The concept of technology: its formation and modern understanding

Abstract

The article discusses the concept of technology, offering a reconstruction of its formation and its modern understanding. It formulates the problems that necessitate analyzing and clarifying this concept: the question of its time of origin (the Neolithic or the 18th century?), the distinction between the concepts of “technology” and “technics/technique”, the opposi­tion between narrow and broad understandings of technology, and the technical interpreta­tion of technology. To resolve these problems, the author turns to the works of the first theo­rists of technology – J. Beckmann, C. Babbage, and F. Taylor. The second half of the 18th and the 19th century marked a period of capitalist development and industrial revolutions in Europe, intensifying market competition where success favored those who were more ef­ficient in production and trade. One consequence of the pressures of the capitalist environ­ment was the optimization and improvement of production. These developments occurred under the banner of the “scientific organization of production”, which is understandable given the rapid advancement of natural sciences and engineering during this period. In turn, the scientific approach to production involved, on the one hand, the analysis of production activities, resulting in their breakdown into individual processes and operations, and on the other hand, the synthesis of these new units into a coherent whole. In anthropological terms, this breakdown into individual units and their synthesis corresponds to the processes of the division and cooperation of labor. This resulted not only in the representation of pro­duction in the form of separate operations and the conditions for their implementation but also in the division and new cooperation of labor, an emphasis on economy (to which em­phases on standardization and product quality were later added), the requirement for produc­tion research for the purpose of its improvement (and later, modernization), and the neces­sity of its design and redesign. The author asserts that the development of technology is influenced by two main factors: the nature of the activity being described as a new techno­logy, and the specific characteristics of the social environment in which this activity has formed and functions. As these two factors change, developers and theorists are compelled to introduce new characteristics of technology. For instance, modern organizations require efforts for their optimization and development, and their new environment is orders of mag­nitude more complex than previous ones. This has necessitated the incorporation into or­ganizational development technology of development models, work with employees and leaders, and various development strategies.