Proceedings of the UNESCO - University of Tsukuba International Seminar on Traditional Technology for Environmental Conservation and Sustainable Development in the Asian-Pacific Region, held in Tsukuba Science City, Japan, 11-14 December, 1995.
Editors: Kozo Ishizuka, D. Sc. , Shigeru Hisajima, D. Sc. , Darryl R.J. Macer, Ph.D.
The impact has been particularly dramatic on traditional societies, for they are seldom equipped with the cultural tools to evaluate and defend a cohesive separate world from the entry of globalism, hidden as it is behind the status intrusion of consumer objects or the advantage for local income from new roads. Meanwhile, along with the salience of past cultural ways, traditional knowledge and technological ways are likely to be swept aside if they stand in the path of globalisation's progress. As a consequence, traditional peoples increasingly lose control over the balance between their lives and the 'spaceship' environment they inhabit; the core technical knowledge of village life is relegated to the obsolescent scrap heap of the unfashionable; and the globalising world as it sweeps by, does not even see the potential relevance of traditional practices and knowledge to wider environmental solutions.
I therefore argue that it is impossible to come to any realistic conclusions about the potential ability to apply traditional technology to environmental and sustainable development unless we approach the question through an understanding of the relations between technology, knowledge, and culture both within a traditional culture confronted by a globalising world, and at the leading edges of globalism itself. For the re-assertion of traditional technological solutions cannot work unless these solutions are fitted into the cultural and economic sweep of globalising society.
This could seem a depressingly minimalist scenario of transformation except that recent evidence is showing us that the global technological economy is undergoing quite radical change right now, re-asserting the human and local scale within culture, and that within this, quite new advantages are emerging for the small player, and potentially, for small-scale environmentally friendly technologies.
My story starts however in a traditional society confronting the technologies of globalisation for the first time.
This event occurred over thirty five years ago. But its message is highly pertinent to the mood of resistance to modern technology that is spreading through the region today. In the Cook Island example, the people precipitously found themselves relatively wealthy in the wider cash economy when the world discovered and bought the pearl shell that the villagers dived for off their reefs. Subsequently, the people found that they had to do very little to maintain a relatively easy lifestyle. They imported alcohol and spent a considerable amount of time getting drunk. Health problems followed close on the heels of the hedonistic self-indulgence that ready access to cash permitted. Infant mortality, for example, grew to 50 percent of live births.
Sixty of the villagers pursued the benefits of their acquired wealth by taking a trip to the 'bright lights' of the capital, Raratonga. At the end of a spending spree they took home a number of gasoline- powered electricity generators and the pick-up truck.
One year later however, in absence of technical capabilities and spare parts, none of the newly acquired technologies was working. The truck supplier was by this time marketing a new model and could not supply spare-parts at all. Meanwhile, nothing of the peoples' village lifestyle had improved. Two years on, and they interred the rusting, immobile vehicle in a symbolic gesture of rejection of the fruits of modernism they had originally been seduced by.2
It is not often that one hears of a local indigenous culture putting the products of globalism in their place. In this case the technological world was seriously intruding on the Cook Islanders' lives, so they applied their own cultural practices and meanings to it and ceremonially buried it as if it were a person. The story is enchanting because it is unusual: more normally in the trade-off within global and indigenous cultural interplay, the global culture wins. As tiny island states standing on the edge of globalised progress, islands of the Pacific have been late to enter the modern industrial world. But the impact has been profound. Unfortunately, it is no longer as easy to get rid of the encroachment as it was for the Cook Islanders 35 years ago. The new technologies and lifestyles cannot simply be buried, and they won't go away.
In the Kingdom of Tonga, traditional medical knowledge encompassed surgical practices that mirrored those used in modern medicine today. For example, in the early nineteenth century a marooned English sailor observed the surgical procedures that were used in treating a warrior with a spear wound. the barb was cut off and removed, and the wound was then inserted with a trachoma tube made from furled banana leaf in order to drain the wound. The banana leaf had been heated over a fire thus making it sterile. Although using more sophisticated instruments and sterilization procedures, the same principles are applied today in modern medicine.
