Science, Technology, and Social Change (Routledge Revivals) by Steven Yearley

Author:Steven Yearley [Yearley, Steven]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781317629191
Google: Gl8tBAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2014-08-01T05:57:26+00:00

This change he associates with the potential for saturation of the available market with manufactured goods. On this view, once production efficiency has reached truly staggering levels consumers will not wish to acquire familiar goods as quickly as they can be made. The possibility of overproduction makes it attractive for manufacturers to look for new markets and new profits by introducing new product lines. Additionally, this trend away from process to product innovations coincides with a period of enormous growth for large corporations. While process innovations may hold many attractions for small firms operating in a market situation of nearly perfect competition, their appeal to large corporations is less intense. Contemporary large corporations commonly do not operate in anything like perfect competition; there are, for example, only a few producers in the high–volume car market in European countries. Accordingly, the primary interest of large businesses today is in the generation of innovative products. Their aim is to introduce either new goods or new versions of existing products. Gorz argues (1976, p. 164) that such an objective is dictated by the requirement of continued profitability:

There is only one way in which they can achieve this: by means of constant innovation in the field of consumer goods, whereby commodities for which the market is close to saturation–point are constantly made obsolete and are replaced by new, different, more sophisticated products with the same functions.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.