The POET model

This is a model of social change, developed by Otis Dudley Duncan, in which society is basically put into four categories. Population should be easy enough to grasp. Numbers can go up, go down, mortality and fertility rates can change, people can migrate, move to different areas, the age structure can change over time, etc. Organization would include some of the organizational structures of a society--here in the U.S., the government would be important, large corporations, communities, families, churches, etc. The economic organization of a society is important as well. Ours is mostly a capitalist economy. Environment should be fairly self-explanatory. We did talk about the three general functions of the environment--living space, a place to put our waste, and as a repository for resources. In other words, everything around you came from the environment--desks, chairs, computers, your clothes, shoes, pens, etc. They came from a stock of natural resources at some point in their history (although may have experienced a good deal of processing and transformation). We also have to live somewhere, and we have to dump our waste somewhere. Usually we try to keep these functions spatially separate--that is, we don't want to live near where we dump our waste, or where we're doing our mining, or cutting down trees. Technology we won't get into subtle nuances of definition. Technology can include actual artifacts, such as a toaster, or a nuclear warhead, or a tractor, or even a short-handled hoe, or a stone axe, an arrowhead--in other words, technology doesn't have to be sophisticated. If it helps think of technology as tools that are used to achieve some end, but keep in mind that there are few tools that exist in isolation (e.g., Ford's assembly line required an entire technological system to make work. It could be that making arrowheads requires considerably less in the way of support, but you might need certain kinds of rocks for knapping flint (did I say this right, Luke?), there might be different techniques, different grades of mineral, division of labor as to who did what, etc.

So what the POET model essentially says is that--this is why there are double arrows all over the place--a change in any one of those factors or variables, can lead to changes in the others. For instance, how did the automobile change the way society is organized? Why do we have paved streets, interstate highways today? Why do we have gas stations on every corner? Why do some of us work 75 miles from where we live? Why do some people die every year on roads? Why do teenagers get so excited when they turn 16? What has the automobile done to the environment? How much of a city's pollution is due to smog from car exhausts? But, here's an important point: technology doesn't come from thin air. The kinds of technologies produced in a society often reflect the values of the dominant classes in that society. Cars stand for many things--fossil fuel consumption, efficiency (getting from point A to point B faster), class differentiation (ever pull up in your Hyundai next to a Jaguar, and race the engine? Or a Ford F250 12 cylinder diesel [I'm groping for terminology here] vs a Hummer? Do they 'say' different things about their owners?), etc. Technologies are value-laden. As a sociologist once said, 'technology is neither good nor bad. Nor is it neutral.' So check out the POET model, and imagine something being introduced into a society--nuclear power, China's one child only policy, the clock, a steam engine, locomotive, small pox vaccine, water treatment facilities, electricity, dynamite, etc. What sorts of effects might they have? In the late 1950s, an enterprising capitalist decided to introduce the snowmobile to Lap culture in Northern Finland. The Laps were a traditional herding society, and their animal was the reindeer, on which they depended much like Plains Tribes in what is now the U.S. depended on the buffalo for their subsistence. Within 20 years, the Laps went from a culture of reindeer herders, using sleighs, where most families had a small herd and depended on the reindeer for food, shelter, clothing, etc., to a culture where just a few families owned large herds, most people were on government assistance, fertility rates among the reindeer had declined dramatically with the introduction of motorized vehicles, there were many injuries caused by misuse of the snowmobiles (people would stand up on them to see the herds, hit a rock, and have an accident), fuel was spilled across the tundra, and within 25 years of their introduction, helicopters were being used to control the herds. Maybe now we can do it by satellite. Was this the fault of the snowmobile? Think technology is neutral? What values came with the snowmobile that may have been foreign to Lap culture? Put another way, what sorts of other things would be required for the snowmobile to diffuse within Lap culture (fuel, parts, service, etc.), and how might that change their society? Start with a conversion to a cash economy, the need for income, possibly to borrow from banks to invest in herding technology, which might require privatization of land in order to put up the collateral banks require for borrowing, etc.

