10 - Technical Change and Knowledge Networks in England, 1945–1980s

Summary

An atomistic industry – one, such as agriculture, comprised of many small firms – has knowledge acquisition and transfer problems not found in more concentrated industries that are made up of a small number of larger firms. Large firms can afford specialized research and development departments; equally, whereas they can profit from introducing technical changes before their competitors, they stand to lose if their competitors find output-increasing technologies first. Neither of these considerations applies in more competitive markets. Few farmers operated on a large enough scale to carry out their own research, and virtually no farmers controlled such a large part of the market that their production decisions had any impact on market prices. Thus, the research had to be done outside the farm, and farmers had every incentive to adopt outputincreasing innovations, so a network of some shape or form was needed to connect the research organizations and commercial firms that were developing the new techniques, machines, pesticides, seeds, etc. with the farmers and farm workers who would finally use them.

This chapter ignores the original production of scientific and technical knowledge, but concentrates on the way in which that knowledge, once produced and accepted as useful, was transferred to those who used it in practice. It is important to remember, however, that agricultural research in the UK expanded between the 1940s and 1980s, in terms of the money spent on it, the scientists engaged in it, and the results it produced. There was much discussion on what its function should be: whether to discover fundamental scientific principles or to produce rapid answers to current farming problems. This question was extensively discussed in a series of advisory councils (the Agricultural Improvement Council, the Agricultural Advisory Council, and finally the Advisory Council for Agriculture and Horticulture) which brought together prominent farmers and agricultural scientists between 1941 and 1979. The details of their deliberations are not discussed in this chapter, but the results are discussed further in the conclusions of this chapter. However, the chapter's main purpose is to identify the components of the agricultural knowledge network, to trace their development over time, and to show how the network was used.