Evolving Technology and Market Structure: Studies in Schumpeterian Economics.

• Author: Samuels, Warren J.

Edited by Arnold Heertje and Mark Perlman. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990. Pp. 351.

This volume comprises fifteen papers, including an introduction, plus six comments from the second International Congress of the J. A. Schumpeter Society held in Sienna, Italy, in June 1988. The papers are of unusually uniform quality for such a volume and the fact that their interpretive milieu is the research agenda of Schumpeterian dynamics generates analytical coherence. Still, the various authors do not hesitate to identify and seek to improve upon Schumpeter's own ideas, and future work will have to distinguish between Schumpeter's own substantive analyses and the general Schumpeterian research agenda. The first three papers assess Schumpeter's most striking ideas concerning economic dynamics and instability. Christopher Freeman focuses on technological innovation and its relationship to business cycles. including the Kondratiev long wave. Richard Goodwin covers some of the same ground, focusing on Schumpeter's use of and departure from Walras's general equilibrium model. Hyman Minsky examines Schumpeter's ideas, in part in relation of Keynes's, on finance, credit, and money, emphasizing that money is both endogenous and nonneutral and that analysis needs to distinguish between entrepreneurs who are innovators in product and process and those who are innovators in finance--a quite Veblenian distinction.

The remaining papers largely deal with case studies of various types, by time, industry, and country or area, though several, especially those by William Lazonick, Kenichi Imai, Paul A. David and Julie Ann Bunn, and, especially, the concluding essay by Giovanni Dosi, attempt larger theoretical generalizations. Among the case studies are those on the Latin American intellectual tradition (by Raphael Valentino), electricity supply (Paul A. David and Julie Ann Bunn), international pharmaceuticals (Henry G. Grabowski), joint R&D in the Japanese computer industry (Ryuhei Wakasugi), the Japanese power loom industry (Ryoshin Minami and Fumio Makino), Bell Labs and telecommunications (Edward E. Zajac), the diffusion of microprocessor technology in the United Kingdom (David Simpson), Italian patent experience (Franco Malerba and Luigi Orsenigo), and a sixteen-country cross-national study of the textile industry (Cristiano Antonelli, Pascal Petit, and Gabriel Tahar). Both types of papers make contributions to the development of economic dynamics in...