Sociedade, Tecnologia e Inovação Empresarial - Presidente da ...

of markets, new laws, new forms of collective action. In a fundamentalsense, technologies and institutions coevolve.In the preceding section I recounted some of the broad findings ofthese studies. However, to see what is going on it is helpful to zoomin and examine the details of the picture. Thus in the remainder of thissection I want to briefly recount two cases which display this coevolutionaryprocess in some detail.The Rise of Mass Production. As Alfred Chandler and other businesshistorians tell the story, during the last parts of the nineteenth centuryand the first half of the twentieth, manufacturing industry in the UnitedStates experienced rapid productivity growth, associated with the bringinginto operation of new technologies and new modes of organizingwork that came to be called «mass production.» These methods wereaccompanied by a growing scale of plants and firms, rising capitalintensity of production, and the development of professional management,often with education beyond the secondary level. However, theselatter increases in «physical and human capital per worker» and in thescale of outputs should not be considered as independent sources ofgrowth, in the sense of growth accounting; they were productive onlybecause they were needed by the new technologies.Under Chandler’s account, it was the development of the railroadsand the telegraph towards the middle of the nineteenth century, whichopened up the possibility of manufacturing firms selling their outputto large and dispersed markets. In turn, the prospect of large scale ofoperation made mechanization of production, with high fixed costs,profitable, and set in train successful efforts to design and developmachinery suited for mass production. In turn, increased demand forproduction machinery induced significant improvements in machinetooltechnology. Somewhat later, the development of electricity generationand distribution technology, and electric motors, became animportant part of the story.In order to take advantage of the opportunities to sell on much largerand more dispersed markets, and to be able to employ the new technologieswhich offered opportunities for huge economies of scale andscope (to use Chandler’s term), significant institutional changes wereRichard Nelson2 7 3Technology, institutions and economic growth