Corporate Research Laboratories and the History of Innovation

David M. Pithan, David Pithan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000410303
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

With the beginning of the twentieth century, American corporations in the chemical and electrical industries began establishing industrial research laboratories. Some went on to become world-famous not only for their scientific and technological breakthroughs but also for the new union of science and industry they represented. Innovative ideas do not simply appear out of the blue and spread on their own merit. Rather, the laboratory's diffusion takes place in a cultural context that goes beyond corporate capital and technological change.

Using discourse analysis as a method to comprehensively capture the organizational field of the early American R&D laboratories from 1870 to 1930, this book uncovers the collective meanings associated with the industrial laboratory. Meanings such as what and where a laboratory is supposed to be, who the scientist is, and what it means to practice science provided cultural resources that made the transfer of the laboratory from academic science into an industrial setting possible by rendering such meanings understandable and operable to big business and organizational entrepreneurs fighting for hegemony in a rapidly evolving market. It analyzes not only the corporations that established laboratories in the United States but also their contexts – economic, political, and especially scientific – showing how "the industrial laboratory" was transformed from an organizational novelty into an expected institution in less than two decades.

This book will be of interest to researchers, academics, historians, and students in the fields of organizational change, discourse studies, the management of technology and innovation, as well as business and management history.

1 Introduction

This is a book about the history of ideas, and about one idea in particular: setting up a laboratory within the confines of a business enterprise, bringing the material locus of science into a world that seems to be pursuing entirely different goals, subject to an alien logic. When untangling the complex web of traces that ideas leave when they travel, one will quickly notice that the history of the industrial laboratory is also a history of science, and history not only of its contents, practitioners, and institutions but also of the many meanings associated with the concept of science over the centuries. These meanings transformed what practicing science – and practicing science in industry – signified at different times, and in different contexts. While the industrial laboratory may be taken for granted today, conjuring images of eponymous triumphs, chemists clad in white coats, or where superheroes and supervillains are made in our fiction, understanding it as a specific materialization of the practice of science clearly highlights its contingent nature. But this is not a book about laboratory lives and the very nature of the scientific enterprise. Instead, it is about how the laboratory came to be so pervasive and taken for granted. In this way, the third kind of history is revealed, that of organizations. Modern society is increasingly characterized as pervaded by organizations, so it is only fitting to scrutinize one of those organizational entities often seen as a prime example of modern corporations and their complex interrelations with each other – and their environments – from a sociological perspective on organizations.

Of course, numerous scholars have already covered the histories of the early R&D laboratories in various levels of detail. Several waves of scholarly interest have swept over corporate archives, ranging from early – rather celebratory – histories, to the organizational histories of the 1980s, focusing on the most prolific and illustrious laboratories. Each wave reframed these labs, uncovering new aspects of laboratories in industry, the inner workings of science, and big corporations. This is why so much is known about some of the early labs, such as their specific triumphs and failures, and their structural shifts and transformations. But, as Lucier notes, interest in corporate labs has recently ceased: “Perhaps it was a sense that there was nothing left of theoretical interest to say about industrial research …, which along with other institutional histories have looked rather dull and outdated since the cultural turn in history” (Lucier 2016, 25). So, since so much appears to be said already about this topic, what exactly warrants another look at this kind of laboratory?

The perspective this book takes is effectively informed by an interest in the diffusion of innovations, combined with a sociological hunch: that in order to spread successfully, new ideas need to be legitimated in some way. Legitimacy, here, means appearing congruent – fitting and natural – with the existing order. Of course, ideas do not travel on their own, and similarly, they need actors championing their acceptance. Hence, diffusing ideas are subject to a multitude of transformations and translations that fundamentally change both their form and content in order to fit new environments and organizational contexts. It is precisely this intersection within which the main analytical thrust of this study lies: how new ideas are made to fit – through individual acts of translation – to greater collective layers of meaning, thereby providing legitimacy, which I call discourse. These discourses construct social reality in the first place: its categories, actors, and possibilities for the agency. Thus, to understand how scientific laboratories found a place in industrial corporations, it first needs to be known what the laboratory, science, and the scientist meant to organizational actors of the time. How these concepts were translated – discursively re-constructed – in order to fit different local contexts and grander discursive shifts and transformations is at the heart of this successful process of diffusion.

In this unique convergence of the history of ideas, science, and the sociology of organizations, the constructive effects of language on organizational reality are key to the way that this new idea was naturalized and made salient. Foregoing grand explanations that see the industrial laboratory as an inevitable organizational outcome of modernization and the general rationalization of economic life, the goal here is to combine detailed history with contextual factors in order to paint a more complete picture: “Because laboratories are so integrally a part of their times and places, lab history is of necessity also social history” (Kohler 2008, 765). A theoretical framework combining organizational theory with discursive methods is used, working toward a cultural explanation of how laboratories in industry came to be institutionalized. Hence, going beyond existing studies on corporate R&D that center around organizational, technical, or legal aspects, my study will include the ideational environment of chemical corporations and how its characteristics conditioned organizational agency. In order to gain access to historical scholarship on the topic, as well as texts that were later used in the discourse analysis, I spent four months at the Chemical Heritage Foundation in Philadelphia, PA, in the fall of 2016. During this time, I also visited the Du Pont archives at the Hagley Museum and Library in Wilmington, DE, as well as the Kodak archives at the University of Rochester and the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, NY. These research visits proved instrumental in filling some holes in the histories of the “research pioneers”, as well as adequately mapping the field’s discourses.

