Science Technology Human Values OnlineFirst, published on October 27, 2009 as

doi:10.1177/0162243909345834

Science, Technology, & Human Values

000(00) 1-21
ª The Author(s) 2009
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Peripheralization DOI: 10.1177/0162243909345834
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Allen W. Batteau1

Abstract
Technological gaps in large-scale systems, whether ancient empires or the
modern world system, are millenia old and are usually viewed in terms of
variable rates of innovation and diffusion. When overlaid with large-scale,
tightly coupled systems, such as air transport, pharmaceutical regimes,
power grids, industrial supply chains, or food supply networks, these mis-
matches frequently have adverse consequences for the performance of the
system. This article suggests that these gaps are a consequence of the net-
work topologies that produce innovation, and more importantly that the
dynamics of these networks progressively amplify the gaps. The dark side
of technological acceleration (the geometric growth in technological per-
formance) in core regions is an expanding gap between core and periphery,
creating a unique class of hazards outside the core.

Keywords
technological gaps, technological acceleration, safety, world systems theory

Technological gaps around the world are a commonplace observation. Like

the rising of the sun every morning, they are sufficiently banal and

1
Department of Anthropology, Institute for Information Technology and Culture, Wayne
State University, Detroit, Michigan.

Corresponding Author:
Allen W. Batteau, Department of Anthropology, Institute for Information Technology and
Culture, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI 48202. E-mail: a.batteau@wayne.edu
2 Science, Technology, & Human Values 000(00)

ubiquitous as to scarcely require explanation or further elaboration. Certain

nations pulled ahead in the past four centuries and now have become foun-
tains and repositories of technology, supplying advanced innovations to the
remainder of the world. As technologies diffuse from the developed to the
developing, it is sometimes assumed that the remainder of the world will
‘‘catch up,’’ and the gap will be closed. More recently, the emergence of
new technological capabilities, whether in China or India or Brazil, is cre-
ating a multipolar technological world, yet one in which technological gaps
and mismatches between more and less advanced regions, still remain.
Time, it is assumed, will close these gaps.
In this brief article, I would like to propose an alternative perspective that
these gaps are a consequence of the network topologies that produce inno-
vation and more importantly that the dynamics of these networks progres-
sively amplify the gaps. Technological gaps between centers of innovation
and peripheries are millenia old. Gaps between regions on differing techno-
logical trajectories, while not as dramatic, are an emerging dynamic in a
multipolar technological world. When these gaps are overlaid with the
large-scale, tightly coupled systems of contemporary industry and society,
the result is the creation of new forms of hazard. The challenges of air trans-
port in Asia, Africa, and Latin America supply vivid illustrations on this
point.

1. Consequences of Technological Mismatches

Two airliners collide over Lake Constanz in Switzerland because of differ-
ing cultural interpretations of machine and human instructions. In Colom-
bia, a modern airliner flies into a hillside after a breakdown in
communication between the U.S.-based flight crew and the national Air
Traffic Control. In China, a cockpit alarm in English puzzles the
Mandarin-speaking flight crew. In Nigeria, by contrast, livestock collisions
are a recognized aviation hazard, due to unrepaired runway fencing
(Adedoyin 2006; Timberg 2006). Conditions such as these have made air
travel uniquely hazardous in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
In examining these hazards, we can empirically identify four broad
classes of technological failure: infrastructural, operational, human-
machine interface, and regulatory control. Air transport is a loosely coupled
system, although in certain regions (notably Europe) and certain phases of
flight (notably terminal operations) it is tightly coupled. Additionally, as
Weick notes, under certain circumstances, it is ‘‘vulnerable’’ to rapidly
becoming tightly coupled (Weick 1990). Thus, under selected circumstances,
Batteau 3

complex mismatches among infrastructure, equipment, procedures, and the

operators’ and regulators’ cultural assumptions can degrade system perfor-
mance. Most of the time this degradation in performance is banal: a bush
pilot takes off with less than a full load because the landing strip is too short,
or too pot-holed, for a heavier takeoff, or crew or equipment shortages make
schedule-keeping an insurmountable challenge. On some occasions,
though, tragedy results.
In addition to airports and runways, a vital part of the infrastructure of air
transport is a system of navigation aids that direct aircraft along aerial
‘‘highways.’’ In Europe and the Americas, arrays of Very High Frequency
Omnidirectional Radial (VOR) signals guide flights to their destinations.
While on approach in the mountains of Colombia after dark in December
20, 1995, confusion over two of these beacons (the Romeo VOR and the
Rozo VOR) combined with a poorly designed user interface on the flight
management computer, compounded with communication difficulties with
the air traffic controller, caused the flight crew of American Airlines 965 to
become disoriented, leading to a breakdown in crew coordination and even-
tually crashing into a hillside near Cali (Perez 2002).
Air transport is what Rene Amalberti calls an ultrasafe system
(Amalberti 2001). The obverse of this proposition is that when accidents
do occur, they are overdetermined, at the end of a long chain of equipment,
procedural, and human errors. The accident at Cali, in addition to being
caused by an unexpected lack of radar services, was also caused by a break-
down in crew coordination, a loss of situational awareness, and confusion
over communication with air traffic control.
The importance of crew coordination is such that all air carriers instruct
their flight crews in its techniques, including open communication, work-
load sharing, and aeronautical decision-making. This instruction, ‘‘Crew
Resource Management,’’ (CRM) is based on cultural assumptions of open
communication and egalitarianism. In rigidly authoritarian cultures, CRM
may break down. This was illustrated by the crash of a China Airlines
140 at Nagoya on April 26, 1994. The Airbus A300 had an advanced flight
management system, in which computerized ‘‘fly by wire’’ controls had
replaced the conventional, manual yoke and rudder. As the aircraft
approached the runway on short final, the first officer accidentally hit the
‘‘go lever’’—a control that actuates a ‘‘go around’’ (i.e., the airplane climbs
out and makes another pass at a landing). A ‘‘go around’’ is a standard pro-
cedure, but in this instance it was unexpected and created a momentary
‘‘mode confusion’’ (i.e., a mismatch between the aircraft’s behavior and
crew expectations). The angry captain accused the first officer of causing
4 Science, Technology, & Human Values 000(00)

