Economics,innovation and history: Perspectives in honour of Nick von Tunzelmann

This introductory article raises a methodological challenge for scholars of technical change and innovation, on the one hand, and historians of technical change, on the other. We ask to what extent have economists and historians of technical change engaged in cross-fertilisation with regards to methods and the identification of relevant questions. We then provide an overview on the use and methods of history within the field of Economics of Technical Change and Innovation Studies (ETIS), which is traditionally considered as ‘history-friendly’. We locate the work and intellectual heritage of Nick von Tunzelmann among that of a small group of scholars in which history and economics of technical change have co-habited happily. We reflect on the variety of historical methods proposed by the contributors to this special issue, who were invited to respond to the above methodological challenge. Finally, we propose a way ahead in terms of the identification of relevant questions and pertinent methodological approaches.     

参与实验——STS如何反思公众参与科学

近年来,参与实验作为STS中新出现的研究方法受到了广泛的关注。在方法层面,参与实验吸收了行动者-网络理论(ANT)等研究成果对实践的关注,挑战了现有公众参与科学模式囿于议程、代表权、共识等概念的困境,将公众参与科学引向对日常活动中物质实践的定制和分析。在理论层面,参与实验区分了ANT、存在论政治学等“经验化”存在论方案,试图在STS中建立一种“实验化”的存在论方案。“实验化”研究突破了“经验化”研究的方法论框架,但其存在论地位仍显模糊。本研究讨论了德勒兹与拉图尔对伦理问题的不同思考,指出了两者在伦理学上不同的存在论立场可以成为解释“实验化”和“经验化”之间对立根源的思想线索。在此思想线索的基础上,诉诸“遭遇中的生成”将为“实验化”存在论方案提供一条区分于“经验化”的立足之途,从而为在“公众参与科学”中促发更多具备可行性的实践方案提供一种可能的理论前提。     

NEW PRODUCTION CONCEPTS

Flexibilty within a framework of internal labour markets is now widely seen to be an important factor in the ability of manufacturing firms to respond quickly to changes in market conditions — which is increasingly coming to be the form that competitive advantage takes in advanced industrial economies. An emerging and flourishing literature has identified a number of ‘new production concepts’ being developed in manufacturing industries, that depart from time-honoured Taylorist systems of job fragmentation and skill minimisation. The new concepts, such as ‘flexible specialisation’, ‘human-centred production’, and ‘diversified quality production’, are all in one way or another seeking to characterise a form of ‘functional flexibility’, that both enhances productivity and offers workers themselves a greater sense of involvement with their activity. The new concepts rest on the identification of a critical linkage between work organisation, skill formation and advanced manufacturing technology; they point to a convergence between the previously separate worlds of work and of learning.

In this paper the new production concepts are characterised as elements of an emergent ‘post Fordist’ technoeconomic paradigm. The present period of uncertainty can be construed as a transition between the Fordist paradigm centred on mass production, and its successors. There is nothing predetermined about the shape of these successors: this will be the outcome of a prolonged economic, industrial and political process as much as of a technical process. The choices are identified as falling between a continuation and intensification of Fordism, dubbed Computer-Aided Taylorisation; or a break with Fordism, dubbed Skill-Dependent Innovation. The new production concepts are characterised as instances of the latter approach to manufacturing management and technology. It is through this notion of ‘competing paradigms’ that this paper formulates an approach to the ‘politics’ of technological change.     

The history of medicine and the scientific revolution

The "new philosophy" of the seventeenth century has continued to be explained mainly on its own terms: as a major philosophical turn. Twentieth-century modernism gave pride of place to big ideas and reinforced the tendency to explain the rise of science in light of new ideas. Such orientations subordinated medicine (and technology) to sciences that appeared to be more theoretical. In attempts to persuade historians of science of the importance of medicine, then, many authors took an approach arguing that the major changes in the history of medicine during the so-called scientific revolution arose from philosophical commitments. Yet because medicine is also intimately connected to other aspects of life, its histories proved to be recalcitrant to such reductions and so continue to offer many possibilities for those who seek fresh means to address histories of body and mind united rather than divided.     

