Philip Scranton

The People’s Republic of China faced multiple constraints in its 1950s industrialization drive –  a persistent capital shortage, a severe undersupply of engineers, designers, managers and technicians, insufficient administrative capability, and painfully weak infrastructure in transport and communications. Missteps and errors wasted resources on urgent but poorly executed projects, climaxing in catastrophes at decade’s end: the Great Leap Forward’s failure, a bitter rift with the USSR (Soviet advisors’ abandoning huge construction projects), and dreadful agricultural plans prioritizing crops for industry (e.g., cotton) over foodstuffs, triggering China’s last famine. Much needed fixing, clearly. Hence, Beijing leaders promoted a series of economic reform campaigns, two of which, Technology Reform and Design Reform focused on enterprises, but have been largely forgotten. This study recovers and analyzes their courses.

Innovation is regularly a disorderly process, but rarely moreso than in situations where a search for new, complex technologies proceeds in environments rich with uncertainties (re materials, scientific knowledge, strategy, reliability) and where that search proceeds through cycles of redesign fed by feedback from testing and use. Building on insights provided by Karl Weick, this phenomenon here is described as dynamic innovation, which is distinguished from more familiar analytic and synthetic innovation approaches. A historical case study of such experimental development, focused on US jet propulsionin World War Two and the Early Cold War, provides an exemplary window into the non-linear
and often conflictual processes through which multiple uncertainties are engaged by project managers and their colleagues.

Machine tools may be fundamental to metalworking industrial economies, but their Cold War era history in the US has rarely been assessed over the last generation. A quarter century after David Noble's crucial and critical Forces of Production, perhaps a broad-gauged assessment may be timely. This essay aims to offer two theses for discussion. First, it seems that a sector whose enterprises once specialized in one or more tool types reconfigured itself into clusters of firms servicing automotive-based automation demands, aeronautical/aerospace precision and flexibility needs, or providing specialized auxiliary components, especially instrumentation and controls. Second, cascades of new industrial materials and processes generated both opportunities for and constraints on tool firms, as innovations facilitated users' substituting, for example, plastics for metals or material-forming for metal-cutting, quietly shifting the technical and market foundations. Such dynamics set the stage for US machine tool enterprises' decline as the Cold War ebbed, but they did not chiefly derive from technological deflections deriving from military contracting.

This essay undertakes a comparative review of radical innovation in the early Cold War, when UK jet propulsion development far outpaced any US efforts. British ingenuity created a series of jet engines which Americans adopted. One among these, which captures contrasting organisational formats for handling complexity and innovation, was the Armstrong Siddeley Sapphire, a tough, reliable propulsion system. The USAF's licence assigned production to Curtiss-Wright, which had made piston engines for decades and which spectacularly botched the project, wasting millions. Eventually, the Pentagon shifted the J-65 American Sapphire to GM's Buick division, which finally fabricated adequate but obsolete engines in the mid-1950s. Ambivalence, hypocrisy, inconsistency, and equivocality may be pejorative labels in times of stability, but they are markers of heightened awareness in times of transition. (Karl Weick, 2003, p. 381) 1 Technological reality isn't rational, and it's no good rationalizing it after the fact. (Bruno Latour, 1996, p. 37) 2 This project, because of its urgency, was not conducted in accordance with normal procedures. (Lieutenant General E.W. Rawlings, re the J65 engine, cited in Self, 1954b) 3

Despite repeated announcements of its death or uselessness, the 'linear model' of science– technology relations persists, the notion that fundamental scientific research precedes applied studies that in time generate technological advances. This article undertakes first to revisit investigations and critiques of the model, and to remind historians of technology that intriguing alternatives to it have been developed. Second, using the case study of Cold War military jet propulsion, it argues that innovative, complex technologies have been created without reliable understanding of scientific fundamentals. These were messy, non-linear, and failure-filled processes, to be sure, yet they may well prove to have been more the rule than the exception, once scholars pursue richly textured studies of technical practice in experimental development. Ultimately, project needs to overcome engineering obstacles in technological innovation may provide the platforms and the funding to support basic scientific research as well, reversing the linear model's expected flows. We have paid particular attention to the relation of science to innovation. To our minds, our failure to find more than a small handful of direct connections is the more striking for the fact that we set out deliberately to look for them …. Perhaps science is not the father of technology but an anonymous well-wisher who sends it gifts through the post, as it were. 1 Entrepreneurs have long accepted that innovation is anything but orderly and simple, and scholars are beginning to understand this too. Governments, however, still tend to view innovation as a pipeline. If public money is stuffed into basic research in universities and national laboratories at one end, they reckon, new technology and commercial applications should pop out of the other. 2 'The " linear model " of the process of innovation, established in the course of indus-trialization and dominant in perceptions of the relation between science, technology

How did China’s emergent state enterprises, aiming to build socialism after wartime destruction, approach maintaining and repairing tools, machinery, water and electrical systems, while contending with persistent capital and skills shortages and periodic political upheavals? How were household goods kept in working condition now that many women engaged in “social labor”? As Maoist ideologies framed a politics of mass mobilization, how were tasks like making spare parts, providing timely service, or reusing waste materials achieved?  Last, given the serious poverty post-1949 China faced, what implications do socialist maintenance, repair and recycling [MR&R] trajectories, often from improvisation toward routinization, have for understanding capitalist/consumer societies, then and now?  Broadly, the following paper argues that collective projects in MR&R were critical to economic vitality in the PRC, as in other capital-constrained (often planning-led) developing nations. As everyday enterprise practice under communism has been far less examined than in the capitalist West, this effort to probe socialist MR&R will sketch approaches whose socialist principles and collaborative dynamics contrast sharply with the individualistic profit-seeking of Euro-American societies.

The shortcomings of communist central planning have been extensively analyzed, but few researchers have probed the ways in which a relentless focus on growth could leave holes in socialist societies’ capabilities for, and commitments to, maintaining and repairing what had been built or produced. This essay will highlight organizational and practical dimensions of this phenomenon in post-1945 Poland.  Badly damaged during World War Two, Poland faced a daunting rebuilding process while establishing socialist institutions, principles and practices while facing citizens’ resistance and indifference. In the 1950s, the main drivers for building socialism were industry and agriculture, strengthened by capital construction. But this simple schema overlooked important dimensions of “non-productive labor”: “services to organizations” and “services to the population.”  Transport, power and communications networks anchored the organizations. State railways, road managers, river shippers and telephone networks all relied on maintenance and repair units to continue effective operations. Second, services to people included maintenance of urban transit systems and worker housing, and the repair of household goods (furniture, appliances) or personal possessions (e.g., watches, clothing, shoes). Third, each of the “productive” sectors had substantial M&R responsibilities regarding machinery and facilities. This paper reviews Communist M&R practices across Poland’s first postwar generation.

Numerical control [N/C] transformed the design, capabilities, and use of machine tools between the 1950s and the 1980s, but neither smoothly nor without resistance and complications. This essay analyzes efforts in the United States and Great Britain to create digitized representations of machine functions and, eventually, computerized control of machine operations. It will discuss the firms, innovations, problems/failures, and competition that drove the transition from manual/mechanical control to automatic/largely-electronic control