Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
multi-million dollar federal wind programs had not achieved
a significant commercial impact by the time that most such
programs were cancelled when the oil crisis ended in the mid-
1980s. At the same time, the bottom-up technology-development
eforts of the small-scale wind energy entrepreneurs with an
emphasis on the development of small and reliable machines
succeeded in capturing the market which grew into the modern
wind industry. These arguments use social and political causal
relationships to explain the development of the technology and the
industry. The arguments also tend to highlight the relative value
of diferent instances of the technology itself as influential in the
success or failure of the diferent eforts to develop a stable wind
industry. Without explicitly recognising it, these analyses are thus
contributing to a standing academic debate on the “nature” of
technology and more specifically, the level of autonomy it has and
the degree of influence it exerts on society.
This chapter
2
brings to the fore the role that assumptions
about the nature of the technology play in the treatment of its
history and also the intricacies of the relationships that exist
across the diferent development eforts. To do this, a theoretical
reference frame known as actor-network theory (ANT) is
employed. Core to this theory is the idea of a dual-shaping of
socio-political and technological worlds.
3
Thus,
via
ANT, a voice is
and Denmark, while the work of Adam Serchuk provides a detailed contrast of
the activities of two groups in the United States: the federal wind program and
small entrepreneurs. Similarly, the work of Garud and Karnoe also highlight
the social and cultural aspects of wind energy development by contrasting
the federal US programs (emphasising breakthrough) with the Danish
entrepreneurial eforts (emphasising bricolage—improvisation and the search
for “modest yet steady gains” in performance).
2
This work is a condensed treatment of the history of wind energy technology
using ANT methods. The full version is contained in a 2013 doctoral thesis by
the author on the same subject. For more detail regarding the history, methods
and related topics, the reader is referred to that body of work.
3
While theories on society and technology are beyond the scope of this work,
some treatment of critical concepts is useful to introduce the reader to the
underlying motivation of the work and justify the use of the particular analytical
lens of actor-network theory (ANT). Since Lewis Mumford published his work
on
in 1934, many scholars in the area of technology
studies became involved in analysis of and debate over the nature of the
relationship between society and technology. However, many still disagree
on the extent and direction of causality between the technical and the social.
Technics and Civilization
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