of) dynamic processes in both technical and non-technical layers of LTS.

Hughes’s application of the concept to technical reverse salients leads him to distinguish two types of inventions and inventors: conservative and radical. Conservative inventions, or improvements occur when critical technical problems are identified and solved by the engineering expertise of the systems’s managing organizations. Radical inventions and innovations are solutions which such organizations fail to find and are instead produced by independent professional inventors. They may give rise to new, competing systems, or to the merging of separate, hitherto incompatible systems. Hughes shows that again and again it has needed “system inventors” who tended to establish themselves in independent organizations to come up with unlikely and effective solutions of reverse salients. Indeed, independent inventor-entrepreneurs could be shown to specialize in identifying critical problems and related “reverse salients” on broad technological fronts.

Load factor - the ratio of average system output to maximum output over a given period - is held, next to diversity of services and economic mix, to be a critical attribute of LTS which system builders and operators constantly try to improve. “Load factor is, probably, the major explanation for the growth of capital-intensive technological systems in capitalistic, interest-calculating societies.”⁷ The advantage of the concept seems to be that it refers straight to the technical core of systems, which is often masked, as Hughes says, by “concepts such as economies of scale, and motives such as drive for personal power and organizational aggrandizement.”⁸

Introducing the concept of momentum, or dynamic inertia, Hughes leaves for good the actor perspective with which he began. Momentum seems to be a purely structural concept for capturing the unique properties that distinguish LTS from other technical systems.⁹ The term aptly brings together several notions: that of giant mass, made up of innumerable technical and organizational components; of velocity, in the sense of expansiveness and rate of growth; and of goal-directedness. If reverse salients and load factor refer mainly to internal dynamics, momentum accounts for external effects. It is momentum what gives LTS the appearance of “autonomy” and deterministic power, and the concept is meant to prevent social science research on LTS to take these appearances at face value, as it were.

In his approach Hughes combines the broad frame of reference most social science disciplines would apply in studying LTS with the historian of technology’s regard and respect for the technical world which the former lack. He insists that technologists and technology make a difference. And he insists that technology is far more than complicated machinery, that technologists do far more than construct machines. Bringing together two quite different sets of data - about the world-views and doings of major system inventors and about the steady if not linear emergence of giant “networks of power” - a series of conceptualizations is developed which promise to be flexible enough to accomodate other sets of data derived from other micro and macro perspectives.

Three questions may profitably be asked. Is the model compatible with evidence about these same systems produced by different approaches framed, for example, in a tradition of political economy? Can it be generalized to the generation of other LTS, such as transport systems or telecommunication systems or organ transplant systems? And can it be generalized to yet later stages in the expansion, up-scaling or merging of LTS, for instance transitions to nuclear-based electricity or to satellite-based telecommunications, or to the linking of LTS into transnational systems, or the integration of separate communication networks through ISDN and the like?

As to the first point, Hughes obviously puts different questions to his material than, for instance, Perrow¹⁰ who is interested in the way economic power structures determine technological choice. Theories are selective, and Hughes consistently applies the heuristic of tracing relationships, for example with capital, only to a point where mutual effects between capitalistic dealings and the generative mechanisms of technological systems can no longer be demonstrated in his data. But little in his model prevents linkage with economic or political models, provided these in turn conceptualize technological systems and scale as distinct phenomena.

Generalizing, secondly, to other LTS, one must keep in mind that Hughes’s main body of empirical data comes from electricity in three countries. Kaijser, for instance, comparing Swedish teleg...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Foreword
• 1. Large Technical Systems: Concepts and Issues
• 2. The Emergence of an Early Large-Scale Technical System: The American Railroad Network
• 3. The Evolution of the Technical System of Railways in France from 1832 to 1937
• 4. The Development of the German Railroad System
• 5. Looking for the Boundaries of Technological Determinism: A Brief History of the U.S. Telephone System
• 6. The Telephone in France 1879–1979: National Characteristics and International Influences
• 7. The Politics of Growth: The German Telephone System
• 8. The United States Air Traffic System: Increasing Reliability in the Midst of Raped Growth
• 9. The French Electrical Power System: An Inter-Country Comparison
• 10. The Dynamics of System Development in a Comparative Perspective: Interactive Videotex in Germany, France and Britain
• Contributors