Abstract
Cyrus Mody’s fascinating new book on the development of probe microcroscopy is an essential read for anyone interested in technology evolution, commercialization of university research, the emergence of new organizational forms, or the creation of the field of nanotechnology. In it, he documents several decades of the development of an essential tool enabling nanotechnology—scanning tunneling microscopes (STMs)—as well as other related probe technologies. In doing so, Mody details how innovation in technology is mixed with innovation in organizational forms and how organizations, disciplines, and networked communities interact in the shaping of a field.
While Mody was trained (at Cornell) as a science and technology studies (STS) scholar, he is well read in the management of technology and organizational theory literatures and uses this book as an experiment in linking STS methods and theories to those in fields closer to home for the typical reader of the Administrative Science Quarterly. The interpenetration of these fields has yet to get much traction (though see recent work by Kaplan and Radin, 2011, and Berman, 2008, for studies linking STS and neoinstitutional theory), but Mody’s book is a clear demonstration of the potential value. Chapter 1 offers a well-written and evocative summary of the book’s arguments in each of the subsequent chapters, and if you were pressed for time, you could get away with just reading these initial pages. But if you did, you would be missing rich descriptions of the unfolding of this field that, in their details, offer deep insight into the mechanisms of field emergence as well as technology commercialization, insights that challenge many of the understandings in management research today. The story of STMs not only elucidates but also provokes a long series of new research questions.
Based on a multiyear ethnography of an STM lab, more than 150 interviews with inventors and users of STMs, and a painstakingly researched historical analysis, Mody engagingly provides a blow-by-blow description of the development of this scientific and technological field. He offers clear explanations of the science that make the developments readily understandable to the non-scientist reader. This careful grounding in the technical details allows him to show, without any elusive handwaving, the relationship between the material aspects of the instruments and the social aspects of the development of the instrumental community.
The book proceeds mainly chronologically, starting with the invention of the STM. Chapter 2 not only offers an account of how the STM’s inventors, Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer in IBM’s Zurich labs, “cannily” mobilized academic disciplines such as surface science to generate interest in their invention but also shows how Russell Young, the inventor of a precursor technology, the Topografiner, failed to do so. It is refreshing to look at a thwarted development as well as a successful one. And this comparison reveals that emergence does not happen from a clean sheet of paper but rather is made up of actions to mobilize resources in existing disciplines, organizations, and instrumental communities. The invention of the STM won Binnig and Rohrer a Nobel Prize.
Mody further demonstrates that adoption of these new instruments was not a stable exchange in which developers offered products and researchers chose whether or not to adopt them. Instead, the design of the products themselves was shaped by a search for potential users, and users then often modified the instruments for their own use. In essence, the STM inventors searched out potential users of the technology (in this case IBM surface scientists) and asked what surface they most wanted characterized. By getting results using the suggested silicon 7x7, they attracted tremendous attention from all of the fields interested in microelectronics and also garnered legitimacy and commitment from IBM management to support the STM program.
In the telling of this story, Mody unearths one fascinating exchange between a researcher at Bell Labs (a main competitor to IBM in STM development) and an IBM research manager from the Yorktown Heights location, in which the IBM’er attributed IBM Zurich’s Nobel Prizes to “poor management.” Said the informant, “At the National Bureau of Standards, where Young [the inventor of the Topographiner] had better management, the project was stopped, and at IBM Zurich, where they were pretty much leaving those people alone, it went ahead . . .” (p. 49).
Chapter 3 documents the interaction between organizations and disciplines. The STM is deeply connected to the stories of IBM and Bell Labs, which were, at least through the mid-1980s, preeminent corporate research organizations that could rival any university. In these organizations, producing outstanding research was the coin of the realm. Groups were allocated resources, and people were promoted based on the quality of research produced. And the way that research was judged was based on the evaluation criteria of the academic disciplines. Further, the commitment to quality research made recruiting top researchers into the labs easier. Eventually, once the STM had been widely replicated and adapted throughout these research organizations, and when the appetite for basic research in these corporate labs declined in the late 1980s, the researchers often returned to academia, bringing their knowledge and techniques with them.
But replication was tricky. Whether people made the pilgrimage to (IBM’s) Zurich or not, it would often take a few years to build a new STM, as researchers struggled to achieve the required atomic resolution. Mody suggests that the tacit knowledge required to make these instruments work travelled through networks of practitioners, sometimes brought together in problem-solving workshops (a particularly foundational one occurred in Cancun), but it appears that this mostly occurred as skilled scientists and technicians, as individuals or teams, were hired into different labs. These networks also functioned to establish the criteria for deciding if an experiment had been accurately replicated or not.
Here, we read fascinating stories like that of the bureaucratic fights for suitable lab space, which at Bell Labs resulted in the researchers commandeering a tractor shed. This shed, in which researchers put multiple STMs, ultimately became a famous and productive lab because the close proximity of instruments allowed the rapid circulation of knowledge, samples, and “everything else needed to make an STM work” (p. 74).