This book will focus on industrial research laboratories in the United States only, and specifically in the US chemical industries. In the beginning, the hypothesis arose that the adoption of R&D in America was the result of the highly successful German template of laboratories in the chemical industries. But soon after it was revealed that American firms followed their own paths in this venture, nullifying explanations based on visibility and mimesis. A comparative study surely would have been interesting, but the exploratory approach and hybrid method employed here set limitations. Mapping two organizational fields’ discourses with wildly different histories would have been excessive and may have diluted the analytical clarity of either analysis. Consequently, the focus was shifted toward the unique economical, political, and cultural situation in the United States.

Anyone familiar with previous scholarship on industrial research laboratories and the history of American science will know how their stories are often informed by perspectives interested in the types of science done within the laboratories. These types may be called pure or applied science, or basic and applied research, among many other descriptors. Discussions found within such approaches are often concerned with the relationships between these types, or how pure science could be practiced in impure places, such as anywhere outside of academia. Using an analytical perspective here that steers clear of any such preconceived notions was a conscious, purposeful decision. Any assumptions regarding the types of science, the motives of its practitioners, and their “proper” locations presuppose science in fixed, distorted ways that would run counter to a framework and epistemology that puts the constructive effects of language front and center. In addition, focusing on an ontology of science and its related ideologies would run the risk of obscuring what actually happened, as Gieryn put it very succinctly: “The sociological question is not whether science is really pure or impure or both, but rather how its borders and territories are flexibly and discursively mapped out in pursuit of some observed or inferred ambition – and with what consequences, and for whom?” (Gieryn 1999, 23). Hence, when mapping out the pathways, the laboratory took from organizational novelty to institution, no presumptions about any types of science involved shall be made; instead, the actors of the time who were involved in its spread shall be heard.

Lastly, a note on the designations used in this book. In the following, I will variously speak of laboratories, industrial research laboratories, R&D labs, and other labels. As the history of organized research in industry in America laid out below will illustrate, a plethora of terms existed for the organizational unit, and categories such as “research” and “development” were in no ways fixed (or even in existence) at the beginning of the twentieth century. Different names for these laboratories will thus only be used for stylistic reasons unless otherwise noted, and in no way to make assumptions about what kind of work was done there. In the end, what this book is interested in is how modern corporations came to have a distinct unit called “research laboratory”, no matter its place in the organizational structure or what specifically happened within its laboratory walls.

2 Theory

Diffusion of Innovations

In the following, I develop a theoretical framework for analyzing the emergence and spread of the industrial research laboratory, which brings together various perspectives on innovations and organizations from different strands of sociology. These perspectives serve not only to put the diffusion of ideas into a conceptual model but also to provide a methodical starting point for the discourse analysis. Of course, many other framings for understanding R&D laboratories could have been chosen, but combining diffusion with organizational theory adds a new angle to both the story of the industrial laboratory and to the diffusion of innovations in organizational fields by focusing on the role that an innovation’s fit within the surrounding environment plays. To understand how new ideas, practices, or things spread successfully, one needs to account for cultural variables that serve as anchoring points for traveling ideas. Building a theoretical framework for such an analysis will be undertaken in three steps: First, I examine historical and conceptual developments in the literature of diffusion of innovations, with a particular focus on cultural variables in social systems in order to better understand either how innovations fit or are made to fit. Second, since the history of the R&D laboratory is about organizations, I use elements from organizational institutionalism to expand the toolkit of diffusion studies, especially by using the organizational field concept that improves our understanding of what conditions organizational agency within organizational fields. Third, the concept of discourse – and the method of discourse analysis – will be introduced as a way to analyze the layers of meaning in a given field. After this theoretical triple jump, the research program that follows the theoretical framework is outlined.

What a Diffusion Perspective Can Add

What do the theoretical perspective and methodical toolkit of diffusion studies add to the understanding of the emergence of the industrial research laboratory – and, vice versa, how can this example contribute to the already extensive body of literature on diffusion? As it turns out, the curious case of the birth of the organizational entity that is known today as the Research and Development Laboratory (or R&D Lab, for short) has already attracted considerable scholarly attention, having been addressed from a variety of angles. Historians of science and technology (Reich 1980; Wise 1985; Hounshell & Smith 1988) explored the singular histories of the pioneer laboratories, their eponymous directors, their scientific triumphs, and the external and internal resistances – ranging from a rapidly changing legal and economic environment to the challenges of doing “scientific research” in an industrial setting – that needed to be overcome in order to shape a space for science in the modern corporation. In contrast, economic sociologists (Chandler 1977, 1990b; Fligstein 1990) put the R&D Laboratory in the context of the larger shifts of corporations’ structures and managerial logic happening at the time, linking environmental pressures to the internal demands of the giant corporations that ultimately brought about an organizational structure that included a laboratory – structure following strategy, an expression of managerial ideologies. Furthermore, innovation economists (Mowery 1981; Lamoreaux & Sokoloff 1999) added to our understanding by including quantitative indicators in a framework of transactional costs and (technological) markets, underlining the roles played by factors such as sector, firm size, and capital in the establishment of laboratories. Theoretical perspectives on corporate research laboratories are disassembled and their various explanatory parts scrutinized, in a history of the early US R&D laboratories sketched later (Chapter 3).

