Manufacturing knowledge in transit: Technical practice, organizational change, and the rise of the semiconductor industry in the United States and Japan, 1948--1960

This dissertation examines the development of the semiconductor manufacturing industry in the two most successful countries in this sector during the 1950s: the United States and Japan. The invention of the transistor in December 1947 triggered a technological transformation of the electronics industry with widespread repercussions known today as the "electronics revolution." Scientists, engineers, and policymakers in the two countries struggled to channel the new technology through a number of different institutions---including private firms, public laboratories, military organizations, and government bureaucracies---as they began realize its implications. The introduction of transistor technology and the techniques to manufacture them in mass quantities required reassessments of the effective organizational process and structure within, and relationships among, private and public institutions. This dissertation will analyze the historical events across this complex terrain by focusing on a technological artifact, the transistor.; This dissertation discusses the global circulation of manufacturing knowledge in a high-technology industry during the 1950s and its relationship to the private and public organizational structures that sustained the flow of knowledge. Manufacturing transistors required a distinct knowledge not fully explicated in precisely controlled laboratory environments, and defied simple transfer to other locations. Scientists and engineers painstakingly transplanted this knowledge to a distant location and extensively adapted it to local conditions. Through these efforts, the physical artifact of the transistor radically changed its form between 1948 and 1960, as well as the organizational process and structure that shaped the technology. The goal of this dissertation is to depict a dynamic relationship between technology and organizational change.