Technological innovation in the crisis of accumulation: State structure and biotechnology development in the United States and Britain

Technological innovation constitutes a central structure of socio-political relations in late capitalism. Relations among the capitalist state, its internal mode of operation, and its politics in the context of science and technology's transition from a largely national product to an increasingly internationalized commodity provide the central foci of this study. The study examines biotechnology development and the policies related to its emergence, promotion, and control in the United States and Britain from the early 1970s to the late 1980s. The general theoretical perspective developed here is that a structural separation exists between private development and social control of technological innovation, a separation created through and maintained in contradictory ways by the internal organization of the state's policy production process.; The regulatory limits of the post-war Keynesian-Beveridge welfare state are increasingly visible as the structural crisis of capitalism continues and deepens. With the Fordist retreat, the largely nationally based, extensive regime of accumulation and mode of regulation are being superseded by an intensive social structure of accumulation strongly conditioned by the introduction of new technologies tied largely to multinational capitals. The regulatory form of this developing social structure of accumulation, however, especially as it is organized within and by state sponsored intensification efforts, remains indistinct at this point. In the United States and, to a lesser extent in Britain, a university-industry-government nexus has formed at a subnational level. Guided by social market ideologies and with the university assuming the role of "social representative," the nexus partly organizes the state's role in intensive accumulation. The study introduces the concept of "regional-sectoral corporatism" based on this nexus, and examines corporatism as a neo-conservative state form capable of advancing intensive technological innovation at the same time depoliticizing that process. The study concludes that regional-sectoral corporatism, while bringing certain substate relations into closer alliance with international processes, nonetheless further politicizes the process of technological innovation leading to new state constraints and limits to economic re-regulation. A final chapter of the study elaborates three competing models of technology policy and politics and examines their potential in the conceptual development of a critical political sociology of technology.