It would be misleading to speak of an anti-scientific mood in public opinion today. Most people support advanced technology or scientific medicine, but it is true that criticism of economic modernization or hospital life is growing. Science is not widely criticized, but the idea of a scientific society is often rejected by science-educated people. We still believe in science, but no longer in progress. I would like to make some comments on this general statement.

Progress means that scientific and technological achievements trigger welfare, freedom and happiness. Condorcet, at the end of the eighteenth century, during the most violent period of the French Revolution and a few weeks before he died, wrote a most enthusiastic hymn to progress, announcing a future of abundance, emancipation and peace. The idea of eternal peace was central to eighteenth-century British, French and German political thought.

Social analysis, from the beginning of the nineteenth century to recent years, has been dominated by the opposition between modernity and tradition, categories which were practically synonymous with good and evil. Modernity was defined as rationalization, both in economic and administrative fields, and as secularization or disenchantment, to use Max Weber's terms, as far as culture was concerned. It was a global view of collective as well as individual life. Modernity was identified with the creative use of reason in all fields, and conceived as domination and mastery of nature, to use Descartes' and Bacon's ideas; also as an instrument of liberation from customs, privileges and prejudices.

Introduction

This chapter deals with historical cases of resistance to new technologies in Norway and Sweden. It is primarily an interpretive essay rather than original research, drawing on existing historical work related to economic and social dimensions of technological change in two of the largest and most important Scandinavian industries, fishing and timber, plus a major energy technology of the twentieth century, nuclear power. It is interpretive in the sense that the objective of the chapter is not simply to describe some historical aspects of resistance to innovation in these industries, but also to raise questions about how such resistance should be understood. The main point which is argued is that resistance to new technologies should not be seen purely in terms of a kind of conservative labour resistance; rather, it often involves complex coalitions of actors, and is perhaps best understood as one of the selection mechanisms through which societies adopt or reject new technological opportunities.

In general, in analysing technological change in Scandinavia, we are discussing processes by which foreign technologies enter the system. Like many of the core technologies of the region, the new techniques in fishing, timber processing and energy had in common the fact that they were originally developed outside Scandinavia, and so what is being considered here are in part conflicts related to international technology transfer.

The Scandinavian economies have always been highly open trading economies, firmly integrated with the trading systems of the Hanseatic League, the Dutch Baltic trade, and then the ‘new’ Atlantic economy (based on trade between Europe and the American colonies) which emerged in the eighteenth century.

Introduction: resistance and reception

New consumer IT (Information Technology) sometimes appears to be an unmitigated success in the marketplace. Even products which have been written off may break through in the longer term (e.g. the laser videodisc, now reappearing both as a vehicle for movies and in the new form of interactive Compact Disc); some products which are apparent losers have bounced back in a new form (e.g. videogames consoles, for a while seen as being displaced by home computers as a medium for games); yet others' deaths have been much exaggerated (e.g. a drop in home computer sales, in the wake of a boom, was heralded to be the passing of a fad).

Videotex is the exemplary failure to realize expected consumer markets for new IT – and even here, Britain's Prestel does not tell the whole story, as witnessed by the large markets established by France's Minitel. A less familiar failure in consumer telecommunications involved the collapse of the first CT2 (telepoint) portable phone systems: but this resulted from a combination of greedy pricing, incompatible standards and confusing signals from competing suppliers, and industrial belief in the consumer potential for such services in the UK was still being displayed by Hutchinson's eventually unsuccessful efforts to secure a foothold for their Rabbit system – after all, similar technology had taken off in Hong Kong. At the same time, cellular phone operators are pitching ‘low cost’ services at consumer markets, and the new generation of PCN (Personal Communication Network) products is soon to be launched.

In this chapter I develop two ideas about resistance in social processes in a speculative manner, with the help of a functional analogy: (a) resistance is primarily a functional event in social processes – dysfunctionality is possible but secondary; and (b) resistance is a contribution that urges consideration of whether to sustain a process, in analogy to ‘acute pain’, and if so, how.

In whatever context, political, technological or economic, resistance is an action attribution, and as such the achievement of a communication system (Heidenscheder 1992). This analysis of resistance is mainly concerned with resistance in areas of present day technology, but makes use of ideas from other historical and political contexts. I explore a discursive schema with two main actors: an innovator and a resistant. Further differentiation is conceivable according to the various roles of the change agency (Ottaway 1983) and resistance (see Bauer, Chapter 1). The innovator proposes a project that is not acceptable and rejected tel-quel by the resistant part; in that mismatch mutually unexpected expectations meet. Concrete actors may change their roles in two ways. First, the innovator resists changes to the project; and resistance may become an initiator. Second, these parts of innovator and resistant are not scripted: they change as they are enacted.

Being interested in the function of resistance in a process, I focus on effects: how does resistance affect the process that is its target.

Introduction

The invention of the transistor in 1947 ushered electronics into a new era. Although access to transistor technology was relatively open, France and Japan responded differently to the opportunities offered by the new technology. This chapter compares their national responses to semiconductor technology, particularly transistors, up to the mid-1960s. Semiconductor diffusion occurred faster in Japan than in France and this had important industrial competitiveness consequences. Partly as a result of historical patterns of state action (or lack thereof) and societal arrangements, by 1972 there was no French firm among the world's top ten semiconductor firms, and only one among the top twenty (Webbink 1977, p. 22). In contrast, there were two Japanese firms among the top ten and five among the top twenty. By 1960 Japanese transistor production was larger than French. Early technological choices shaped the future competitiveness of the national industry in semiconductors.

Conventional views portray Japanese society and state as forward looking and fascinated with material progress. Since the Meiji restoration Japanese society has been eager to adopt modernity and build upon it. In contrast, France, her society and state, are portrayed as conservative with regard to new technologies at least until World War II. Formalistic explanations which analyse the cultural form of resistance hide the historically contingent and political nature of that resistance. To identify cultural, market or societal differences may be a sufficient explanation of resistance from a functionalist viewpoint but it fails to uncover the process characteristics of the phenomenon, which is an important resource for collective action.

In the history of technology the concept of ‘technophobia’ seems to undergo a periodical revival to deal with people's reactions to innovations. This tendency to detect symptoms of pathology in people's experience of new technologies reappears in public debates. According to the historian Goffi (1988) we may distinguish a universal from a particular form of technophobia. Universal ‘phobia’ is expressed in ancient myths such as Prometheus, The Golem, Dr Faustus or the Greek notion of Hybris. The particular form is the anti-scientific attitudes in the recent industrial age. Often technophobia is part of the larger concept of ‘neophobia’ which refers to people's general aversion against all things new.

In the nineteenth century, ‘Siderodromophobia’ subsumed adverse reactions to railway work and railway journeys: fever in the aftermath of journeys; the ‘delirium furiosum’, a mental agitation caused by the mere sight of a locomotive steaming by; and a hysterical aversion to work among locomotive and wagon personnel (Fischer-Homberger 1975, pp. 40f). Mitchell (1984) reports how at times the nuclear debate in the USA was conducted under the heading of ‘nuclear phobia’: images of nuclear power, spread by the media, touch on unconscious motivations, and give rise to an emotional over-reaction which brought the nuclear power industry to a virtual stop.

To use the notion of ‘phobia’ to describe people's experience of and behaviour towards new technology is pragmatically not neutral; the psychopathological classification presents the problem through the ‘clinical’ eye.