THE INFLUENCE OF DEVELOPMENT PERSPECTIVES ON THE CHOICE OF TECHNOLOGY

Studies on choice of technology are aimed at discovering the developme nt-promoting potential of a specific technology. This requires a holis tic description of alternative technologies through a unified set of a ttributes; followed by a ranking of alternatives within a given develo pment perspective. In this paper the problem of choice of technology i s viewed as a technology-ranking problem and is studied by relating it to two development perspectives labeled as: 1) regional self-reliant development and 2) market or growth-oriented development. Five technol ogy alternatives in toilet soap-making are ranked by the application o f Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). It is shown that the rankings are significantly altered when the development perspective is changed.