the mistake, and the first officer’s loss of face momentarily paralyzed him.
On the Cockpit Voice Recorder transcript, one sees the First Officer fight-
ing with the airplane, and the Captain fighting with the First Officer. The
airplane stalled and crashed to the ground, killing 264 of the 271 crew and
passengers on board (Ministry of Transport 1995).
Although this account may appear to be essentializing Chinese culture,
the relationship between culturally conditioned responses and technological
interfaces is a serious concern. Jing Hung Sying has analyzed the relation-
ship between a ‘‘guanxi gradient’’—the varying emphasis placed in differ-
ent settings between personal ties and formal procedures—and found a
strong correlation with flight safety (Jing and Chang 2006). Such cross-
cultural comparisons, however, must be handled with care, inasmuch as
they embrace mismatches between western-derived social science concepts
and a variety of local conditions. The issues of cultural contexts of advanced
technologies cannot be resolved from the perspective of any single culture.
Rather, they should be approached through cross-cultural dialogues.
Human-machine interfaces are increasingly a challenge as modern airli-
ners become increasingly, technologically complex. A simple aircraft such
as the DC-3, with manual controls (as contrasted to fly-by-wire), few auto-
mated alarms, and analog navigational displays demand few skills beyond
basic airmanship. As more systems, alarms, and control modes are added,
more skills are required, a fact that is sometimes discovered only after a
fatal crash. When China Northern 483 was on final approach into Urumqi
in November 13, 1993, it was flying too low, and the Ground Proximity
Warning System sounded an alarm: ‘‘Whoop! Whoop! Terrain! Terrain!
Pull up! Pull up!’’ Fifteen seconds later, the MD-82 crashed into the ground.
The final words on the Cockpit Voice Recorder were, ‘‘Sh? shèn mé yé sı̀
‘pull up’’’? [What does ‘‘pull up’’ mean?] (Feldman 1998).1
Another safety system that makes even more subtle linguistic assump-
tions is the Terminal Collision Avoidance System (TCAS). Two airliners
equipped with this system (required of all airliners flying in Europe and
North America) watch out, so to speak, for each other, and when their flight
paths are converging (meaning an impending midair collision), they nego-
tiate and communicate a ‘‘resolution advisory’’ with each other. One air-
craft will be instructed by the TCAS to climb, and the other to descend,
thus averting a collision. Air traffic controllers likewise in congested air-
space are on the lookout for impending midair collisions. On July 21,
2002, over Lake Constanz, a DHL Boeing 757 and a Bashkirian Airlines
Tupolev 154 were on converging flight paths. The TCAS instructed the
Russian flight to ascend and the German flight to descend. The ground
Batteau 5

