Levels and concepts of process

assume their units to be surrounded by a distinguishable environment while both have mutual effects on each other. The conceptual move of heterogeneous approaches has a dual strength. For one, it is widely tested by diverse empirical case studies that avoid social reductionism. For another, it promises to replace determinism of all sorts with a fine-tuned research framework based on notions of interaction, co-constitution, or coproduction (see table 3.1).

Karl Marx understood the societal change as structurally determined by way of contradictions between the superstructure, the relations of production, and the material forces of production (Tilley 1982, p. 35). The introduction, for example, of new machines which via industrial automation that helped reshaping the modes of production, is indicative of “the instrumental use of technology by the bourgeoisie for their own ends (…) in the capitalist phase of history. Technology neither causes nor necessitates the class struggle that follows.” (Bimber 1994, p. 96) If machines primarily serve interests, the specific history of innovations has no conceptual weight. Innovations and innovators, thus, have historic significance only in the sense as they reinforce processes of economic accumulation and psychological struggles of alienation (Bimber 1994, p. 97). In Marx’s view, technical achievements such as newspapers and railways undermine social order elsewhere in the world:

“when you have once introduced machinery into the locomotion of a country, which possesses iron and coal, you are unable to withhold it from its fabrication. You cannot maintain a net of railways over an immense country without introducing all those industrial processes necessary to meet the immediate and current wants of railway locomotion and out of which there must grow the application machinery to those branches of industry not immediately connected with railways. The railway system will therefore become, in India, truly the forerunner of modern industry.” (Marx 1853, p. 37 cited in Adas 1990, p. 240)

The automatic flavor of this structural understanding of the processes of production and commerce is not confined to Marx alone. Contemporary observers likewise understood the technological progress as the step towards the opening up and regeneration of Asian societies. This viewpoint placed technological innovation at the center of a broader process of market expansion and transformation that would bring to the fore new modes of societal organization and class cleavages (Adas 1990, p. 239, 241). And yet, as Nick Dyer-Witheford emphasized, Marx’s commentaries and descriptions concerning nineteenth-century technologies have sprinkled over his encyclopedic oeuvre and, taken together, been allowing for a nuanced and contextualized reading of technological revolutions.⁴³ On the one hand, he saw the explosive growth of technologies such as                                                                                                                

43 Marx’s historical materialism changed over time. Particularly seen in his early and late works, which offer different readings. Marx is anything but a “technological determinist” as his understanding of the

railways, telegraphy, and steamships “as tendrils for the extension of a system of domination (…) and the ‘automization of the world market’” (Dyer-Witheford 1999, p.41). On the other hand, Marx valued their “liberatory possibilities” because these technologies tended to undermine “parochialism, localism, and narrow national interests”

while functioning as “potential catalysts for proletarian internationalism.” (Dyer-Witheford 1999, p. 42)

In sum, Marx’s understanding of machinery and travel and telecommunications technologies “oscillated” between to rival possibilities. At one pole, technology is an instrument of capitalist domination, a means for the intensification of exploitation and the enchaining of the world in commodity exchange. At the other, it is the basis for the freedom from want and the social intercourse that are the prerequisites for a communist society. How much emphasis is given to each pole, and by what logic or narrative they are connected, is, however, a matter of huge contention.” (Dyer-Witheford 1999, p. 42, Matthewman 2011, pp. 29-49) This structural bipolar view has another consequence: it would downplay the role of actors such as entrepreneurs, merchants, workers or inventors during an age of bustling entrepreneurial activity. It stemmed from an influential intellectual tradition handed down from Smith and Ricardo, theorists who had systematically downplayed entrepreneurial activities. Readers of their works are “bound to get an impression”, as Schumpeter noted, “to the effect that this process runs on itself.”

(Schumpeter 1949/2008, p. 255)

Joseph A. Schumpeter, in contrast to Marx’s structural view, stressed the actor-centric dynamics of economic development, which are associated with the concept of

“creative response”. For him, “entrepreneur-heroes” would carry out a historical mission in the context of “creative destruction” (Witt 1992, p. 219). According to this process model, entrepreneurs may realize something that is “outside of the range of existing practice” and thereby create fundamental discontinuities in the economy. This could                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          

connection between technologies and social change is much more differentiated than many critiques admit.