The average adult of the Philippine Hanunoo tribe could identify 1,600 different botanical species - 400 more than had previously been identified by a systematic botanical survey. The Hanunoo had four different terms for describing the firmness of soil; nine colour categories to reflect soil properties; ten basic and thirty sub-types of rocks; five different topographical types; three different ways of categorizing slopes; and, six major and ten minor types of vegetation grouping.3
It is this 'common stock' of indigenous knowledge that equips the cultural group to inhabit the particular ecological niche which they inhabit. But, as with all common stock knowledge in modernist society - like knowing how to catch buses or answer a telephone - this knowledge is rarely valued very much because everyone has it; and it is likely to have been absorbed by 'learning by doing' rather than through any form of institutionalized activity.4 In general, as they approach traditional societies, either entrepreneurs selling consumer products, or extension agents acting on behalf of modern science, tend to view such traditional cultural knowledge and values as legacies to be bypassed. That is, until the edge of value of traditional knowledge was discovered relatively recently and drug companies headed into the forests talking with the locals to identify plants with substantial pharmacological promise. The UNESCO stimulated Manila Declaration of February, 1992, and the Melaka Accord of June, 1994, adopted by the Asian Symposium on Medicinal Plants, Spices and Other Natural Products - seeks to confront the resultant exploitation of traditional knowledge resources by global corporations. The Declaration and Accord deal with the fair and equitable sharing of benefits deriving from genetic resources and the indigenous knowledge concerning these resources. Working groups are now being formed to influence government; expropriation of the resources however, is still expanding.
Neil Armstrong, when he walked on the moon in 1969, performed a feat that symbolized within global society the most extraordinary level of technological mastery by humans over their natural world. In a remote jungle area of Papua New Guinea the event was interpreted rather differently however to what one might have expected in the United States.
A friend of mine who was present in the Upper Sepik district of Papua New Guinea at the time, told of an indigenous tribesman who returned to his tribe, having heard of the moonwalk on the radio in the capital, Port Moresby. In the tradition of the people, he presented a masterful oratory on rockets and space capsules, and on men journeying through the skies to land on the moon that the people could see above the skyline of their jungle habitat. The people were transfixed. The orator was heard in complete silence, unusual as normally there is a considerable amount of cross-talk whilst an orator presents his speech. At the end, the people asked him two questions. The first was, 'Why did they go? - was it for pigs or women? The second question was, 'Who were they? - Roman Catholics or Seventh Day Adventists?'
Whilst entirely understandable, the strangeness of missed or non-articulated meanings presents a weakness in the face of globalising culture. Interaction between indigenous and global meanings lies within slowly changing everyday experience, not in a sudden tilt in the world that evokes a clear picture of what is to follow. People simply take advantage of what lies in front of them in a seemingly unproblematic way and live the experience, and seek to make sense of the changed meanings with which they are confronted. The weakness lies in the fact that the people cannot see what is emerging in the shadows.
Introduction of the objects that symbolize global society directly implies the economic values and social relations of production of a global industrializing world - even when the commodities are quite literally brought home in a suitcase from a remote industrially connected location.
In the early development of the Bougainville Copper Mines young Papua New Guineans were employed straight out of a timeless tribal society into the copper mines of Bougainville. With their entry into a money economy, they purchased Western consumer products and took them home to their villages. The symbolic wealth power of alien artifacts, such as clothes, radios and watches that they could present as 'bride prices' stood in stark contrast to the 'normal' traditional exchange gifts of pigs, cassowaries and tribal artifacts. The symbolic power of gifts was directly associated with acquired status and exchange-induced obligations. The effect therefore of young men entering the money economy through the Bougainville Copper Company was to deeply penetrate and erode the traditional structures of authority, obligation, status and cultural meaning of the indigenous society.
In this case we therefore see the power of the symbol of global culture entering an indigenous culture, or what Arthur Koestler otherwise refers to as the 'Coca-Colonization of the world'5. This is not a simple colonization of unresisting cultures as the case from the Cook Islands presented earlier demonstrates. Indeed indigenous cultures can be highly resourceful, as, for that matter, can modern office cultures, in not only resisting externally induced cultural change, but also in finding ways of surrounding or dismissing the invading 'virus'. Aborigines of the Australian Western Desert, for example, consigned 'whitefella' material technologies to a separate domain of reality from which the objects' alien character could not trouble existing 'dreamtime' meanings.6 This separation can be maintained however only as long as the objects and practices can be insulated from everyday life and daily practices. Far more commonly, the 'form' of alien cultural practices is transformed and in some way filled with meaning by the group into which the innovation is incorporated.7 The people therefore become involved in a continuous struggle to reintegrate their lives around the newly evolved and potentially conflicting understandings of what is happening to them.8 As Clifford Geertz affirms, 'The drive to make sense out of experience, to give it form and order, is evidently as real as the more familiar biological needs': the organism 'cannot live in a world it is unable to understand'.9
Certainly, the impact is more dramatic where the articulation between indigenous and global culture is new. However, the power of the symbol to carry new cultural assumptions into indigenous or local culture is general, just less obvious elsewhere. The power for cultural change lies in the economic and social relations assumptions that lie in the shadows. For example:
In the Kingdom of Tonga during the 1970s, a bakery commenced the baking of bread for the first time in the capital city, Nuku'Alofa. The demand was initially very small from a people whose staple diet was taro, coconuts and fish, and only one sack of imported flour was used a day.