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Technology and values

Hopefully it is becoming clearer how technology can be value-laden. It can even be political. A good example is Robert Moses, engineer who designed much of New York City, and made the clearance under bridges out to Long Island too low to accommodate public buses (excluding poor minorities from the city from using the beaches). Nuclear power is another example. By its very nature it requires centralization and security, unless we all think that people should be granted the right to own personal nuclear reactors. Windpower, solar power--these can be decentralized technologies. They don't have to be--Some energy company could put up a giant solar collector in the desert and sell the power to the grid--but the technology don't require centralization in the same way that messing with radioactive isotopes does.

We also discussed the demographic transition model that developed countries have passed through, largely because of improvements in public health (better sanitation, mostly). Hence changes in technology led to higher survival rates, longer life expectancies, in many cases lower infant mortality rates. The demographic transition has 4 stages,

• from high birth and death rates
• to high birth rates and declining death rates,
• to declining birth rates and low death rates,
• to low birth and death rates.

We assume every 'developing' society will go through this transition, and in fact most countries in the world are seeing declines in fertility rates. But most societies are still agrarian--which means they're dependent on farming, usually using manual technologies, and are therefore dependent upon labor and large family size. The industrial revolution was heavily dependent on technopiracy--taking technologies from the colonies, figuring out how to streamline and automate processes (sound familiar?), and depend on the colonies to produce the raw materials (e.g., cotton for textiles, peanuts for oil) to fuel the process of industrialization in European society.

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Technology and Colonization

We discussed this in class--how did the industrial revolution really take off? It had much to do with Europeans taking technologies from China and Islam, and modifying them. After Marco Polo's expedition in the late 1200s, the prize was the spice trade in the East Indies (the so-called 'spice islands' were mostly what is now Inonesia, but markets existed along the West Coast of India, among other places--see a map of region). Food was pretty bad in Europe in the early part of the millennium (between 1000-2000), and in fact most of the high culture was coming from Islamic and Chinese societies.

For a glimpse at the value of spices and the state of European cuisine in the Dark Ages:

During the Middle Ages in Europe, a pound of ginger was worth the price of a sheep; a pound of mace would buy three sheep or half cow; cloves cost the equivalent of about $20 a pound. Pepper, always the greatest prize, was counted out peppercorn by peppercorn. The guards on London docks even down to Elizabethan times, had to have their pockets sewn up to make sure they didn't steal any spices. In the 11th Century, many towns kept their accounts in pepper; taxes and rents were assessed and paid in this spice and a sack of. pepper was worth a man's life. (ASTA online)

That didn't stop the Europeans from exploring, however. The Arabs controlled the lucrative trade in spices, and the Europeans wanted in on the 'market share.' The problem with the spice trade was that the overland routes were very difficult and long (try making sense of this map of trade routes):

The sea route was perilous as well--one had to go around Africa, and the southern tip could be disastrous during a storm. Another problem was the ship type--galleys required oarsmen, and oarsmen require lots of food and water, and there was little room left for cargo. The ships had to hug the coastline and go ashore for fresh water frequently. This posed a problem getting across the stretches of the Sahara Desert, where there was no water along the coast. The other problem was faced when returning with cargo. Prevailing ocean currents tended to blow the ships out to open sea, away from the coast. This posed a problem of getting lost, and losing access to water along the coast. The Portuguese came up with a solution: The caravel.

Because it didn't require oarsmen, it didn't have to carry so much food and stop as often. The Portuguese also took the concept of the gun from Chinese culture, and made it bigger--they placed cannons on the caravel, for defense and/or offense. Thus the caravel required less crew, which meant less food and more room for cargo. The other problem happened when the ships would return up the West Coast of Africa, because of the prevailing ocean currents that would take them out to deep sea, away from the coast. The astrolabe (image below) was a precursor of the compass, that helped sailors calculate their latitude, using the north star as a point of reference. So they knew that even if they did get blown out to sea, they could work their way back and knew what their latitude was, their north/south orientation.

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From there, the control of the spice trade belonged to the Portuguese. It had been a fairly decentralized operation, most of the merchants were Arab. But Portugal, by virtue of its big guns and big boats, was able to dominate, and the era of European Colonization had begun. Now, this was facilitated largely by several technologies. But remember our discussion about technologies as value-laden. Did technology cause the problem?

