Socio-technical Trajectories and Technological Change Styles into Underdeveloped Countries: the Resignification of Technologies. (Latin-America, 1930/2005)

HERNÁN THOMAS

Beijing

Congreso; 22nd International Congress of History of Science; 2005

International Union of History and Philosophy of Science

This paper focuses on the analysis of an historical process inside Latin American countries, since the beginning of the industrialization process until today. The process of rising, spreading, relative dominance and limitation of socio-technical trajectories based onto the difussion, widening and upgrading of Re-signification of Technologies operations (from now, RT). An image present into the common sense is to consider that into the peripheral countries the technological activity is scarce and it has a low innovative content. From this viewpoint, the socially-in-use technology comes mainly from abroad and the local technological intervention on the imported products and processes is restricted to make little adaptations to local conditions of usage. As for this image, the local intervention is minimun, the creativeness, almost inexistent. But... is it this a real image? By checking many case and sectorial studies, belonging to several different local production branches, it seems possible to assert that in Latin America a particular dynamic of technological change has been under developing between 1930 and 2000. It’s possible to found in those sources a lot of empirical data about a wide variety of technological operations made, involving a diverse technological creativeness degree. New case-studies allows today to assert that those operations are present not only into mature technologies in traditional industrial sectors but also into more scientific and technological knowledge-intensive local productions like as the biotechnological, nuclear and aerospatial sectors. The RT operations implies either the re-utilization or overutilization of certain available technic or technology. The RT operations aren’t a mere ‘mechanical’ application of either a technic or a technology, but a re-signification of that technology and also, of it’s application method. The knowledge required is of the same kind as that needed for, i.e., the manufacture of original machinery, and has similar conditions and characteristics to the activity of basic design. To resignify technologies isn’t to make a simple reutilization of parts, but to re-functionalize, even, to found a new meaning. To make RT operations isn’t restricted to the way into technology is created but includes the creative utilization of available technologies. RT operations are located at the interface between the social actions of technological development and the technological trajectories of specific social groups, into the socio-technical dynamic ‘seamless web’: this ‘technological style’ is only feasible given certain conditions of interplay between the technological endowments, social conditions, political and economic conditions, and the ideological constitutions of the social actors. The analysis of this sociotechnical process it’s a key to understand the rythm, aim, consistence and limitations of the Latin American innovative dynamic.