controller, however, issued conflicting instructions, telling the DHL flight

to climb and the Bashkirian flight to descend. The Russian crew obeyed the
human voice from the ground, while the German crew obeyed the machine
instructions. Both aircraft descended, and collided, killing all seventy-one
on board the two aircraft (Bundestelle für Flugunfalluntersuchung 2004).
Breakdowns in communication, not only with machines but with other
actors (aircrew, cabin crew, air traffic control) in the production chains of
flight also can result in tragedy. The most notable of these, and the worst
disaster in aviation history, occurred on March 27, 1977, on the ground
in Tenerife, when the stresses of a crowded airport were compounded with
an irregular procedure, with use of nonstandard communication phraseol-
ogy, and with schedule pressures, resulting in a breakdown of crew coordi-
nation and the collision of a Pan Am and a KLM 747 on the runway. The
Tenerife disaster, in which 583 passengers and crew died, illustrates the fra-
gility air transport in which unexpected complexities (in this case, of lan-
guage and geography) exceed the tolerances of the system. In Karl
Weick’s analysis, a normally robust system was ‘‘vulnerable’’ to rapid
degradation into the combination of complexity and tight coupling that
leads to a ‘‘normal accident’’ (Perrow 1984; Weick 1990).
Numerous other accidents could be added to this account to illustrate the
complex demands created by advanced aviation technology. In the early
days of flight automation, unfamiliarity with keyboard inputs that replaced
analog controls caused a crash at Mt Ste Odile on January 20, 1992, killing
eighty-seven. The pilot typed in a ‘‘vertical descent speed’’ of 3.3 (that is,
3.3 thousand, or 3300 feet per minute) when he should have been inputting a
glide slope of 3.3 (that is, 3.3! angle of descent, which would correspond to
a vertical speed of 800 feet per second), thus causing the aircraft to plummet
abruptly (Lenorovitz 1992; Learmount 2006). A Vietnam Airlines cargo
flight with a Russian captain and a Vietnamese First Officer, on May 18,
2004, came close to crashing while climbing out of Charles DeGaulle air-
port near Paris, because the two pilots differed over how to respond to con-
fusing instructions from Air Traffic Control and the flight instrumentation.
The common thread of all of these is the informational and electromecha-
nical and cultural and linguistic complexity associated with technological
advances that create hazardous situations. When cascades of multiple fail-
ures go uncorrected in the precious few seconds of (for example) a final
approach, tragedy ensues.
One might suggest that the data presented here on accident chains are
anecdotal and hence cannot add up to a general theory. To some extent, this
is inevitable: in an ultrasafe system, when causal patterns do emerge even
6 Science, Technology, & Human Values 000(00)

weakly out of statistically valid data, industry-wide corrective actions are

taken by national authorities, air carriers, and the International Civil Avia-
tion Organization. Discovery of such causal patterns, however, depends on
knowing what to look for. The consequential pattern of higher accident
rates in Asia, Africa, and Latin America is well recognized. Presented here
is a new, yet undiscussed dynamic, technological peripheralization, sub-
mitted as a common causal theme underlying Third World industrial
hazards not limited to aviation.
The remainder of this article develops the argument that these mis-
matches are inherent in a technologically dynamic world system, and that
the dynamics of that system, if uncorrected by reverse salients, will produce
a growing number of hazardous possibilities.

2. Distributions of Innovations in Scale-Free Networks

The tragic events described here are an expectable result of the uneven
spread of the components of complex technological assemblages. Technol-
ogies such as air transport comprise networks made up of artifacts (air-
planes, airports, navigation facilities), social groups and categories (flight
crews, passengers, airlines, labor unions, regulatory agencies), and critical
problems (safety, efficiency, schedule-keeping). ‘‘Technology,’’ a term that
many find problematic (Marx 1997), contains many values in addition to
efficient functionality: modernism, social cachet, and nationalism, as many
have noted (Fritzsche 1992; Nye 1994; Wohl 1994; Paris 1995; Young
1995; Psenka 2008). For the present purposes, we may view technologies
as those elements with the fewest degrees of freedom in assemblages of
social groups, social problems, and social artifacts. Technologies frequently
evolve by solving problems that they in fact create: the design of the ‘‘safety
bicycle,’’ for example, was a response to the social problems created by its
predecessor, the high-wheeled ‘‘ordinary’’ (Pinch and Bijker 1987). In these
assemblages, ‘‘technology’’ consists of those objects and representations
that everyone can agree upon or at least focus upon. ‘‘Technology’’ is thus
defined both by its capacity to innovate and by its capacity to stabilize.
A formidable literature, not reviewed here, explores the bases of techno-
logical innovation. Rather than reviewing this literature, I will focus my
argument on the following four key points:

1. Viewing technology from an Actor-Network perspective, the topology

of modern networks of groups, artifacts, and problems approximates a
scale-free network. In these networks, the distribution of connectivity
Batteau 7

approximates an exponential rather than a normal or Poisson distribu-

tion. The topology is highly centralized having a power law distribution
with a long tail, rather than the random graph of an Erdos network. In
networks with normal distributions of connectivity, as the network
grows larger, the mean connectivity remains the same. By contrast,
as scale-free networks grow larger, the range of connectivity grows
larger, with a few central nodes having large numbers of connections
with other nodes (Barabasi 2003; Barabasi and Bonabeau 2003). One
can see this hyperconnectivity in comparing contemporary air transport
today with that of sixty years ago at the dawn of the jet age: the aircraft
are far more complex, procedures are more detailed, the airlines are
more bureaucratized, the industry is more tightly woven into society
than it was at a time when air travel was a high-end status display, and
terrorism is a travel hazard not imagined in the earlier era. Explaining
why industries such as telecommunications, information technology,
and air transport have this particular topology is an important although
separate discussion that cannot be developed here, except to note that it
is a consequence of increasing artifact and role complexity.
2. Innovation is far more typically a matter of recombining existing arti-
facts, groups, and problems, than it is about developing a New Thing.
This is a commonplace observation in the literature of innovation.
3. Artifacts are uniquely decomposable into systems, subsystems, compo-
nents, and parts. Even the bicycle, which supplies well-known illustra-
tions of SCOT (Social Construction of Technology) is decomposable
into its frame, its wheels, and its drive mechanism; this last can be
decomposed into the crank, the chain, and the gearing mechanism; each
of these in turn can be decomposed at least two levels further into
shafts, bearings, gears, brackets, and fasteners. Analogous efforts to
decompose social groups into individuals, and individuals into body
parts, run up against profound legal and ethical objections, perhaps
skirted by a shadowy trade in vital organs.
4. Innovation is more typically a recombination of elements at lower lev-
els of decomposition; diffusion of artifacts and behaviors, by contrast,
is most easily achieved with the higher-level, modular assemblages.
The example of personal computers is a perfect illustration of this. After
an early start where the first PCs—the Altair 8800, for example—were
sold in kit form or were assembled by the earliest adopters from parts
purchased at Radio Shack, the real takeoff or broad-scale diffusion of
personal computing (a complex assemblage of objects, groups, and
problems) came when computers could be purchased with all of their
8 Science, Technology, & Human Values 000(00)

