United States and Japanese Competition

The core focus of our concern in the following discussion is in the relationship of government technology policy with the technical and commercial development of a high-technology industry, specifically the computer industry. In the course of exploring this relationship, however, we must go far afield of the narrow specifics of policymaking. Technology policies are not formulated in a vacuum. Nor, indeed, do technologies themselves emerge in a vacuum. Neither technology nor technology arises in simple consequence of a purely objective decision-making process. Instead, technologies and technology policies are shaped by the political and cultural environment in which they take form. Therefore, to understand "technology policy," we must look less at specific policies than at the social context in which policy is formed.

In the course of this discussion, we will argue for a number of propositions regarding the role of technology policy and the culture of technological development in Japan and the United States. In Japan, we will suggest, centrally directed technology

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he nature of this other side of the computer industry, we must turn back several decades, to the Second World War. Under the pressure of total war, the United States had adopted "industrial policy" on the grandest scale. The Manhattan Project that produced the atomic bomb is the most famous example of industrial policy in the service of war, but a more consequential one was the growth of the aviation (later aerospace) industry. During the course of the war, the United States built approximately a hundred thousand warplanes. After a brief postwar hiatus, the inception of the Cold War brought a flood of new orders to the industry, orders associated with the new technology of the jet plane. Go to any major airport and watch the jets. About half of them will be products of the Boeing company. Most of them, whoever the builder, will have a distinct configuration, with their jet engines mounted in pods slung forward of and below the wing. This configuration is so familiar that we may well take it for granted as the natural way to put together a jetliner. In fact, however, a variety of configurations were explored in the early years of the jet age, one of the most popular (that of the British Comet and the Soviet TU-24, the first
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Meanwhile American, United Japan, Silicon Valley, Mobley McKeown, Subsequently IBM, World War, Likewise American, Apple II, Fifth Generation, McConnell Brue, industrial policy, computer industry, technology policy, personal computer, personal computers, computer technology, brock 1975, market personal computers, american computer, development personal, software development, mcconnell brue 1993, mobley mckeown 1989, development personal computer, brue 1993 pp,
Approximate Word count = 6108
Approximate Pages = 24 (250 words per page)

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