In Marx’s writings, technologies figure differently depending on different historical periods. As they are aligned to labor relations, social resistance against alienation and exploitation, they are first of all enablers of the bourgeoisie’s profit interests (see MacKenzie 1984a, Moore 1975, p. 181ff.). Technology, accordingly, is not the sole driving agent. Societal configurations have rather changed in concert of technical, social, financial, and psychological conditions (Bimber 1994).

involve anything from the introduction of new products over the establishment of a new market to the exploitation of new resources and lands or the creation of novel categories of commodities. As such, the transformative effects of creative entrepreneurial efforts, which on average have more often failed than succeeded, are irreducible. They resemble, as Schumpeter reassured us, “an essential element in the historical process” (Schumpeter 1947, p. 222).

At the one hand, the purposeful use of technologies is instrumental for this process.

On the other hand, Schumpeter perceived technological progress at a larger level as inevitable, infinite, and (almost) unstoppable evolution. For example, he rejected the assumption that the geographical exploration and utilization of the entire globe—an insight that has already stipulated Mackinder’s heartland theory—could progressively diminish investment opportunities and, ultimately, bring an end to 150 years of capitalist growth. Schumpeter not only anticipated the Club of Rom predictions of the 1970s concerning limited planetary resources but also refuted its core argument. According to him, “technological progress effectively turned the tables on any such tendency.”

Because of technological innovations, “it is one of the safest predictions that in the calculable future we shall live in an embarras de richesse of both foodstuffs and raw materials” (Schumpeter 1947, p. 117).

Moreover, as Schumpeter was the first economist to rigorously theorize economic development as cycles, technological innovations became conceptually related to macro shifts and pattern of the global economy (Arrighi 1994).

“An analogous argument applies to the widely accepted view that the great stride in technological advance has been made and that but minor achievements remain. So far as this view does not merely render the impressions conceived from the state of things during and after the world crisis—when an apparent absence of novel propositions of the first magnitude was part of the familiar pattern of any great depression—it exemplifies still better than did the “closing of humanity’s frontier” that error in interpretation economists are so prone to commit. We are just now in the downgrade of a wave of enterprise that created the electrical power plant, the electrical industry, the electrified farm and home and the motorcar. We find all that very marvelous, and we cannot for our lives see where opportunities of comparable importance are to come from. As a matter of fact however, the

promise held out by the chemical industry alone is much greater than what it was possible to anticipate in, say, 1880, not to mention the fact that the mere utilization of the achievement of the age of electricity and the production of modern homes for the masses would suffice to provide investment opportunities for quite a time to come” (Schumpeter 1947, pp. 177-118).

In Schumpeter’s systemic view, technology-induced waves of destruction would result in the predictable occurrence of up-and-down cycles. This led him to qualify Marx’s historical materialism. While a down-cycle does not mean the end of capitalism, the innovations do not reinforce a fixed path or teleological processes of accumulation and concentration, either. They are rather successive singular events that set in motion an evolutionary dynamic of economic development (Schumpeter 1947, 1934). At the heart of this process lie the power of novelty that might even transcend “land” and “labor” as the traditional resource bases of economic activities. As Schumpeter maintained, “the conquest of the air may well be more important than the conquest of India was”

(Schumpeter 1947, p. 117). Ultimately, no “frontiers” can impede this infinite process.

Writes Schumpeter:

Technological possibilities are an uncharted sea. We may survey a geographical region and appraise, though only with reference to a given technique of agricultural production, the relative fertility of individual plots. Given that technique and disregarding its possible future developments, we may then imagine (though this would be wrong historically) that the best plots are first taken into cultivation, after them the next best ones and so on. At any given time during this process it is only relatively inferior plots that remain to be exploited in the future. But we cannot reason in this fashion about the future possibilities of technological advance. From the fact that some of them have been exploited before others, it cannot be inferred that the former were more productive than the latter. And those that are still in the lap of the gods may be more or less productive than any that have thus far come within our range of observation.” (Schumpeter 2003, pp. 117-118)

Schumpeter’s and Marx’s accounts of the politics of technological innovations contain a precious heritage. While both contextualize technological innovations within the global political economy, suggesting different structural pattern, Schumpeter emphasized the micro component of entrepreneurial activity related to innovations. Thus theorizing processes, both theorists also pointed to ways in which agency can be conceptualized.