Special Issue: Nature of Technology
Special Issue on Nature of Technology - Spring 2010
Editors: Phil Faulkner, Clive Lawson and Jochen Runde
Perhaps more than at any other time in human history, questions of technology and its development are at the forefront of the challenges that face society. Yet while economics would seem a natural site for the study of many of these questions, current discussions of the topic within the discipline are hampered in two important ways. The first is that although technology has received sustained and complex treatment from economists in the past, modern mainstream economics has tended to favour a formalistic ‘black-box’ approach that downplays analysis of the nature of technology per se. The second is that the enormous diversity of views concerning the nature of technology, both within the non-mainstream parts of economics and beyond, makes it difficult for researchers interested in these questions to either gain a broad understanding of the current state of play or easily engage in fruitful dialogue with others.
The purpose of this special issue of the Cambridge Journal of Economics is to address these problems by providing an overview of different conceptions of technology that have been emerging in a range of different fields, namely the philosophy of technology, the social sciences generally, and the non-mainstream parts of economics. The collection comprises three distinct sections with the papers in each written by leading scholars in their respective fields. Section 1 sets the scene with five papers pitched at a relatively abstract level, primarily by philosophers who have contributed to the ontology of technology. Section 2 then shifts the focus to the disciplinary level, consisting of nine papers that elaborate conceptions of technology that have currency in social sciences other than economics (including history, anthropology/archaeology, engineering, sociology, feminist theory, evolutionary studies, engineering, management, and the environment). Finally, section 3 contains four papers that focus on different conceptions of technology that have emerged in heterodox traditions in economics, particularly from the areas of Marxian, Schumpeterian and Institutionalist economics.
Preview
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The Cambridge Political Economy Society