The Rationality of Mechanization in the Pacific Salmon-Canning Industry before the Second World War

Dianne Newell

Business History Review, 1988, vol. 62, issue 4, 626-655

Abstract: An industry may fail to adopt or to extend new technology for many reasons other than lack of entrepreneurial vision. In the following article, Professor Newell considers the halting and incomplete diffusion of mechanization and continuous-process technology in the salmon-canning industry of the Pacific Northwest. She shows that the fragile and cyclical character of the natural resource, the labor system employed, and the remote and isolated locations of individual production units all affected cannery operators' decisions about technology adoption, and that the persistence of manual labor reflected rational, not reactionary, business choices.

Date: 1988
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