ABSTRACT
The notion of technological capability has gained broad acceptance within the community of scholars and practitioners concerned with Third World development. Most of the knowledge about the acquisition of technological capability comes from microscopic empirical research on the internal workings of manufacturing enterprises. The scoring procedure and the statistical analysis, taken together, constitute a capability-focused, macroscopic approach to policy research. A potentially useful approach is to seek regularities in relationships between capability levels and particular attributes of the technologies being employed. The discovery of associations between capabilities and attributes of potential consequence helps to explain the observed scores, but it does so only to the degree that one can establish definite links between the associations and the firms’ underlying technological behavior. The majority of firms in the sample appear to have technological strategies that can be characterized as being passive or reactive rather than active or aggressive.