Today, the demand is hundreds of times higher. Bread symbolized modern food, and presaged Kentucky Fried Chicken, Macdonalds and so on, that arrived through Asia and the Pacific with conscious high budget symbols asserting advertising campaigns. With improved roads across the island, Tongatapu, a product of development aid, access to the capital became considerably easier, and people started to come to the town to purchase bread. Children from schools buy bread for lunch rather than eat traditional foods. The need to purchase a staple commodity that cannot be produced from local resources has required villagers to enter the cash economy, so many young people (particularly) congregate in the town looking for work that the modernist elements of the economy can not yet provide adequately, meanwhile eating bread rather than traditional foods - traditional relations and obligations of village life are being eroded with each new loaf of bread that is baked. Because of the low level of wealth of the nation, the flour that is imported is of the lowest quality that can be obtained, and whilst rich in starch, is very poor in nutritional ingredients. Diet-related health problems are accelerating, all because, as one senior Tongan official observed, 'the people had got used to buttered bread.'10
With the introduction of new technologies rather than the arrival of consumer products manufactured elsewhere, interaction between global and indigenous cultures even more strongly lays the foundation for the global economy to set the framework for indigenous culture and its assumptions. Technological means and productive advantage is accessible to those who have the purchasing power to have access to it: the technologies are not laying in wait within a technological 'library' or 'museum' for members of the public to take them home, as the source of power to do within industrialized society is also the source of power to profit . Not only direct financial purchasing power is implied however. Also, access is implied to the modernist knowledge resources that are required to at least operate and maintain the technology purchased.
From the 1960s to the mid-1970s, 2000 inboard motor craft were brought into the fishing villages of Sri Lanka to improve fishing yields, a program that was devised on the advice of foreign 'experts' whose fisheries experience was mainly of large industrial enterprise. At a cost of 30,000 rupees, or 10 to 15 years income for village families, the boats were very expensive. To ensure maximum diffusion the boats were therefore introduced under a hire purchase scheme. The majority of village fishermen, precipitated suddenly from a traditional production system into a cash economy, had little savings. Wage costs plus loan repayments placed their new income under considerable strain. With no margins of additional capital to draw on many of the fishermen went bankrupt.
The critical cost was for repairs. Traditional village fishing knowledge provided no experience of use in comprehending or maintaining Norwegian boats with Japanese engines. When the boats broke down the villagers could not fix them. The boats lay idle preventing the continuing repayment of their loans. The richer, more successful boat owners, who could afford to keep the boats running by paying for repairs, managed thus to purchase the second-hand boats, and built up fleets that increased their elite advantage over the distribution of the village fishing trawl. The previous 'inefficient' canoe-based fishing system was almost entirely displaced.
Paul Alexander observed the effects on one fishing village of 1,200 to 1,300 people. As a direct impact of the new boats fishing output rose over 15 years by 7 to 8 times. But the total number of people employed in fishing decreased by 50 percent, and unemployment rose to the point where 35 percent of males under 25 years had no job at all. Formerly, there had been a very small elite of one or two families and a large class of free peasants; now there was a large elite of ten to fifteen families, but at the same time, about 200 families were living close to or below subsistence level, and were kept alive by government rations of rice and other foodstuffs. Meanwhile, the fish, previously eaten in the village, was exported 210 kilometres to Colombo. Prior obligations of village life had disappeared along with the erosion of traditional social relations of production. Not only that but the village was more directly connected with urban-based economic structures because the size of the financial transactions meant that the loan economy became increasingly dependent on external financial sources.11
The dynamics of what happened in the Sri Lankan village are fundamentally to do with interaction between culture, cultural meanings and knowledge, and technological systems. The global cultural context of the technological systems that came into the villagers' lives are implied at every point along the path of their diffusion. The cultural context of technological systems implies an associated economic and status system, and stocks of technical knowledge. When participation in this system becomes the mode of producing together in village life, those who practice old ways simply have no place or value any more.