企业技术创新体系设计

建立有效的企业技术创新体系是提高企业创新能力的保证。文章建立了由创新动力机制、激励机制、约束机制、支撑机制和运行机制有机构成的企业技术创新体系。文章将技术创新主体从“企业”深化到企业中的“人”,将企业从事技术创新的动机转化为人的行为动机,把技术创新主体划分为具有广泛适应性的公司、部门和个人三个层次,并由此构造了技术创新动力的三级传递系统。将建立企业技术创新体系与企业的基本管理职能、特别企业目标管理体系相联系,把企业技术创新活动管理纳入企业日常管理活动,以确保企业创新体系的有效运行。     

Tunzelmann,Schumpeter, and the Hockey Stick

The article reviews theoretical approaches and methods of conventional economics and economic history to address the fundamental question of why the world's economy has experienced unprecedented growth rates only after 1800, following millennial relative stagnation. The intellectual challenge put forward by economic historians and historians of technical change is to explain the role of technology broadly interpreted in affecting economic change, offering a richer picture than the mere accumulation of production factors. This includes the analysis of the processes leading to the accumulation of ‘inventive people’.     

Crowding in and crowding out within a contribution good model of research

In standard economic theory, government support of science is expected to confer external benefits and ‘crowd-in’ additional private sector research. However, higher rates of economic growth from this effect are not easily discerned from the long run data, and government and business financed R&D have moved in opposite directions (as a proportion of GDP) since the early 1960s in the US and elsewhere. This paper looks at potential sources of ‘crowding out’ as well as ‘crowding in,’ and compares standard analysis with a ‘contribution good’ model of science. Two different policy issues are identified – the assembly of ‘critical mass’ for the ‘kick starting’ of commercial science, and the expansion of commercial science beyond its ‘private equilibrium’. We analyse the allocation of scarce business as well as scientific skills between sectors. The model produces regions of both crowding in and out. The latter dominates for very high wages in the public sector as the government deprives the private sector of the means to exploit new knowledge.     

幼儿园生活化课程开发理念下的师幼互动行为探析

幼儿日常生活中的生成课程是隐性的,隐藏在幼儿的一日生活中,也是待挖掘的课程。幼儿的一日生活是生成课程的“根”,不断地在幼儿日常生活中汲取养分。在幼儿日常生活中捕捉具有教育价值的事件或情节,有利于教师准确掌握幼儿的兴趣点。对吉林省长春市S幼儿园进行观察调研时,发现教师能够针对幼儿生活中的事件,不断引导幼儿,试图探索幼儿已有经验的边缘。探索幼儿园教师如何对幼儿一日生活的教育契机进行课程的生成,检验幼儿对已有经验的组合运用,能最大限度地发挥幼儿的创造力与想象力,进而使幼儿具备独立解决现实生活中问题的能力。     

History of mathematics and history of science

This essay argues that the diversity of the history of mathematics community in the United Kingdom has influenced the development of the subject and is a significant factor behind the different concerns often evident in work on the history of mathematics when compared with that of historians of science. The heterogeneous nature of the community, which includes many who are not specialist historians, and the limited opportunities for academic careers open to practitioners have had a profound effect on the discipline, leading to a focus on elite mathematics and great mathematicians. More recently, reflecting earlier developments in the history of science, an increased interest in the context and culture of the practice of mathematics has become evident.     

Historiography of biomedicine: "bio," "medicine," and in between

History of biomedicine is a hybrid domain, intersecting with many other scholarly disciplines. From the 1970s, historians who investigated recent developments in medicine increasingly shared the approaches, presuppositions, and methods of inquiry of historians and sociologists of science and technology. One reason is that the increasing reliance of medicine on technologies, instruments, and drugs makes the demarcation between "medicine," "science," and "industry" more difficult. Another is the "practice turn" in the history of science, which gave greater attention to the ways scientists and physicians work. The impressive achievements of historians who applied these new approaches came, however, at a cost. The neglect of an earlier generation of historians of medicine may have limited more recent ambitions for understanding health and disease in society. Closer links with historians of science and technology and sociologists of science may have blurred the specificity of medicine as a domain grounded in the distinction between the normal and the pathological and lessened scholars' interest in "the clinic" as a unique site of the production of knowledge.     

