Technological Change. Clotilde Coron

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СКАЧАТЬ target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_0c278e4d-01a8-58ab-a0b1-473e4934a328">Box I.1. Computer generations from a techno-centric perspective

1945–1955	First generation: electronic tube machines (vacuum tubes). The first fully electronic computer, the ENIAC (Electronical Numerical Integrator And Calculator) weighs 30 tons and occupies 135 m2.
1955–1965	Second generation: transistor computers that make it possible to build more reliable and less bulky machines.
1965–1980	Third generation: integrated circuits (also called electronic chips). The Intel 4004 processor achieves the same performance as the ENIAC for a size of less than 11 mm2.
1980–2000	Fourth generation: microprocessors. Integration of thousands to billions of transistors on the same silicon chip.
2000	Fifth generation: widespread use of networks and graphical interfaces (there are disagreements between specialists about the existence of this fifth generation).

      This first perspective, concerned with the object and its materiality, does not address the human dimension of technological change. At the organizational level, it can lead to neglecting the individual who becomes the residual part of technological change, the part that is said to resist change.

      I.1.2.2. The romantic perspective: the inventor and his creation

Here, technological change is often represented as a chronological succession of technical objects with which glorious personalities and events are associated, such as the one we have taken up, by way of illustration, in Box I.2.

This tenacious tendency undoubtedly gives an attractive representation of technological change because of its simplicity, its exaltation of the idea of progress and the myth of great men. But it will not be our preference. To attribute to a single individual, at a given date, an invention when it is usually the result of a maturation, resulting from parallel research, seems to us to be from a romantic perspective.

Box I.2. Technological change as a succession of uses

1769	James Watt develops an improved condenser for the steam engine.
1821	Michael Faraday demonstrates the first electric motor.
1838	Charles Wheatstone builds the first electric telegraph.
1859	Étienne Lenoir makes the first internal combustion engine.
1876	Alexander Graham Bell files a patent on the telephone.
1879	Thomas Edison develops the carbon filament bulb.
1884	Hiram Maxim invents the first self-propelled machine gun.
1899	Guglielmo Marconi makes the first transatlantic radio transmission (which won him the Nobel Prize in 1909).
1903	Brothers Orville and Wilbur Wright make their first motorized flights.
1923	Vladimir Zworykin patent the iconoscope, a fully electronic television transmission tube.
1947	Bardeen, Brattain and Shockley (Nobel Prize winners in physics in 1956) invent a new type of transistor.
1957	The Soviets launch Sputnik 1, the first spacecraft placed in orbit around the Earth.
1969	Edward Hoff and Federico Faggin develop the very first electronic chip, the microprocessor.
1973	François Gernelle develops the first microcomputer, the Micral N.
1977	Designed by Steve Wozniak, the Apple II, a personal computer, is developed in Steve Jobs’ garage, manufactured on a large scale and marketed by Apple Computer.
1982	Microsoft, created by Bill Gates and Paul Allen, presents MS/DOS (Microsoft Disk Operating System) developed for the IBM PC, then for compatible PCs.
1994	Jeff Bezos founds the Amazon website, which becomes the world’s largest online sales company. He lists the shares on the stock exchange in 1997.
1998	Google is created by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two students from Stanford University, who together initiate the search engine of the same name.
2005	Mark Zuckerberg founds the online social network Facebook, after testing it on his fellow students at Harvard University.

This second perspective leaves little more room for the human being than the first, at most the latter is thought of as the progenitor of the technical object. The emphasis on the glorious origins of a tool is reflected at the organizational level when technological change is referred to exclusively in reference to the individual who was at the origin of a technological innovation and who gives it a prestigious character.

      I.1.2.3. The anthropotechnical perspective: towards a sociotechnical coupling

      The opposite of technocentrism is anthropocentrism, a vision of technologies centered on individuals and social groups. The technologies are thought of in reference to the human being and not the other way around. However, we will avoid any radicalism.

      In practice, we do not intend to focus solely on individuals and their needs, but rather to consider how to achieve co-adaptation between object and subject. This is what we call an anthropotechnical approach. We will present different theoretical currents in Chapter 1 in more detail.

The focus on the uses of technologies, and no longer on the objects themselves, as they couple the human and technological, is a good illustration of this approach (see Box I.3).

Box I.3. A history of enterprise computing centered on usage

       1955–1960: from scientific computing to management computing

      At the beginning, computing was mainly concerned with scientific calculation and operational research. It was then the business of engineers, the only ones capable of programming the automaton in machine language that they used for their own needs. Then management СКАЧАТЬ