As in the Sri Lankan case, the likely impact of the entry of the global economy and production system into the indigenous culture is therefore likely to be deep intrusion of globalised cultural values, along with the significant erosion of the cultural salience and authority of traditional knowledge and its meaning within the life-world of the society. When backed by the powerful vibrant images of global culture beamed by satellite to the village television, the symbols that displace past ways, and relationships of cohesion, Coca-cola, Macdonalds, Levi Jeans, and so on, also obscure the dependency on a globalised economy and culture that follows close behind, because the only way that they can be brought into the lifeworld of the people is by participating in the 'colonizing' system, and accepting the cultural assumptions that are associated with it.
Indigenous cultures therefore appear endangered species, progressively moving over the edge of extinction where all that may be left is the marketable element of their difference - colourful dances to be performed in Hilton Hotel lobbies for curious global-culture tourists, dances that by the location of their performance, and the cash nexus that brought them to life, are robbed of their integrative communal significance.
It is here that the relationship between global and indigenous cultures and knowledge can be turned into a strength rather than a disempowering weakness.
First, people have to see their indigenous cultural world through different eyes - ones that can see the connectedness of their world with globalism, but also see how to value their own lifeworld. I learnt recently of an artist in Java who is teaching precisely this by teaching villagers to paint. What is different about these painting classes however is that what the villagers represent artistically is technological artifacts that, under the artist's tutelage, they construct themselves to enhance their productive efficiency. In other words the people learn modern technological thinking and ways by doing, and then turn around and learn to see the value through the eyes of an artist.
Indeed by forging an alliance between globalised scientific or technical knowledge and traditional knowledge and culture, real economic benefits can accrue.
Following on from the impact of the Green Revolution that introduced high yielding dwarf varieties of rice into Asia in the 1970s, high inputs of fertilizers and pesticides were required to maintain the yields. Indonesia, as many other developing countries, reinforced the provision of these chemicals by policy and subsidy support to production, for example, providing a pesticide production subsidy that cost $(US) 7 million per annum in 1974 and rose to a cost of $(US) 150 million per annum by 1985. Meanwhile, international research was demonstrating that the extensive use of pesticides was eliminating the large variety of natural enemies to rice pest insects, such as brown plant hopper, thus causing major outbreaks of these pests.
Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, CSIRO, through their (then) Chief of the Division of Entomology, Doug Waterhouse, initiated a major FAO Rice Integrated Pest Management Project that he persuaded Freedom from Hunger and AIDAB, the Australian aid agency, to sponsor. The project, covering 9 Asian countries, commenced with Indonesia. Its purpose was to educate rice farmers to become experts at managing their rice, exploiting the natural biodiversity in their paddies and thus reducing dependency on pesticides.
The program was particularly successful in Indonesia - where 13 million rice growers are now being trained. President Suharto took a special interest and, guided by CSIRO analysis of the cost of the pesticide production subsidy - $(US) 2 billion, together with health and environment damage, in 1986 issued a presidential decree banning 57 of 61 chemical pesticides used on rice and removing the pesticide subsidy. The change in government policy, together with farmer training, has caused a reduction in pesticide usage by some 60% in Indonesia's rice paddies, whilst rice production continues to climb - increasing by 15% between 1988 and 1993.12
What is of major importance about this case of Australian-Indonesian cooperation is that not only were results of scientific research transferred, but the Indonesian farmers were empowered as researchers themselves. Farmers were taught to become experts and in the course of the program small laboratories were set up at village level. What was transferred was therefore both technical and social innovation that was based on prior experience CSIRO had with Australian farmers. Innovation, generally in the modern world, if it is to be empowering and allow choice over ecological balance, must capture both these dimensions and build them into the 'design space' of planned change.13
The technical knowledge and exploration required to produce such transformation at village level can be located quite close to the village within the overall indigenous knowledge-global cultural knowledge chain. As an Indian colleague, S.S. Solanki, reports:
Over the last few decades the Kirloskar diesel engine has become increasingly popular in rural areas of India for irrigation purposes. Costing approximately Rs15,000, the engine is used for irrigation purposes for only two to three months, and lays idle for the remainder of the year.