components, including peripherals and software, already configured.

Automobiles and cell phones likewise diffuse easily because of their
modularity and bundling (with service plans or warranties) and a
preexisting infrastructure (of highways, of cell phone towers) made
their acquisition almost truly ‘‘plug and play.’’ By contrast, to be a
developer of new computers or cell phones or automobiles or airplanes
requires access to these devices at the component level, including the
engineering skills and manufacturing resources required to develop a
new carburetor or disc drive or wing geometry. Component-level
access is concentrated in core regions of the network and is difficult
in remote regions. Anyone living in a small town, who has tried to find
a new head gasket at the local parts store for his Swedish import, is
aware of this.

The net result of these topologies and distributions is that within a scale-free
network, opportunities for developing New Things are concentrated in the
denser regions, and the network density creates an accelerating pace of
innovation. Stated simply, the positive feedback that creates technological
acceleration (New Things compounding New Things) is more likely in
regions where the circuits are smaller (i.e., denser connections among nodes
result in fewer steps required to close a loop).
The connection density at the core of this scale-free network creates an
autocatalytic set (Kauffman 1993) in which artifacts, problems, and groups
are exploring and exploiting new assemblages, new dilemmas, and new
institutional configurations. The ferment in Detroit in the early twentieth
century around a growing automotive industry derived from a confluence
of predecessor industries, large numbers of skilled craftsmen, raw material
advantages, and the urban challenges of a growing nation of immigrants.
Some of the ‘‘solutions’’ to these problems actually reinforced the problem
(more factories brought in more immigrants which led to more problems in
urban planning which created a need for more transport); this created an
explosive dynamic that led to rapid growth in a new industry. Some of the
configurations or initial conditions accepted at that time (e.g., cultural gaps
between labor and management) set patterns that continue even today. Like-
wise, an early alliance between aviators and the military dating back to the
earliest years of experimentation laid the groundwork for an aerospace
industry that is at the core of the military industrial complex. This institu-
tional complex, enabled by the sort of public revenues that are available
only within wealthy nations, is very fecund of new problems (cramming
more airplanes into crowded skies, and more passengers into larger
Batteau 9

Percentage adoption

Time

Figure 1. Logistic Curve of Adoption.

airplanes), of new systems (systems of air traffic management), of new

solutions (such as TCAS, see above), and of new groups (footloose global
business travelers or medical tourists). These configurations represent com-
promises achieved in core regions that are then exported around the world.
(This self-reinforcing, innovation-generating positive feedback is not an
inevitability. Network density also increases opportunities for negative
feedback for dampening new ideas and new things. The management struc-
ture of General Motors comes to mind here. What distinguishes Silicon Val-
ley from the Big Three automotive companies—both core institutions, both
having dense networks, yet the one innovation-producing and the other
innovation-smothering—is the heterogeneity of corporate, social, and tech-
nological cultures. In Silicon Valley, if a young engineer has a bright idea
that is rejected by management, she can always walk across the street and
find another company that will be intrigued enough to invest in her idea.
This free flow of intellectual capital, a norm in Silicon Valley, is extremely
rare in the monoculture of the Big Three automakers. Along with optimal
firm size and adequacy of capital, it provides the fertile ground, so to speak,
for accelerated rates of technological coevolution, a landscape containing a
requisite variety of cultural/technological niches.)
A further consequence of this network topology is that just as innovation
accelerates in regions of dense connectivity (assuming other favorable con-
ditions), the diffusion of innovation slows down as one moves further from
10 Science, Technology, & Human Values 000(00)

Percentage adoption

Distance

Figure 2. Reverse Logistic Curve of Diffusion.