Investigating narrative involvement,parasocial interactions,and impulse buying behaviours within a second screen social commerce context

Using mobile devices for additional information search before, during and after watching television (either factual news or fictional TV series) - is an increasingly significant information management phenomenon. This activity has been recognised by both TV media executives and academia as ‘second screen’ activity. This paper develops and tests a ‘parasocial interaction-impulse buying’ - model that captures the behaviours of consumers watching a Chinese TV drama series. These audience-consumers were also engaging extensively (most on a daily basis) during the broadcast period with series related influencer social media activities on a second screen. A structural equation model was developed to analyse the data. Findings indicate that TV series audience consumers who are also highly engaged with influencer- consumer ‘second screen’ content are likely to experience positive narrative involvement leading to engagement in parasocial interaction behaviours and ultimately impulse buying behaviour. These findings have implications for managers by providing insights into (1) the effects of influencer second screen content (2) the processes by which consumers’ involvement in a TV show’s narrative leads to impulse buying of products. Thus, influencer related second screen consumer engagement should be considered a significant opportunity for marketers, as such activity makes consumers become more involved in the characters and the narrative of a particular TV show, leading to increased impulse buying.     

My home is my castle – Assessment of city love in Sweden

This paper offers a novel contribution to an evidence-based assessment of the attractiveness features (or perceived qualities) of cities or urban neighbourhoods, based on a quantitative evaluation of such areas by introducing and applying what is called ‘city-love’ analysis. To put this new concept in context, we offer first a concise overview of related and complementary notions (e.g. happiness, satisfaction, well-being, quality of life, contentment). Then we propose a new departure for attractiveness research pertaining to micro-based information on residents or users of cities by introducing the notion of a ‘city-love production function’. This function expresses the ability of cities to enhance the love or appreciation for a city or its neighbourhoods through an appropriate combination of five specific ‘city capital’ constituents. We test the validity of this so-called ‘Pentagon’ approach to city love by means of the city-love production function using a multivariate econometric model based on extensive heterogeneous statistical data on municipalities in Sweden and complemented with cell phone data. Our results are confronted with empirical ‘big data’ on the appreciation of Swedish places – and their characteristics – taken from social media platforms. The study offers also interesting findings from an advanced spatial-econometric and multilevel modelling approach. Our estimations show that the concept of the city-love production function allows us to quantitatively uncover important determinants of citizens’ love for their local environment.     

基于简单专利族和Bcp指数方法探讨专利“睡美人”的识别与分析

[目的/意义]针对专利文献的特殊性,选择合适的引文分析方法和研究单元,对专利“睡美人”进行识别和分析。[方法/过程]通过总结分析现有“睡美人”识别方法,选择对总被引次数依赖性小、可规避不同学科引文差异影响的Bcp指数方法识别筛选专利“睡美人”。利用Incopat专利信息平台,检索清华大学的所有专利文献,统计分析引文分布,筛选Bcp指数Top50的简单专利族,并以一个典型专利家族为例分析专利“睡美人”的价值。[结果/结论]Bcp指数方法可行和有效。本文修正了Bcp指数方法相关指标,并明确其计算方法。筛选出的简单专利族绝大多数有很高的合享价值度,属于高价值专利,但专利“睡美人”处于有效状态的比例低。如果能尽早识别筛选出关注度不太高但具有高价值的专利“睡美人”,对促进技术持续研发和迭代、加强专利布局、提高专利成果转移转化,实现专利的经济价值有非常重要的现实意义。     

Training and the generalist's vision in the history of science

Commentators have often complained about specialization in the history of science. This essay discusses recent intellectual trends within our discipline in the light of significant changes in graduate training: both a relatively recent consensus as to the types of sources that are appropriate to analyze in a dissertation and the tremendous growth in the number of new dissertations completed each year in our field. It suggests that this kind of focus on pedagogical concerns provides useful analytic tools for historians investigating other fields in various times and places.     

政府财政干预对OEM厂商绿色再制造的影响

以原产品生产企业(OEM厂商)为研究对象,通过两期模型探讨政府财政干预对企业再制造战略的影响,重点比较税收政策、补贴政策、"税收—补贴"联合政策对OEM厂商再制造的激励作用。研究结果表明,政府向OEM厂商征收新产品回收处置税的措施尽管会抑制新产品销量,但同时也抑制了再制造产品销量,因此难以达到扩大再制造的预期目的。与税收政策相比,补贴政策和"税收—补贴"联合政策具有正向引导作用,但两类政策的激励效果受到消费者认可度的影响。当消费者对再制造产品的认可度高时,适合采取"税收—补贴"联合政策;当消费者认可度低时,则仅适合采用补贴政策。     

Drones, information technology, and distance: mapping the moral epistemology of remote fighting