Meanwhile there was a problem with transporting surplus produce to the external markets and seeds, fertilizer and tools to the fields. Large landhold farmers could afford either a bullock cart or a tractor for cultivation and transport purposes. Farmers of small and medium sized landholdings could not afford to make such an investment.
An enterprising blacksmith in the Rohtak District of Harynana found a solution which he developed in 1973. With the help from technicians in the nearby town along with frequent consultation with the farmers, he devised a system of fitting the engine with a trolley. The total cost of the motorised trolley including the motor is just over twice the cost of the engine by itself and has been readily accepted by farmers in Haryana, Western Uttar Pradesh, Punjab and Rajasthan. Now, many village artisans and town technicians are involved in what has been an autonomously generated trade: no help was sought from R&D or financial institutions.14
Again, what is required is a new way of seeing at the intersection between global and indigenous cultures. As evidenced in Solanki's case, the people were alive, creating a new meaning for a machine that had been imported into their world from the global technologised culture that lay outside their everyday life.
Indeed, carriage of the process of economic and cultural empowerment of indigenous culture lies at each node of linkage along a local production to global production system. The articulation of levels of technical quality between indigenous and global production is absolutely central. Perhaps one of the most significant factors in cutting off indigenous society from the wealth generating potential of the modernizing sector lies in the lack of such quality control articulation. For example:
When semi-automated weaving looms were introduced into Uttar Pradesh in northern India, specifically to utilize cotton thread spun in traditional villages, the technical requirements of the factories which emphasized standardized inputs and throughputs, prevented the peasants' thread being used. It quite literally clogged up the machines. The effect on the traditional villages was profound. Not only did their market for cotton disappear - as the factories were forced to import synthetic thread from ICI, Delhi, but also the only cloth that they could now purchase was also synthetic. Thus, at the same time, the peasants' cash crop income was removed and they were forced to purchase off the global cultural market's shelves. Income from the new modernized activity, instead of trickling down to the peasants, met an impervious barrier and re-percolated up into the cities and thus the global economy.15
Fortunately in this case there was a happy ending. By linking the system back together again using technical means, the relationship between global and indigenous cultures and knowledge started to be turned into a strength rather than a disempowering weakness. The champion at the centre was Garge, an old engineer in Lucknow who had been Schumacher's developing countries counterpart back in the 1940s in development of the original concept of 'small is beautiful'.16
Garge recognized the problem clearly. And he set about making a machine that could spin the cotton thread that the peasants produced twice as fast, a change in production procedure at the village level that would produce yarn of adequate consistency and strength to be re-integrated into the production system of the semi-automated weaving looms.
Basic design parameters of the machines required that they had to be able to be manufactured in provincial cities, repaired at either small town or village level, and powered by either a small electric motor or human bicycle leverage. The level of power required became the critical issue.
Instead of changing the design parameter - for this would have had a social design consequence, disempowering large sections of the poor peasant population - Garge sought a solution in the design of the spindles that formed the nodes when the thread was spun. He hired as consultant a mathematician from Reading University in England to conduct theoretical mathematical trials on alternative shapes of the nodes in the casting of curves. Garge then integrated the mathematical solution into the machine design.
Now, the machines are being manufactured and distributed through villages across the State, and the link between village production and global economy and culture has been refashioned.
As in the case of the artist working with indigenous villagers in Java, the 'linkages' case demonstrates the power of new ways of seeing. As with the case of the management of biodiversity in Indonesian villages, the case demonstrates the necessity of this way of seeing involving both technical and social dimensions. What the case also demonstrates however is the power of quite basic scientific research when focused specifically into the context of what the market needs - in this case, a low technology machine to link peasant farmer production with the modern technology sector. One cannot imagine a university pure mathematics Professor in England playing with mathematical curves and thinking, 'I think I'll apply this solution in developing spindles for person-powered spinning machines in villages in Uttar Pradesh'. More likely the results would appear in an obscure infrequently cited journal article archived amongst the vast dormitory of knowledge that sleeps in the background of global society. The design context sets the framework for capitalizing on the potential power of science.
Stimulated by the drive towards consumerism of an increasingly global culture based economy, the world of technological change and of scientific production has fundamentally changed representing a new kind of relationship between technology and people. And this transformation has occurred only over the last five to ten years.