the core. The well-known logistic curve of adoption for specific technolo-
gies (figure 1) is, by the same dynamics that create it, reversed when one
considers levels of adoption as a function of network distance from the
locus of innovation (figure 2):
‘‘Distance,’’ I must make clear, refers to social and institutional distance
and linkages, a traversing of networked nodes, rather than to geography
(although geography has an influence here). The more links in a network
that an innovation must travel, the less likely its adoption at any point in
time, and the less likely the social environment that promotes adoption.
To state this figuratively, just as diffusion over time is a self-reinforcing
process once a critical inflection point is reached and social pressures
promote adoption (Rogers 1995, 320), diffusion over distance is an ‘‘other-
cancelling’’ process beyond a critical point, which we might call a ‘‘deflec-
tion point,’’ beyond which preexisting technological and institutional
arrangements have not yet succumbed to the innovation, and (perhaps only
temporarily) are able to mount an effective resistance, hence deflecting the
innovation. Well-known (if apocryphal) examples of ‘‘resistance to innova-
tion’’ include factory managers who keep a paper schedule in their hip
pocket, because they do not trust the automated production scheduling sys-
tem, or farmers who ‘‘stubbornly cling’’ to ‘‘old fashioned methods.’’ Any-
one who has attempted to introduce a new idea or method into an aging
Batteau 11

public bureaucracy is familiar with ‘‘resistance to innovation.’’ The tone of

these invidious phrasings reflects, of course, what Rogers notes as the ‘‘pro-
innovation bias’’ in the diffusion literature, an assumption that innovation is
good, rational, and inevitable, and that resistance is therefore irrational and
futile (Rogers 1995, 100-15). The topological analysis presented here, one
hopes, is less biased either for or against innovation.
The importance of a logistic distribution of increasing adoption over
time (deriving from the interaction of network connections and threshold
effects) is well recognized in the diffusion literature (Rogers 1995, 320). Its
obverse, the reverse logistic curve of declining efficacy over distance pre-
sented here, is equally important, though less commented on. When one
introduces institutional barriers such as corporate, state, or industry bound-
aries and identities, these effects are accentuated. Institutional barriers, after
all, exist precisely for the purpose of impeding the flow of information and
artifacts.
This, then, is the dark side of technological acceleration: given the dif-
ference between the rates of technological invention and diffusion, for any
given technology on the steepest part of the logistic curve, the technological
gaps between cores and peripheries will be expanding. On the ground in
some countries, ox carts are the preferred freight transport even as airliners
fly overhead; in some regions of Mexico, runners carry messages from one
village to the next, even as those messages originated in a cell phone in a
regional market town. In some Himalayan villages, cow dung supplies more
energy than electricity, while at the same time the runoff from their local
tributary powers a hydroelectric turbine hundreds of miles downstream.
Without accepting the schematism of world systems theory (Wallerstein
1974), I will designate these villages and regions, like other isolated,
network-thin communities, as ‘‘technological peripheries,’’ at the fringes
of network of diffusion links, where advanced technologies arrive slowly
and incompletely. These diffusion chains are no longer structured solely
by geography (as Wallerstein’s core/periphery scheme implied) but instead
are articulated (and separated) by mutually reinforcing social, linguistic,
industrial, and economic distinctions. Rather than arriving as complete
packages, some components such as modular end user devices diffuse more
rapidly while others (e.g., user support) diffuse slowly, if at all. Some crit-
ical elements, such as user manuals, may never reach the distant shore, at
least in a serviceable form (e.g., an adequate translation).
In many respects, these gradients of technological development are as
old as civilization: The Romans, for example, enjoyed steam baths, even
as Germanic tribes to the north huddled around campfires. What is new is
12 Science, Technology, & Human Values 000(00)

a distinctive nineteenth- and twentieth-century phenomenon, the develop-

ment of highly engineered, large-scale, tightly coupled systems. These sys-
tems, whether railways, air transport, power grids, telephone networks, or
water supplies, flow people, material, energy, and information over large
distances. Some of these, such as water supply networks based on gravity
feed, are simple in their construction and operation and have existed for mil-
lennia. Although controlling nondissipative flows require new management
techniques, these ancient systems did not tightly couple highly engineered
devices with possibly less sophisticated components. By contrast, many of
the components of industrial transportation networks, whether rail net-
works, air traffic systems, or the assemblage of roads, automobiles, and
energy transport and delivery, are highly engineered. ‘‘Highly engineered’’
indicates elaborate and stabilized compromises among multiple contending
interests (including the larger environment) over such issues as system
architecture, component standards, and optimization criteria. When used
in an environment other than that for which the device was optimized, com-
ponent performance is degraded.
The common dynamic of all these is not some characterological or men-
tal deficiency in maintaining, training, or regulating up to a (Western-
derived) standard, but rather the heterogeneity of expectations, artifacts,
infrastructure, support, skills, management, and system planning that is
an inevitable consequence of the variable rates of diffusion in a large-
scale technological system within an articulated social field. In core
localities and regions, artifacts, infrastructure, skills, system planning, reg-
ulation, and other matters are more or less finely tuned to each other. The
configuration is stabilized. The further one gets from the points of origin,
the greater the mismatch. That two of the examples given here (Tenerife
and Lake Constanz) occurred in core regions (the Canary Islands at the time
were part of Spain) actually underscore one key point that large scale inevi-
tably adds social, political, and linguistic complexity to already-complex
electromechanical systems.
Most central to the argument being developed here is that modern airli-
ners, and modern air traffic management, are complex, tightly coupled sys-
tems, in which not simply mechanical devices but operator training,
management practices, organizational culture, spoken language, and infra-
structure operate only within a set of narrow tolerances (Risukhin 2001,
18ff). These narrow tolerances represent compromises that were achieved
through dense coordination in the core regions, where the systems were
developed. These compromises, however, are not always accepted else-
where. ‘‘Human error’’ such systems now refers less to the motor or
Batteau 13

