Learning efficiency, technological change and economic progress
by Gerry Sweeney
International Journal of Technology Management (IJTM), Vol. 11, No. 1/2, 1996

Abstract: The current recession marks the trough behind a long wave of economic and technical progress which commenced with the Industrial Revolution. In the past, organisational innovation tended to be the force driving technological and social change. The indications are that social forces will determine technological and organisational change in the next long wave. Unfortunately, the emergence of the new wave is being delayed by the momentum of the organisational and scientific determinisms and academic individualism emanating from the paradigms which have evolved from the past. Learning efficiency and the interactive person to person creation of new knowledge, which are the fundamental factors determining technological progress, are inhibited in many western economies. Information technology, driven by scientific determinism, has failed to produce the surge of innovations necessary for a new wave of productive creation of economic wealth. IT has not been interactively integrated with the tacit understanding and skills in product and production technologies necessary to create a new surge of innovations. Learning efficiency and the generation of new economic activity and maintenance of economic prosperity which stem from it, are local phenomena and result from the transaction-intensive information sharing of communities with distinctive cultures and a spirit of communitarianism, and the technological orientation of the education system. The networks integrate each actor in a geographic area in an intensive melange of social, business, technological and civic information and work sharing. The firms and the local economies are structured as interactive, small craft workshops, and the basic unit of industrial organisation is the local economy.

Online publication date: Fri, 22-May-2009

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