Dissertation Research: Automatic Control: Development and Transfer

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This dissertation project investigates the relationship between technology and culture by examining the development and transfer of electronic automatic control technology between the United States and Japan in the period of 1920-1965. Although Japanese business imported large quantities of control technology from America during the 1920's, the material, managerial, and scientific circumstances under which engineers used these technologies differed substantially between Japan and the United States. Different conditions produced different technologies appropriate to these societies' technological capabilities. In addition, in each country industrialists, bureaucrats, and academics created distinctive interpretations of control suitable to their particular social, cultural, and political situations. This study will use control technology as a vehicle for understanding the material and sociocultural transformations necessary to move technologies between societies. The central hypothesis is that for imported technology to be useful, its recipients must reorganize and adapt it to suit their particular needs. At the same time, however, the recipients must reevaluate the technology in light of its new role in their society, creating a new set of meanings that define the terms under which the technology will be applied. In so doing, the users transform their relationships to themselves, to each other, and to the technology itself.