Preliminary Programme

Development and diffusion of “Clean Technologies” (CT) are generally acknowledged as particularly important to stabilise climate change and promoting industrial growth that are more sustainable. This paper deals with the development and diffusion of CT within Swedish forest industry during a period when pioneering steps were taken towards cleaner production processes. We will focus on the 1960s and 70s and address the role of business cooperation and state-industry cooperation in targeting pollution problems which for the most part were common for all plants in the pulp and paper sector. The role of cooperation and joint financed research institutes will be especially discussed.

The Swedish forest industry embarked on pollution abatement long before this became a general concern. Already in 1954 the Water laboratory of the Forest Industry was set up to develop methods for reduction of pollution. During the sixties, initial environmental care was taken in close cooperation with the government. In 1966 the water laboratory was reorganised and enlarged to become the “Institute of Water and Air Protection (IVL)“. In this new form, IVL was financed jointly by the Swedish government and the industry. When a more rigid anti pollution legislation was taken in 1969, the forest industry responded to the challenge by setting up numerous ambitious collective pollution abatement projects. Those R&D project were coordinated by the board of the Forest Industry Research Foundation for Air and Water Protection (SSVL), to organise development projects. In this paper, we focus on the novel activities of IVL and SSVL and explore its achievements on CT development and diffusion in Swedish pulp and paper industries, which became pioneering the development of important CT during the 1970s. (Show less)

Why could India position itself at the cutting edge of a technologically meditated service industry, thus adopting the historically unprecedented trajectory of development via a revolution in the services sector rather than in manufacturing (Dossani, 2007),as economic globalisation picked up in the late 90s? I argue that part of the answer lies in the continued legacy of a specific construction of development and technology that had its roots in colonial India, and was institutionalised in the post colonial state, notably through the the setting up of the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) the elite technical universities of India, in the 1950s. Using these as a methodological tool, I look at how certain modes of technology were accepted and others, such as Gandhian alternatives were rejected in tune with the broader aims and transformations in the post colonial state, and how this was a spatial and temporal process that continues to influence India’s developmental and technological choices.
A clear line can be drawn between colonial decisions taken to adapt certain forms of technology and definitions of development, the institutionalisation of these in the post colonial state, and India’s contemporary success in a technologically mediated service industry. Adapting the idea that knowledge is inherently transgressive and transdisciplinary (Nowotny, 2003), and in contrast to a top down linear diffusion model of technological transfer, my paper explores this process as a critical arena of transnational and local negotiation that was a crucial element in the legitimizing strategies of non-state governance in the post colonial state.
Extant literature looks at perceptions of science in the British Empire, its institutionalization for political purposes, the impact this had on the periphery and the metropolis (Baber, 1996; Adas, 1989); and the close link between Empire and scientific pursuits (Headrick, 1981). Historians have also begun to explore how various aspects of India’s development agendas had their roots in a specific conception of development and modernity (Agrawal, 2003). Conceptions of 1930s New Deal water projects influenced Nehru’s commitment to large dam projects (Klingensmith, 2007), or imperial ideas of health played a role in broader debates about the post colonial order (Amrith, 2006). However, the development decision to invest in a technologically intensive knowledge society, and its broader implications has not been closely studied. I look at how this process was institutionalised and the process of negotiation with indigenous alternatives such as the Gandhian mode of development, and how this process illustrates the relevance of local contexts to the transnational circulation of technologies. To cite two examples, Sir Ardeshir Dalal, who in 1944, as the first head of the Department of Planning and Development in India, drew up the blueprint of the IITs, making the crucial decision that technology rather than capital was key to India’s progress, was an alumni of Cambridge. Today, many of the entrepreneurs in India’s Silicon Valley, Bangalore, are IIT alumni who have returned from the USA but leverage India’s niche in the global knowledge society. For my sources I use science and technology policy documents that span the colonial and post colonial period and the archives of the IIT and locate them in the broader context of literature on technologically mediated modernisation. (Show less)

Expo '58 served as the first site for the display of the Sputniks, the first time that the general public had an opportunity to view them up close. It also was the first universal exhibition of the post-World War II era and as such became a major battleground in the "cultural Cold War." The exhibition enabled the USSR to bask in the reflective glow of its scientific and technological achievement before an international audience of 40 million.

Based largely on archival material (from Brussels and Moscow) that is approached through discursive and consumption/reception theories, this paper considers how Sputnik was used by Soviet authorities, the messages inscribed in its display, and the appropriation of the exhibit by different publics. It begins by contextualizing Soviet participation in the Fair, proceeds to analyze the display of Sputnik replicas in terms of its production (or "encoding"), reproduction in published texts, and consumption (or "decoding/reading"). Though presented in succession these different dimensions of Sputnik at Brussels in a sense produced each other. (Show less)

The exhibition ‘A Nation at Work’ operated for 163 days between May and October 1937 attracting several million visitors. It was the largest and most successful of the many exhibitions held during the Nazi dictatorship and was intended to perform a national imaginary locked on the local image of the Ruhr region and its capital city of Düsseldorf as the industrial, commercial and leisure centre of a rejuvenated Germany. The exhibition was a dramatic representation of the mass spectacle, which, as Walter Benjamin argued in the mid-1930s provided the symbolic form consonant with the fascist “aestheticization of politics”. It was, in every aspect, a consumer-oriented event that combined multiple meanings in a spectacular display of “German quality work”, the “honour of labour” and national unity. According to a multi-language publicity leaflet designed for foreign consumption, the exhibition provided “a picture of the Nation at Work today and a succinct exposition of tomorrow’s trade problems,” adding that it was “the first time that an attempt has been made to show in an exhibition how the nation lives”. Exhibition planners intended the exhibition as a performative display of Germany’s future-oriented economy of self-sufficiency under the direction of the four year plan. Yet, if the focus was on national productivity, the cultural exchange value of the exhibition itself was firmly rooted in the “politics of desire” of a consumer society. A as form of popular assembly, the exhibition performed as a space where people could come together to participate in the often spectacular and always extraordinary representation of authority conceived as a “reformatory of manners”.
The local organization behind the exhibition ‘A Nation at Work’ constructed the exposition in the future tense. It presented the futuristic image of the new and modern Germany. From the technical fluency displayed in the hundreds of exhibitions to the tectonic unity of the site itself, the exhibition represented the national model that Nazi publicists projected as the wave of the exhibitionary future. This was not an exhibition of kitsch, so often regarded as the essence of Nazi culture. The streamlined geometric buildings, bold fountains, the alternatively classic and bucolic greens, constructed a powerful and confident national image of the Nazi state for foreign consumption and a similarly powerful and confident national identity for consumption by the German people. In short, the exhibition ‘A Nation at Work’ was a conventional industrial exhibition on steroids. It reached out to the future, aggressively and with apparent single-mindedness of purpose. Acted upon, German visiting the exhibition at the same time acted out their own images of their present and future.
The paper is based on archival sources. Conceptually, it draws on Tony Bennett’s Foucauldian inspired “exhibitionary complex” in which the exhbition operates as public space for the regulation of consumer behaviour. It also makes use of the performativity studies of Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, that emphasize the formative performance of exhibitions to operate constitutively on collective self-image and in the process set out the terms for social action. (Show less)