Strangely enough this new relationship is not to be found in the cyber-space information access of computer nurds to global informatics villages. Instead the new relationship is to be found in the assertion of humans, ethnic groups, communities - local meanings - against 'systems' - demonstrated as clearly in the collapse of the previous Soviet Union as within the rise of the 'idea' of culture within hard-nosed business management literature.17
The 'previous' order of globalising technological systems has been well characterized by familiar critiques of 'Taylorism' and 'Fordism', as a technological order that has driven globalisation through the enframement of people by larger and more powerful technological systems - heading towards a world dominated economically by machine-conditioned de-skilled production and larger and larger mass production systems, centrally controlled and fed by centrally owned technologies. Evidence that this is changing that is now emerging is showing us is that this order is not working anymore, in spite of the apparent economic advantages of leaving people out of the equation as much as possible. Put quite simply, the person was becoming too small for a sustainable society.18
People demanded change. Not in the ballot box, nor in political revolution. But in the marketplace where people are searching for more individualized meanings, and in the technological capabilities that have now emerged to handle the complexity of systems that can produce individualized production. To be competitive in the 1990s economy means feeding the rising demand for individuality within a global economy by technological means. Only a new balance between technical and social capabilities makes this possible.
Key ingredients in the new competitiveness formula are these:
A move in process technologies from mechanical to electronic control has allowed the competitiveness of complex non-standardized production to supersede the prior advantage of standardized mass production.
In parallel, consumer preferences have shifted towards a more specialized and customized demand.
Communications and information flows have changed. Advances in information technology allow highly specific and timely linkage between production demands of large companies and small supplier capabilities: fax and other electronic communication closes the physical distance - time gap between the firm and its customers.
Complexity of required information ensures that flat and small organizational structures perform more flexibly and responsively than large corporations.
The key to customized, market sensitive, technologically sophisticated, competitive advantage in the 1990s is responsiveness . Responsiveness requires both well developed technological and social capabilities.
In this context, corporations have to be able to move fast - to sense new market opportunities and strategic inventions and innovations early and address the market through putting emerging technologies into production very rapidly.19 In the computer industry for example, the window of opportunity for many products is likely to be three months wide and two years ahead of current production; meanwhile the obsolescence rate of current software and hardware skills is likely to be approximately two to three, and four to five years, respectively. Hewlett-Packard, for example, earn two-thirds of their revenue from products developed in the last two to three years.
With speed the essence in delivering a product to market, the leading edge of innovation sets scientific knowledge in an application context. To wait for discipline-driven scientific change takes too long. Globally, there has therefore been a remarkable increase in both the application focus and the level of multidisciplinarity of research, as solving the problem fast is what matters. Small teams, short lines of communication, transfers of experience and informal 'tacit' knowledge, and personal relations have therefore started to become new dominant modes of organization in both knowledge creation and transfer.20 The apparent paradox here is that in an age where Internet and information technology are making vast data resources available and immediate, personal relations and informal knowledge are the forces that drive the agenda.
The old order persists, as did craft-based production parallel early factory organization through the early 19th century. Large multinational companies still retain their hold on the global economy and on capture of the leading edge of scientific and technological change for economic advantage.
However, the form of multinational control and organization is changing significantly - specifically to address the more 'localized' and 'responsive' demand features of the late 20th century economy.
Big companies move slow, dinosaurs in a world of intelligent late 20th century economic mammals. Big companies are starting to respond by re-inventing themselves, moving towards more open global networks where the corporations selectively share control, technology and markets with organizations beyond their formal structures that can feed the larger organizations' needs for speed.