judgment skills of the operators, and more to breakdowns in crew coordina-

tion (Kern 2001), corporate leadership (Perrow 2006), or government pol-
icy. Meshkati (1991) suggests that mismatches—‘‘the way the (system)
parts . . . fit together and interact’’—are behind large-scale system acci-
dents, yet without inquiring into the origins of these mismatches. Large-
scale systems, spanning multiple regions with diverse languages, customs,
regulatory regimes, and cultural assumptions, add a sometimes fatal level of
complexity to a highly complex, tightly coupled system. Perhaps more so
than any other technology, contemporary aviation combines the complexity
of global reach with the efficiencies of tight coupling, joining benefits at the
core with peril on the peripheries.
Large-scale transportation and information systems spanning developed
and developing regions inevitably embrace gaps and mismatches of infra-
structure, device sophistication, and operational standards. This is as true
of systems that flow information as well as those that flow people and mate-
rial. In regions where the electric power supply is at times unreliable, where
fuels might be low grade, and where the only good Internet connection
might be at a café in the center of town, enterprises are at a competitive dis-
advantage compared to their better connected and better supported cousins
in the larger cities and more developed regions. This is hardly a new story.
What is new is that these gaps are widening. As core businesses shift
more of their business to electronic commerce, disdaining the ‘‘public Inter-
net’’ for newer virtual private networks (VPNs) with greater reliability and
throughput, the villager in Venezuela has less opportunity to comprehend,
let alone compete in activities in business centers whether of New York,
Tokyo, or Mumbai. As Internet content becomes more graphics-intensive,
those whose only connection is dial-up discover that downloading files
takes longer than ever. As enterprises shift from bureaucratic toward colla-
borative models requiring higher levels of trust (Heckscher and Adler
2006), core regions possessed of the institutional infrastructure of trust com-
pound their competitive advantages.
Occasionally the diffusion of end user devices alters local balances of
power: fishermen in India use cell phones to compare prices from multiple
buyers in the precious hours before their catches spoil; farmers in Brazil
track futures on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. However, this does little
to alter the fact that the Merc is still in Chicago, not northeast Brazil, and
that the cell phones were designed in Finland (even if they were manufac-
tured in China). Nor does it alter the fact that clustering and location still
create competitive advantages (Porter 1998), making Helsinki but not New
Delhi a center of cell phone innovation. That new technological centers
14 Science, Technology, & Human Values 000(00)

are emerging (Mumbai for software, Sao Paulo for aircraft, or Dongfeng,
China’s ‘‘space city’’ for rocketry), demonstrates that this is a dynamic and
not a deterministic process. The dense coordination behind these achieve-
ments rests on multiple political, geographic, and cultural factors that could
be studied profitably by other regions seeking to achieve or maintain tech-
nological leadership.
In sum, the widening gaps in technological capability between cores and
peripheries, although brought into dramatic relief by the occasional airliner
crash, more typically result in stable configurations in which peripheral
regions play new, subordinate roles, supplying those functions (notably
maintenance) that are labor-intensive, and accepting higher rates of hazard
in return. Various schemes of technology transfer, development, microcre-
dit, and local self-sufficiency may mitigate some of the effects of core
development. National efforts to promote a specific industry, such as the
software industry in Mumbai, can create new centers of innovation even
in the Third World. The unrelenting advance of technological capabilities,
whether in microdevices or innovative materials or medical procedures or
industrial automation or pharmaceutical regimes or nanotechnologies, will
continue to widen the gaps between the centers that produce them and far
fringes to which they are exported.

3. Singularities and Salients

There are several caveats that might be raised with this perspective. For
example, it is often observed that innovations—end user devices, actually,
rather than the entire assemblage of research institutes and laboratories and
manufacturing facilities and support networks—‘‘leapfrog’’ into develop-
ing regions, in part because they do not have to compete with more mature
technologies for subscribers, customers, or infrastructure. Countries with
unreliable land lines are adopting cell phones more rapidly than the United
States; China is building factories that are as up-to-date as any in the United
States, even as aging auto plants rust in Flint, Michigan. These countries are
adopting infrastructure, production facilities, and end user devices, but this
by itself is not transforming them into creators of advanced technology:
they are still dependent at least in the short term on laboratories and corpo-
rations in the United States, Japan, and Finland for the knowledge and the
devices.
A second caveat might come from the observation that Pakistan has
become an exporter of nuclear weapons technology, much to the dismay
of the remainder of the world. Likewise, it is feared that Iran and the
Batteau 15

