Science and Technology

Technological, Cultural, and Social Determinism

Three distinct schools of social scientific thought argue that individual leaders are unimportant in science and technology and progress is really the result of impersonal forces:

Technological determinism holds that technology is the engine of its own development, and individual scientists and engineers play only subsidiary roles. William F. Ogburn (1886–1959) offered a four-step model:

• 1.
  Invention: New technology naturally evolves from the existing technical base, and a given innovation tends to occur simultaneously with several inventors as soon as it is technically feasible.
• 2.
  Accumulation: Inventions tend to accumulate over time, in an accelerating process, because the more inventions that already exist, the more opportunities there are to combine them in novel ways.
• 3.
  Diffusion: Inventions tend to spread beyond the geographic and technical area in which they arose.
• 4.
  Adjustment: New technology transforms social conditions, causing cultural lag as the institutions of society fail to change until social movements bring about needed adaptations.

Cultural determinism holds that the values of the wider society channel research investments into particular fields, and individuals merely innovate in those fields given highest priority by the surrounding culture. Robert K. Merton (1910–2003) charted the changing cultural emphasis across different scientific fields in England in the period just before the Industrial Revolution. Liah Greenfeld suggests that the specific value galvanizing rapid scientific progress in England was nationalism, as the English sought ways to compete the larger continental powers, France and Spain.

Social determinism views organizations as networks of communication, and innovation as a process in which the information necessary to develop a new idea happens to collect at one location. Kathleen Carley conceptualizes organizations as information systems, and Mark Granovetter stresses the importance of extended communication networks. Some individuals appear to innovate creatively, but that is an illusion caused by the fact that these individuals happen to hold particular positions in the social network. Innovative individuals are often marginal to two fields, thus receiving diverse information from different sources and in a good position to bring ideas together.

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