And here lies a quite new advantage for the small player. For small firms can nest into these open structures and can provide the responsive speed that today's more customized demand requires and which larger organizations cannot deliver. Some large companies, such as the electronics giant Kyocera of Japan, have themselves sought to transform into networks or 'clusters' of small organizations: the production department of Kyocera has been restructured into 200 self-managing and financing teams or 'amoebae', as they are called, which change their shape and size according to demand.21 But, in general, the advantage increasingly lies with the small player. In Australia, a very small actor in the global economy, evidence from the McKinsey Report demonstrates that the leading edge of national value-added export drive is commanded by 700 small and medium-sized companies (SMEs).22 The same SME trend is observed in the United Kingdom, United States, a number of European countries and Japan.23 Moving more deeply into Asia, SME strategies lie at the core of the powerful arc of Chinese business influence throughout the entire region, particularly originating from Taiwan where SME strategy is conscious, and supported by public R&D organizations with the express purpose of spinning off small industries whilst facilitating the transfer and assimilation of advanced technologies across ten targeted industries from semiconductors to health care.24 Furthermore, across ASEAN countries SMEs play a highly significant role in national economic wealth: in Indonesia, for example, in spite of the apparent dominance of the large conglomerates, much of the real manufacturing innovation that is driving the Indonesian economy to consistent high growth levels is produced by small to medium-sized firms.25
The words of Joseph Schümacher have therefore been transcribed from the counterculture wall on which they were originally written in the 1970s onto the mainstream economic page of the 1990s: 'small is beautiful'. Opportunities follow for the small enterprise as do opportunities for the small economy. But, only if responsiveness, quality and organizational ingenuity stand on the centre stage of organization and national strategies.
Furthermore, speed in knowledge transfer across a global economy to remote production facilities is fundamental to competitiveness. Survival, in the long-term, now requires the capability to deliver high quality, small batch products customized to local needs.26 The corporation remains ahead of competition simply by being faster on its feet rather than by locking up its technological secrets in an intellectual property vault. As Robert Reich observed in his influential book, The Work of Nations , "it is not what we own that counts; it is what we do."27 There has been a shift from economic power being derived from nationally-owned production facilities that lease out their core resource to economic power being derived from national location of high value-added activities that capture economic advantage out of the rivers of technological and market opportunity that flow by through quick-witted skill.28
The game at the leading edge of competitiveness in the global economy is one of capture , rather than control . - capture of passing 'butterflies' of knowledge by skilled human resources rather than ownership and control of facilities where cheapness of labour rather than skill provides the competitive advantage.
This global economy of customized market responsiveness, of flitting knowledge butterflies, of 'local' and personal relationships as vehicles for innovation and transfer, of advantage for small technically and socially adroit companies - is a world where a very different kind of technology-culture relationship exist. It is a world in which we have discovered a 'new localism' in relationships between scientists, where tacit or informal knowledge transmitted inside face-to-face personal relations is of equal importance as formalized technical knowledge transmitted through international literature or Internet, both at the leading edge of scientific enquiry and of industrial application.29 Even within contemporary science, there is therefore a new assertion of 'local' cultures.
In terms of choices available, power does not lie in technical expertise alone, but in capturing both social and technical capability together, building cultural resilience to house this alignment, and forming partnerships between the local and the global.
At a local/indigenous cultural level, policy needs to be to empower indigenous knowledge, using global scientific knowledge - as in the case of the villagers avoiding pesticides through exploiting their own knowledge of biological diversity; using global cultural knowledge - as in the case of the Javanese artist assisting villagers to see their own creation of a technologised world differently.
Addressing the linkages between village and global production systems means rewriting the knowledge and technology texts at each point along the path. Again, this involves empowering local technologies and knowledge to ensure they articulate with the globalised systems as was the case with the re-designed spinning machines of Uttah Pradesh. Equally, the social and cultural dimensions of linkage are implied - in developing new and empowered ways of seeing the way globalised technological systems and knowledge can be modified to allow this articulation to work, as in the case of the Haryana blacksmiths invention of the Kirloscar engine trolley.
Finally, at the level of participation of global culture and economy new opportunities are arising at the leading edge for 'small players' who, according to the previous order of control are excluded. In both the development and use of scientific knowledge and in the capture of flows of technology, advantage now exists for small players who can capture both social and technical capability and develop a local organizational culture that is responsive and open.
In all cases, advantage lies in asserting the autonomy of local meaning construction rather than in passive unskilled dependency on remote abstract global meanings, knowledge and systems that are created elsewhere.
Therefore, as I am sure the remainder of this Seminar will demonstrate, there are major advantages and balances that can be introduced into contemporary production through paying attention to 'best-practice' traditional technologies. But, one must be cautious. My plea is to not look through simple minded technologised eyes when doing this, but to be conscious of the design space from which these technologies originate. Technology is always set within a cultural and knowledge context. Exporting technologies across cultural boundaries from the local to the global society implies a cultural process, not just the picking up of a technique from one place and taking it to another. Indeed, reverse export, that is from local to global, implies exporting the cultural and knowledge frameworks equally as much as the introduction of modern technologies into village life implies shadow systems and cultural frameworks that stand behind and are imported into the village.
