The Political Economy of Technical Change

Alan Booth

Chapter 1 in The Management of Technical Change, 2006, pp 1-23 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract This book focuses on the management of technical change in the British economy since the 1950s, with US experience as the reference point. It employs the well-known device of looking at crises, in this instance the “technology scares” that have erupted in twentieth century Britain. They began with “national efficiency” concerns, flowing from the demonstration of US and German productive power in late-Victorian and Edwardian Britain.1 During the First World War, the threat of postwar German industrial competition briefly gripped British political and business leaders, but did not penetrate far beyond that (Cline 1982). There was a low-grade technology scare in interwar Britain around the impact of rationalisation, but was rather small beer when compared to the intense concern in Germany during the 1920s and in the USA in the 1930s.2 In fact, the US debates of the 1930s were so powerful that they coloured the attitudes and expectations of American producer groups into the 1960s (Bix 2000).

Keywords: Machine Tool; Political Economy; Technical Change; Industrial Relation; Enterprise Level (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2006
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:palchp:978-0-230-80060-1_1

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.palgrave.com/9780230800601

DOI: 10.1057/9780230800601_1

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Palgrave Macmillan Books from Palgrave Macmillan
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().