Peoples Republic of Korea will follow suit. Although Iran and Pakistan
might be considered semiperiphery, North Korea is clearly the periphery
of the periphery. In Pakistan and Iran, the formula is roughly equivalent:
a unique source of wealth, plus Western-educated scientists, plus despotic
government, plus a singular focus, add up to one technological success.
North Korea substituted extreme repression for wealth, and Moscow Uni-
versity for Oxbridge, but otherwise mirrored the singularity of Iran’s and
Pakistan’s achievements. In none of these cases does the singularity even
approach an educational-technological-industrial complex capable of sus-
tained generation of invention and innovation.
These singularities also highlight the role of the least portable, most
complex, and most diffusion-resistant elements of a technological complex
to wit academic institutions and government laboratories. The core of the
core, in terms of generating technologies that bestride the narrow world, are
the complexes of universities, government (including military) laboratories,
and their allied corporations that make technological leadership their busi-
ness. These institutional complexes are fixed in place, both by virtue of the
greater wealth of cores (whether in Europe or Asia, for which petroleum
revenues might substitute) and the unique cultural and institutional charac-
teristics of the core regions.
One also observes that peripheries are more creative than cores. In the
history of aviation, two bicycle mechanics from the provinces succeeded
where Dr. Samuel Langley, the Director of the Smithsonian Institution,
failed. A farmer, Cyrus McCormick, along with a Negro blacksmith, Jo
Anderson, in a semiperipheral region, the antebellum American South,
invented a reaper that transformed agriculture around the world. For a bril-
liant invention originating on the periphery to become a durable technology,
however, requires adoption by core institutions, whether the Army Signal
Corps (for the airplane) or American Telephone and Telegraph (for the
transistor).
The ebb and flow of artifacts, influence, and ideas around the world,
along with the rise and decline of industrial cores, make it clear that tech-
nological peripheralization is not a unidirectional affair. A reverse flow of
technology is illustrated by the efforts of automakers in the United States to
implement the ‘‘Toyota Production System’’ (TPS), more typically known
and adapted as ‘‘Lean Manufacturing’’ (LM). In its original (core) context,
the TPS was a complete ensemble of work practices, work relationships,
and management methods oriented toward the elimination of waste and the
management of complexity. The TPS evolved in a context of considerable
cultural similarities within companies, minimal social distances between
16 Science, Technology, & Human Values 000(00)

labor and management (exemplified by company uniforms worn by all, and

modest [by U.S. standards] pay differentials), and a culture where intentions
(honne) and explanations (tatemae) are assumed to exist on separate planes.
Outsiders initially find the ensemble incomprehensible, exemplified by the
U.S.-educated Iranian engineer Darius Mehri who spent three years work-
ing in ‘‘Nizumi’’ (Mehri 1995; Nanas, forthcoming).
When imported into the United States under the tutelage of the Massachu-
setts Institute of Technology’s International Motor Vehicle Program, TPS
was reinterpreted primarily in terms of inventory elimination and workflow
improvement. In the 1980s and 1990s, ‘‘Lean Manufacturing’’ was adopted,
or at least given lipservice, by numerous large-scale industrial operations and
became ‘‘the machine that changed the world’’ (Womack, Jones, and Roos
1990). In addition to efficiency and waste elimination (both of which lend
themselves to quantification and hence travel well from one context to
another), TPS/LM include kaizen (continuous improvement, which is some-
what more subjective) and teamwork and communication, both of which are
very much rooted in cultural contexts (e.g., individualistic vs. communitarian
cultures). ‘‘Teamwork’’ in the United States and Japan has drastically differ-
ent meanings, even if English speakers label them with the same noun.
From the management perspective presented by Womack, Jones, and
Roos, the case for LM is unambiguous, which is indeed the case by its own
internal logic. From a labor perspective, by contrast, when implemented in
the United States, LM results in greater stress on workers, greater tension
between workers and management, and higher rates of occupational injuries
(Babson 1995; Davis 2008). Analyses by Babson, Davis, and others make it
clear that Toyota Production is a system, with substantial cultural underpin-
nings; recent developments in the U.S. automotive history make it clear that
its recontextualization as LM have been less than successful. Greater cul-
tural nuance in the analyses of the diffusion of systems such as these would
go far in explaining their differential successes and failures.2
Despite all this, the near-ubiquity of ample computing power, high band-
width connectivity, and institutional infrastructure in core regions create for
them advantages not only in creating new technologies but also in defining
what is a legitimate technology and setting the rules or standards for tech-
nological devices. Core advantages derive not from possession of superior
microchips but from a topology of institutional networks that facilitates a
fecundity of invention at the core and, through standard setting, impose
on the periphery these inventions and the new lifeworlds they create.
In sum, although creativity, leapfrogging, and focused investment can
locally and temporarily overcome the disadvantages of the peripheries,
Batteau 17

by themselves they do not alter the basic structure of a mismatch between

increasingly complex technological development in selected regions, com-
plex technological developments that are adopted only with increasing dif-
ficulty in others. The presentation here, while certainly overly schematic (as
befits any model), supplies a topological explanation for the banal and ubi-
quitous observation of technological mismatches with which we began.
Like any model, its value will lie both in its ability to order previously
observed facts and in its ability to stimulate new observations. The new
observations waiting to be made are of the costs of technological mis-
matches in systems that span core and peripheral regions, costs that these
systems now externalize. Furthermore, by overlaying these mismatches
with the operational issues of large-scale, tightly coupled systems, I have
suggested that technological development, so frequently celebrated in the
core creates unique hazards and disadvantages at the peripheries.

