ABSTRACT
Perez defines a ‘technological style’ as ‘a sort of “ideal type” of productive organisation or best technological “common sense” which develops as a response to what are perceived as the stable dynamics of the relative cost structure’. In other words, the basic techniques of production, and methods of organisation, which are seen as the most efficient and profitable, change in response to the appearance of new key factors of production which are:
clearly very cheap, by past standards, and tending to get cheaper, and
potentially all-pervasive.
For example, when (as we shall see) the price of steel plummeted after 1850, this had drastic implications for methods of production throughout the economy. About half a century later, the cheapening of various forms of energy, particularly oil and electricity, played a similar role in the development of the Fordist style. The new ‘style’ is:grounded on the introduction of a cluster or constellation of interrelated innovations both technical and managerial which lead to the attainment of a general level of total factor or physical productivity clearly superior to what was ‘normal’ with the previous technological style.
The crucial innovations take place in two areas of the economy: the industries which make the key factor(s) of production (Perez calls these the ‘motive branches’) and those which use the key factor(s) most intensively and are the best adapted to the new organisation of production (the ‘carrier branches’). (Thus oil refining and electricity generation were ‘motive branches’ in the Fordist style, while the motor vehicles industry was a ‘carrier branch’.) The motive and carrier branches are the locomotive of the economy, though once they have got the upswing going there is a burgeoning of a third category, the ‘induced branches’, which provide goods and services for which demand is increasing rapidly. 1