Motivation and Achievement: Technological Change and Creative Response in Comparative Industrial History
Author(s)
Inkster, Ian
Abstract
The most identifiable modus operandi in modern economic development has not been technological creativity but technological transfer. The latter can best be understood in terms of the juxtaposition between relevant economic systems and the character of institutions within a specific system. Thus, a particular institutional response to technology is substantially determined by the global politics of economic industrialization. Key internal system features – for example, social structure – help also to explain the differences in the outcomes of the industrialization process. A selective analysis of industrialization in Britain and Japan reveals that while the British case developed as a result of an enormous flowering of technical ingenuity combined with an openness to change, Japanese industrialization resulted from the large transfer of foreign knowledge and techniques into a culture of formal institutional controls.