Chapter 4 explores the expansion of the STM research agenda geographically away from IBM’s and Bell Labs’ research sites (and toward California) and topically away from surface science. Interestingly, much of this development occurred through a relationship between Calvin Quate, a Stanford professor in applied physics and electrical engineering who was drawn to STMs by reading an article in Physics Today, and Paul Hansma, a professor from the University of California, Santa Barbara who was recruited by IBM Zurich after Rohrer had visited California. This relationship played out in only a small amount of coauthoring (something which management of technology scholars often count to measure collaboration and knowledge flows) but was mainly informal, involving exchanging experimental materials and students, commenting on each other’s draft articles, and collaborating on a sort of division of labor around which topics to pursue. This chapter traces the efforts to improve the STM that led to further developments, such as the atomic force microscope (AFM), as well as reduction in cost and increases in ease of use. In doing so, Mody also documents the growth of research networks mainly through ad hoc efforts to find people with needed skills in new research applications.
Interestingly, he highlights the importance of the mistakes that were made as the researchers expanded the STM agenda. Knowledge of how these instruments work was still in its infancy, and so “wrong” results that were potentially just artifacts of the instrument rather than characteristics of the materials under study were inevitable. He quotes one Santa Barbara post doc who said that “you can actually be wrong but still make an important contribution” because such results, properly contextualized, can be “inspirational” and can “stimulate thinking . . . [and] motivate people” (p. 114).
In chapter 5, Mody turns to the manufacturers of probes, both de alio entry by firms experienced in making other scientific instruments and de novo entry by startup firms, often founded by academics. These firms were able, in fairly short order, to make affordable probes for academic use, thus expanding the community of researchers beyond those with major corporate budgets or those willing and able to build their own instruments. Mody makes the case that the move toward commercialization, while benefiting from the Bayh-Dole Act and the growth of university technology licensing offices, began much before these structural changes came into being. In doing so, he problematizes the notion of “commercialization” itself, showing that STMers were actively engaged with commercial suppliers of parts as they built their own instruments and that STM developments were always occurring with tight connections between commercial labs (e.g., IBM and Bell Labs) and universities in which funding flowed from corporations to universities, and knowledge and people flowed in both directions. Relationships between labs and startups brought mutual benefits that Mody claims are not encompassed in normal discussions about technology transfer and the commercialization of academic knowledge.
In chapter 6, Mody points out that each subnetwork had different evaluation criteria for the credibility of claims about the value of the probe technology. Therefore members of different communities had to innovate in different directions to build trust in the technology and gain their own adherents and adopters. This development of different communities with different regimes of worth could have led to a fragmentation of the field, but the emerging label of “nanotechnology” became a means to attract funding and link activities across fields. Simultaneously, promoters of nanotechnology used the growing instrumental community around probes to legitimate their own enterprise.
Mody describes this as a marriage of convenience in which the nanotechnologists use probe microscopy and probe microscopists use nanotechnology to support their own interests and, in doing so, fuse their agendas over time. The combination of the decline of the Big Science/Cold War model for federal funding of research as well as the search for the next exciting agenda in science (“the bloom was off” of the discipline of surface science), drew most of the STM community toward the nanotechnology discourse. Nanotechnologists, seeking to link to as many communities as possible, eagerly sought out STMers to be part of their agenda.
The term nanotechnology has ended up functioning like a boundary object, though Mody doesn’t use this term, that has unified a dispersed set of research programs, in particular through the insistence on the inherently interdisciplinarity of nanotechnology. And the payoff has been the creation of the U.S. National Nanotechnology Initiative (by President Clinton in 2000) that has channeled a substantial amount of funding into new university-based research centers. Thus, Mody concludes, nanotechnology has offered a “bureaucratic form, promotional labels, and visibility” to the probe community, which has in turn made the nanotechnology agenda material and tangible through its instrumentation.
Mody’s lens into disciplines, organizations, and communities as they interact in the shaping of a new technology, a new field, and new organizational forms contains many valuable touch points and should prove to generate new hypotheses for research in all of these areas.
If there were one quibble about Mody’s book, it might be in his use of the idea of networks. Central to his analysis is the “instrumental community” itself, which he defines as “a network of individuals who view their involvement with a particular type of instrument . . . as ratifying their connection to other nodes in the network” (p. 10). This definition and the stories he tells throughout the book would seem to lend themselves well to more formal network analysis of the kinds that he cites (e.g., Owen-Smith and Powell, 2004). In particular, given his argument about the multiple, overlapping, and sometimes conflicting notions of value in each of the subnetworks, a systematic examination of the different networks, the types of links between them, and how they leverage (or do not leverage) each other would lend further credence to his argument—I’m thinking here of the layered network analysis in Safford (2009) showing how the intersections of networks shaped possibilities for collective action. This may be less of a gap in the book itself and more of an opportunity for future research as scholars continue to explore how technologies, organizations, disciplines, and communities emerge and co-evolve.