Clearly, previous scholarship can answer the question “What happened?”: The Industrial Research Laboratory was created within large American corporations around 1900, primarily in the chemical and electrical industries. The laboratory as an organizational entity then spread through these and adjacent industries, such as the pharmaceutical industry (Liebenau 1985; Furman & MacGarvie 2007). This process can certainly be regarded as an account of organizational change, yet change that was not triggered by new legislation demanding the establishment of laboratory facilities, but rather by a unique combination of factors making the spread of this organizational entity through a population of organizations possible. As such, the emergence and spread of the industrial research laboratory can be framed as a process of diffusion – diffusion being “the most general and abstract term we have for this sort of process, embracing contagion, mimicry, social learning, organized dissemination, and other family members” (Strang & Soule 1998, 266). In particular, this framing adds the analytical categories developed over decades of diffusion research to describe the emergence and spread of R&D laboratories not as heroic entrepreneurs enacting change from within organizations, as the historic accounts would suggest, or as field-level conditions forcing an inevitable outcome. Instead, the toolbox to be utilized here (cf. Rogers 2003, also Mahajan & Peterson 1985; Palloni 2001; Wejnert 2002) offers ways of accounting for individual action within a larger environment that, when viewed a posteriori, takes the shape of a cascading mechanism, of something spreading throughout a social system.

Traditionally, diffusion studies include four elements in their analytical framework: an innovation that spreads via channels of communication, over time, throughout a social system (Rogers 2003, 1ff). The element of time is defined by the empirical reality of the spread of R&D, which happened in the first three decades of the twentieth century. The specific channels of communication themselves are of lesser interest to this study: First, they are subordinated to a social structure that will be scrutinized in detail – patterns of communication now a by-product of patterns of interaction. Second, when analyzing texts and their respective speakers methodically, channels of communication are included in the three-dimensional approach to discourse utilized here. Some definitional trouble starts when accounting for the specific item that diffuses. In Roger’s authoritative review of diffusion research (2003) that item is termed an innovation – indeed a term usually occurring in conjunction with diffusion: “The home territory of diffusion is the innovation” (Strang & Soule 1998, 267). Innovation is defined as “an idea, practice, or object that is perceived as new by an individual or other unit of adoption” (Rogers 2003, 12). Particular emphasis is laid on the perception of novelty, regardless of “objective” newness. The notion of innovation encompasses a variety of items, such as ideas or practices as noted previously, also material things such as technologies (for an introduction, see Fagerberg 2005).

Of course, specifically when dealing with a historically diffuse concept such as “innovation”, a word of caution is in order. The corporate R&D laboratory can be deemed an innovation only with the benefit of hindsight – by virtue of analyzing its spread more than a hundred years later. Today, it is known that the laboratory became an institutionalized part of the modern corporation. Yet terming the R&D lab an innovation from the outset may occlude the reasons for its successful diffusion on a conceptual level by assuming inherent qualities that assured its diffusion. Furthermore, one runs the risk of falling prey to a pro-innovation bias that has plagued the scholarship of innovation: since only those ideas, practices, or things that “make it” can be analyzed, any hypothetical sample of things that diffuse is heavily skewed toward successful innovations. Accounts of failed diffusion – and failed innovations – are few and far between (cf. Rogers 2003, 1–5, 8–11; Jonsson 2009; Croidieu & Monin 2009), circumventing the goal of thoroughly understanding the diffusion of an innovation as an instance of technical and social change that goes beyond the attributes of the innovation. Thus, by terming the spread of corporate research an innovation, it shall by no means be assumed that the actors involved in its creation and diffusion perceived it as such. As historical cases show, there was an abundance of testing and control laboratories long before the first research laboratory was established. Additionally, one may also ask what exactly was diffusing: the physical object “laboratory”, the floor plans of laboratories, the practice of doing research within a corporation, or an even more hazy idea of the benefits of science and research – with the diffusion of immaterial practices or ideas being heavily dependent upon their material means of travel, the profile their diffusion takes often depending on who arrives first, “the merchant or the missionary” (Katz 1999, 151; cf. Czarniawska & Joerges 1996, 36; Rogers 2003, 13f). This issue is further complicated when asking whether it was in fact the same practice spreading through the field of interest, with th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Theory
• 3 The Innovation: Industrial Research Laboratory
• 4 The Organizational Field: US Chemistry, 1870–1930
• 5 Capturing the Discourse about Industrial Research in US Chemistry, 1870–1930
• 6 Analyzing the Discourse
• 7 Discussion and Conclusions
• References
• Index