Furthermore, I am suggesting that power of a people to choose requires autonomy of local meaning construction rather than passive unskilled dependency on remote abstract global meanings, knowledge and systems that are created elsewhere. But, as the case studies of the present paper demonstrate, autonomy is not a simple correlate of a small scale and traditional technological world. Instead, the core idea is linkage , of the local with the global which maintains the significance of technical knowledge within everyday life, whether it be in traditional or suburban society. The latest thinking at the leading edges of scientific endeavour could well be partner to traditional wisdom and practices. The key is alignment within culture.
When industrialism launched out across the global landscape the fabric of the landscape environmental impact was local - streets perhaps bestrewn with refuse, human excrement in inconvenient places - but social production was humanscale and environmental impact localized. The impact of industrialization from the late 18th Century onwards radically changed these relationships from the moment the condensing steam-engine was hooked up to a factory system by Boulton and Watt, thereby increasing the pace of collective human labour by the power of ten to one hundred, and presaging the entry of interconnected systems of production, transport and communication into the everyday lives of the populace. The product in terms of ideals of suburban lifestyle are now ones of living in an oasis from globalised pressures and environmental degradation. In the cities of Jakarta and Manila, with which I am currently particularly familiar, for example, the wealthy spend little time engaged in 'city'-based living, but rather commute between protected inward-referent air-conditioned residences within which life is lived and shared. At the turn of the 19th Century, the local environment was perhaps smelly, but the globe could breathe; at the turn of the 21st Century, the global environment is asphyxiating to allow the local environments to breathe. The 'landscape' of pre-industrialized society as been transformed into an increasingly fragile 'landing scape' when viewed from a 'spaceship' earth perspective, a 'crazed egg' of urbanizing systems and energy radiation when viewed from orbit.
Within the Asia-Pacific region there is no question we are compelled to do something to transform this relationship. Regional development levels have been dramatic, with share in world manufacturing value added rising from 9.3 percent for Japan in 1975 to 16.9 percent in 1994, and from 1.6 percent to 5.6 percent for East and South East Asia.30 But, the rush to participate in the global economy has left behind a legacy of environmental degradation, with, for example, no pollution control equipment in most power plants and resultant sulphur dioxide emissions increasing from 35 million tons in 1990 to a predicted 53 million tons by 2000 and 76 million tons by 2010; solid waste levels for the Asia Pacific region predicted to double from 1900 million tons per annum in 1992 by 2010; and with deforestation progressing at 1.2 percent per year, along with the fastest rate of commercial logging, the highest volume of fuelwood removal and the fastest rate of species removal in the world. Biodiversity is under serious threat due to the growing loss of habitats, species and genetic diversity.31 In the Pacific region the global-local environmental paradox is profound. These island societies have appreciated the closedness and fragility of their own 'spaceship' world well before Western society, or the latter-day views of environmentalists landed. Yet, under globalising pressures, these same societies are the most susceptible to extinction from the rising ocean, direct product of the warming effects of globalised production.
Traditional technologies and knowledge systems could well play a vital part in the transformation that is required to rebalance the global pressures on the planet. However, the contexts of globalisation and of culture-technology relationships are inescapable.
forge partnerships between traditional and scientific technical knowledge in developing small scale localized production that links into the globalised economy and is environmentally sustainable;
pay attention to maintaining technical linkages between traditional and higher technologies 32of production, to ensure both environmental sustainability and adequate quality of the lower order technologies to ensure linkage is possible;
ensure alignment between local culture and technical knowledge and introduced technique and knowledge about environmentally sustainable production - at all levels of technological sophistication of production;
Finally, one must remember that there is a new advantage for the small player within the late 20th Century economy. But this advantage requires ensuring linkage into the global economy and its demands. Human resources to do this must be both technically and socially capable. For advantage lies in responsiveness and quality . Attention to quality in a workforce directly correlates with a sense of one's own worth and responsibility, to empowerment .. These dynamics offer a new opportunity for the introduction of technologies derived from traditional knowledge into the global economy to enhance environmental sustainability of production. But, opportunity can only be grasped if attention is paid to the overall technical-cultural design space into which change is introduced, and to aligned action to enhance the empowerment of people throughout the workforce.