Ethical reflection on drone fighting suggests that this practice does not only create physical distance, but also moral distance: far removed from one’s opponent, it becomes easier to kill. This paper discusses this thesis, frames it as a moral-epistemological problem, and explores the role of information technology in bridging and creating distance. Inspired by a broad range of conceptual and empirical resources including ethics of robotics, psychology, phenomenology, and media reports, it is first argued that drone fighting, like other long-range fighting, creates epistemic and moral distance in so far as ‘screenfighting’ implies the disappearance of the vulnerable face and body of the opponent and thus removes moral-psychological barriers to killing. However, the paper also shows that this influence is at least weakened by current surveillance technologies, which make possible a kind of ‘empathic bridging’ by which the fighter’s opponent on the ground is re-humanized, re-faced, and re-embodied. This ‘mutation’ or unintended ‘hacking’ of the practice is a problem for drone pilots and for those who order them to kill, but revealing its moral-epistemic possibilities opens up new avenues for imagining morally better ways of technology-mediated fighting.     

A time to nourish? Evaluating the impact of public procurement on technological generality through patent data

Innovative public procurement is increasingly considered as a form of public support for private innovation activities by both innovation scholars and policymakers. Economic historians have suggested an even more fundamental role of public procurement in setting the pace of technological change, reporting how defense-related procurement has had a major impact on the emergence and diffusion of many general purpose technologies developed in the United States in the 20th century. In this paper, I suggest that procurement might represent one of the most important elements in creating the right soil to ‘cultivate’ a technology that may have the potential to reach high levels of pervasiveness. To test this hypothesis, I make use of patent data and patent citations. I design a quasi-experiment to compare the changes in the level of generality level over time, between a group of treated and a group of control patents. A patent is assigned to the treatment group if it receives a citation from a patent related to public procurement. Results suggest a positive and significant impact of innovative public procurement on the generality of a patent.     

The long and winding road: Routine creation and replication in multi-site organizations

Prior research on organizational routines in the ‘capabilities’ literature has either studied how new routines are created during an exploratory process of variation and selection or how existing routines are replicated during a phase of exploitation. Few studies have analyzed the life cycle of new routine creation and replication as an integrated process. In an in-depth case study of England’s Highways Agency, this paper shows that the creation and replication of a new routine across multiple sites involves four sequential steps: envisioning, experimenting, entrenching and enacting. We contribute to the capabilities research in two ways: first, by showing how different organizational levels, capabilities and logics (cognitive and behavioural) shape the development of new routines; and second, by identifying how distinct evolutionary cycles of variation and selective retention occur during each step in the process. In contrast with prior research on replication as an exact copy of a template or existing routine, our study focuses on the replication of an entirely new routine (based on novel principles) that is adapted to fit local operational conditions during its large-scale replication across multiple sites. We draw upon insights from adjacent ‘practice research’ and suggest how capabilities and practice studies may complement each other in future research on the evolution of routines.     

Online diaries: Reflections on trust,privacy, and exhibitionism

Trust between transaction partners in cyberspace has come to be considered a distinct possibility. In this article the focus is on the conditions for its creation by way of assuming, not inferring trust. After a survey of its development over the years (in the writings of authors like Luhmann, Baier, Gambetta, and Pettit), this mechanism of trust is explored in a study of personal journal blogs. After a brief presentation of some technicalities of blogging and authors’ motives for writing their diaries, I try to answer the question, ‘Why do the overwhelming majority of web diarists dare to expose the intimate details of their lives to the world at large?’ It is argued that the mechanism of assuming trust is at play: authors simply assume that future visitors to their blog will be sympathetic readers, worthy of their intimacies. This assumption then may create a self-fulfilling cycle of mutual admiration. Thereupon, this phenomenon of blogging about one’s intimacies is linked to Calvert’s theory of ‘mediated voyeurism’ and Mathiesen’s notion of ‘synopticism’. It is to be interpreted as a form of ‘empowering exhibitionism’ that reaffirms subjectivity. Various types of ‘synopticon’ are distinguished, each drawing the line between public and private differently. In the most ‘radical’ synopticon blogging proceeds in total transparency and the concept of privacy is declared obsolete; the societal gaze of surveillance is proudly returned and nullified. Finally it is shown that, in practice, these conceptions of blogging are put to a severe test, while authors often have to cope with known people from ‘real life’ complaining, and with ‘trolling’ strangers.