The colonizers found cultures with some sophisticated technologies--textiles in India in particular. The British took the technology of the day, and figured out how to automate it. Then they used India as a source of cotton, the raw material, to fuel their own industrialization process in textiles. This sort of practice was common--using the colonies to produce raw materials, which became part of industrial production processes in the European Countries. In Senegal (West Africa), France tried to force peasants to grow peanuts--they needed oil for soap making back home. They had two ways to get it--one, through military force, but holding guns to peoples' heads to get them to farm isn't always as effective as you'd think. They levied taxes against the local cultures. Being part of a subsistence economy, no one had cash to pay the tax. Fortunately, France was willing to let people cultivate peanuts and sell them to them to pay their taxes, in the process also introducing a cash economy.

And so it went. The colonizers also oversaw a period of genocide--slaves were taken, shipped to various parts of the world, many dying on the voyages. Estimates vary but probably the number is in the millions.

The point? That the development of the Western Industrialized Powers could not have been possible without technology (but that that technology came from other cultures that did not use it to dominate). Consider also the possibility that our own development could not have been possible without the underdevelopment of the Third World--without the colonies supplying the raw materials that fueld the process of industrialization. Thus we now talk about 'international development,' implying that some countries are 'developed,' and others 'undeveloped.'

We often think of 'development' as a process of transferring the technologies that have worked for us to other areas of the world, especially where agriculture is seen as unproductive. Tractors, for instance, and more generally, agricultural mechanization. We thought we could increase farm productivity, farmers could grow commercial crops, use less labor, sell the crop for cash, develop food processing and other industries, use cash to import the needs to drive development, while the 'extra' farm labor could leave the farms and work in factories, etc. What does one need to integrate the tractor in to a system of farming? Spare parts, service, fuel, infrastructure (need to get the crop to market), some idea of how to use the thing, bank financing (farmers would have to borrow), which would be easier if farmers had private rights to the land and could put it up as collateral to get loans, etc. Not to mention that petrochemicals--fertilizers and pesticides--are often required for an investment in mechanization to really pay off.

So . . . that simple technology of a tractor carries a lot of cultural baggage with it. It isn't just a tractor, and the tractor can change the way people live and work, not always in predictable or welcome ways (the above snowmobile example should illustrate quite nicely ...). The tractor technology hasn't worked in many parts of the world. In some cases it was too heavy and compacted the already nutrient-poor soils. In others there were terrain problems. The whole idea that it required an infrastructure was often not taken into account, and in some areas the countryside is strewn with rusted tractors and farm equipment, usually used by kids as a toy of some sort, and maybe there since the time the first tank of gasoline ran dry.

Take the example of the hydroelectric dam. What values are embedded in large dam projects?

• Electricity
• Flood control
• Irrigation (usually for commercial agriculture)

What is required to pull off a dam project?

• Relocation of people in river valleys (often subsistence cultures) to other areas--we often see relocation as an economic phenomenon, when traditional cultures, attached to the land and their ancestors, see the land as a sacred trust, not some interchangeable market commodity.
• Changing lifestyle, culture--usually the people relocated cannot continue their way of life without major alteration.
• What happened here, along the Columbia and Snake Rivers? What have been the effects on Native Americans?

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Who benefits?

The locals? Urban populations (electricity/food consumers, potential victims of flooding)? Contractors?
IN tropical areas there are often problems with impoundment (damming up rivers can change the ecology, lead to growth of parasitic populations, malaria, etc.); problems with global markets, foreign currency/trade, etc.

What values are embodied?

Bigger is better. Definitely. Huge. Electricity for the masses. Large scale engineering projects that forever change the landscape.
Commercial agriculture, trade.

This would be a good exercise to go through. For example, what sorts of values are embodied in the Sport Utility Vehicle (SUV) that might not be shared by all cultures?

Technology also changes things-e.g., mechanization, automation (think of Ritzer and control). Substituting machines for humans (capital substitution) fits in well with the idea of rationalization, or McDonaldization.
Who benefits? Who loses? Changes in technology often creates winners and losers. If you don't believe me, think about what happened to the horse carriage industry at the turn of the 20th century. What are some technologies that seem to be on their way out now?

Don't forget the POET model when you think of technology and change . . . The idea that there are winners and losers, suggests that there may be social problems afoot. Industrial processes create toxic wastes, large power plants are nasty and possibly hazardous to live near, etc. . .