THE THIN LINE BETWEEN ADVANCED AND CONVENTIONAL NEW TECHNOLOGY - A CASE-STUDY ON PAPER-INDUSTRY MANAGEMENT

The case study evidence in this paper suggests that management of tech nological change is more complicated than the existing literature has acknowledged. Rather than merely introduce or not introduce new techno logy, managers have to choose between more or less advanced technologi es whose implications are difficult to assess. Moreover, the choice be tween advanced and conventional production technologies seems to be in fluenced more by situational determinants than by the habitual actions of managers or changes in management characters. Taking these situati onal determinants and firm-specific critical incidents seriously is es sential, especially for an understanding of why managerial actors alte r their approach to managing technological change. By adopting a longi tudinal firm-in-sector perspective to technological change this paper demonstrates how coinciding increases in material resources and compet itive pressures encourage management to adopt: advanced instead of con ventional technology. To justify this argument, the paper compares two consecutive technological change projects in the same firm and descri bes the background of their profoundly different degrees of sophistica tion.