4. Conclusion
In sum, the perspective of technological peripheralization supplies an alter-
native to both melioristic views of technological ‘‘progress’’ and utilitarian
understandings of ‘‘technology.’’ Technology is seen here not simply as
tools or useful artifacts, but as made up of stable objects on which are
inscribed arrays of social values, social institutions, social problems, polit-
ical motivations, and social identities. The greater the technological devel-
opment (in terms of complexity and scope), the greater the requirement for
institutional investment in training, regulation, planning, support, and
infrastructure.
This perspective of technological peripheralization has several implica-
tions for conventional views of technological ‘‘progress,’’ only three of
which can be touched on here. One implication is that modern technologies,
which promise so much at the core, may actually deliver peril at the periph-
ery. The example of air transport in Nigeria is illustration of this. This
increased hazard may be offset by an increase in productivity or some other
positive value. More typically, the advantages and costs of the technology
are differentially allocated and socially accounted within different regions
of the network and within different stages of the technology’s life cycle.
The ‘‘ship breakers’’ in Gujarat, vividly described by Langewiesche
(2004, 197ff.), who disassemble rusting freighters and tankers, in the pro-
cess ingesting toxic materials and sustaining predictable injuries, are at the
end of the road of a manufacturing and transportation system that sustains
(but only for others) the inexpensive abundance of a global economy.
18 Science, Technology, & Human Values 000(00)

A second implication is that large-scale systems should force us to revise

‘‘standard views’’ of technology (critiqued in Pfaffenberger 1992). Large-
scale systems, whether in electric power transmission or transportation, are
justified in terms of the economies of scale that they create. When viewed
from a global, world systems perspective, in which externalities cannot be
ignored, these economies of scale diminish. Air transport, which contribu-
ted much to the efficiency of colonial administration in the twentieth cen-
tury, has a more problematic aspect at the periphery: integration into
global markets and their neoliberal insecurities and opportunities for work
abroad that often evolve into a necessity to work abroad.
A final implication is that technological diffusion, which is often viewed
as an equilibrium-seeking process (Wejnert 2002, 318), may actually intro-
duce greater instabilities in a large-scale political order, an issue opened by
Smith (1993). In addition to clearly articulated elements such as artifacts,
infrastructure, standards, and skills, technological assemblages embrace
less tangible elements such as expectations, identities, and ideas of sacred-
ness. Cinematic marvels that work so well in Hollywood (or Bollywood)
create expectations of technological perfection that are inevitably disap-
pointed. These starry-eyed expectations, accelerated by mass media and
unconstrained by physicality or sociality, are the wild cards in the deck
of technological diffusion: when a developing nations embrace (Western-
derived) technological goals and identities far in advance of their actual
capability to achieve them, they must either focus on a few destabilizing
iconic singularities (the examples of Pakistan and Iran) or accept a state
of long-term disappointment.

Notes
1. This is a back-translation; the available published reports are in English.
2. I gratefully acknowledge the contribution of my students Daniel Davis and
Elizabeth Nanas to this section.

Author’s Note
Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this material
are mine, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Founda-
tion (NSF). I would also like to express my appreciation to participants in a work-
shop on Technological Peripheries, held at Universidad Iberoamericana on March
12-14, 2004: Mehdi Alaoui, Carmen Bueno, Ricardo Dominguez, John Forje, Julia
Gluesing, Jing Hung-Sying, Barbara Kanki, Mykola Kulyk, Saad Laraqui, Caroline
Moricot, Olugbenga Mejabi, Ashleigh Merritt, Servando Ortoll, Carolyn Psenka,
David Robertson, Galina Suslova, Thomas Wang, and Lisa Whittaker, and
Batteau 19

particularly to Capt. Alejandro Perez Chavez for his extraordinary efforts in support
of the workshop. The influence of Alain Fras and Charles Perrow in conceptualizing
the workshop is gratefully acknowledged, as is the timely assistance of Carolyn
Psenka in the revision of this manuscript. Additional support for the workshop
on Technological Peripheries was provided by el Consejo Nacional Ciencia y
Tecnologı́a, as well as by Aeromexico Airlines. The comments of the anonymous
reviewers for Science, Technology, and Human Values have made a substantial con-
tribution to the improvement of an earlier draft of this article.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no conflicts of interest with respect to the authorship and/or
publication of this article.

Funding
Research for this article was supported in part by a grant from the National Science
Foundation, Grant #0340902. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommenda-
tions expressed in this material are the author’s, and do not necessarily reflect the
views of the National Science Foundation (NSF).

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Bio
Allen W. Batteau is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Wayne State Uni-
versity and the Director of the university’s Institute for Information Technology and
Culture. His books include The Invention of Appalachia (University of Arizona
Press, 1980), and Technology and Culture (Waveland Press, 2010).