Framing Production: Technology, Culture and Change in the British Bicycle Industry

Journal of Transport History, The, Mar 2004 by Oddy, Nicholas

Paul Rosen, Framing Production: Technology, Culture and Change in the British Bicycle Industry, MIT Press, Cambridge MA and London (2002), 219 pp., US$32.95.

Paul Rosen's 1995 Ph.D. thesis is an essential reference for academics interested in socio-technical change in the cycle industry, and this book is a distillation and development of it, placed in the context of a historical overview from 1888 to the present. To use the author's own words, the book is mainly lodged in 'the multi-disciplinary field of science, technology and society (STS) and its subfield social studies of technology (SST)'.

Any author tackling such a topic would find it difficult to avoid reference to Wiebe Bijker and Trevor Pinch's seminal 1984 article in Social Studies of Science, which has since been developed by Bijker in Of Bicycles, Bakelite and Bulbs (1995). These use the development of the bicycle in the period 1839-92 to demonstrate a model of social construction of technology that gives a radically different reading of the development of the machines from that of the 'quasi-linear' technological histories which dominate the subject. Rosen devotes his opening chapter to an analysis of this and other theoretical approaches to technological change, while the whole book aims to build upon and reassess the validity of Bijker's approach. One of Bijker's failings was his reliance on outdated and often discredited factual history; this is not something that Rosen can be accused of. He is as aware of recent work by collectors and cycling enthusiasts as of more 'academic' studies. It is pleasing to see the output of the International Conference of Cycling History cited frequently in a book of this kind, particularly after Bijker's singular failure to acknowledge it. On bibliography and references alone Rosen's work is creditable.

While Bijker's interest in the bicycle diminishes after the 'stabilisation' and eventual 'closure' of the diamond-frame safety bicycle of the 1890s, Rosen's interest commences at this point. He explores the shift from what he terms the 'factory bicycle' made by the principal British manufacturers at the end of the nineteenth century to the 'mass bicycle' of the mid-twentieth century to the 'globally flexible bicycle' of the present day. To a great extent these changes revolve round a technologically 'closed' product: at a casual glance it would be difficult to differentiate a 'mass' from a 'factory' bicycle, and arguably there is little more than aesthetic tinkering between a 'mass' and a 'globally flexible' bicycle. This is very different from the competing and widely different bicycle types of the 1860-90 period that Bijker investigates. Furthermore Rosen restricts the bulk of his study to the output of one maker, Raleigh. This is understandable. Raleigh was a product of the 'factory' period. Founded in the late 1880s, it had become a quality manufacturer by the time of the 1890s boom and survived the crash that followed it to return to private ownership under Frank and then Harold Bowden. A voracious consumer of weaker rivals, in the late 1950s Raleigh was making over 50 per cent of British-built bicycles in a factory covering over sixty acres. After its merger with the British Cycle Corporation it became responsible for 75 per cent of production but lost its autonomy. Until the 1980s it attempted to respond to a diminishing market and the major cultural shifts that resulted in the 'globally flexible' bicycle. Today Raleigh merely assembles machines from components which are largely made abroad. The example of Raleigh, therefore, provides Rosen with an unbroken case study that encompasses his whole period and has a substantial archive to facilitate research.

Dr Rosen is not the first to use Raleigh sources, and Roger Lloyd Jones and M. J Lewis's Raleigh and the British Bicycle Industry gives a more straightforward business history. Rosen, while giving a satisfactory business history, seeks the socio-cultural factors that underpin management policy making. This is where the use of the social construction of technology approach comes into its own. Rosen is refreshingly unwilling to prejudge events. In his exploration of the 'factory bicycle' he points out the cultural factors that allowed companies such as Raleigh to invest in American manufacturing technology while rejecting American working practices. He rightly sees this as a conscious decision, based on an understanding of British conditions, rather than as a result of short-sighted ignorance - the assumption made at the time of David Hounshell's work in the 1980s and still often repeated. The same is said for Raleigh's only partial adoption of Taylorist and Fordist practices in the period of the 'mass' bicycle, and the complexities of the company's relationship with its workforce at this time is well illustrated in 'The case of Tivey'. Rosen's interest in the culture of the shop floor and his cultural-historical approach allow him to make good use of fictional sources such as Alan Sillitoe's 1958 novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.