The thesis sets forth a model relating political contention
to technological development. The selective realisation of
a technical potentiality is shown to have been determined
by conflict and negotiation among shifting alliances of
state and private-industrial entities, each attempting to
impose its requirements upon an emergent technology and
thereby to dictate the precise form and pace of technical
development.
The 'course of communications satellite development is
examined during the technology's formative period from
1961 to 1975--as the product of struggles over technological
control. Negotiation centered upon control, and
contending modes of technical development were promoted
and opposed on the basis of their perceived consequences
upon the distribution of effective control over the technology.
The initial mode of satellite development lasted from
1961 to 1971 and is characterised as pre-emptive underdevelopment;
urgency and haste were combined with tight
constraints on the qualitative breadth allowed to technological
articulation. Pre-emptive underdevelopment derived
from an uneasy political accommodation struck among constituencies
dominant during this phases the U.S. government,
American communications carrier industry and a Western
European intergovernmental bloc. The reigning compromise
was directed toward expediting satellite development sufficiently
to forestall rival deployments without endangering
existing and anticipated interests in both satellite
and competitive technologies. Technical development beneath
a minimum level risked undermining the regime of
control by leaving open the possibility of rival satellite
systems; but development beyond a maximum level would have
harmed the outstanding industrial and political interests
in whose defence control was sought, while subverting the
control regime by widening the legitimate scope for multinational
participation in authority over the technology.
Pre-emptive underdevelopment, it is argued, was succeeded
largely by the products of its own success in meeting
the policy requirements of initially dominant entities
and in thus reducing the continued importance of satellite
technology as a political arena and instrumentality. Restraints
upon development could therefore, in the post-1971
period, be relaxed, while the growing demand for a wider
array of satellite services encouraged emergence of a more
intensive mode of technological development under the auspices
of a de-cartelised, quasi-federal and multinational
political regime