Introduction

This chapter deals with historical cases of resistance to new technologies in Norway and Sweden. It is primarily an interpretive essay rather than original research, drawing on existing historical work related to economic and social dimensions of technological change in two of the largest and most important Scandinavian industries, fishing and timber, plus a major energy technology of the twentieth century, nuclear power. It is interpretive in the sense that the objective of the chapter is not simply to describe some historical aspects of resistance to innovation in these industries, but also to raise questions about how such resistance should be understood. The main point which is argued is that resistance to new technologies should not be seen purely in terms of a kind of conservative labour resistance; rather, it often involves complex coalitions of actors, and is perhaps best understood as one of the selection mechanisms through which societies adopt or reject new technological opportunities.

In general, in analysing technological change in Scandinavia, we are discussing processes by which foreign technologies enter the system. Like many of the core technologies of the region, the new techniques in fishing, timber processing and energy had in common the fact that they were originally developed outside Scandinavia, and so what is being considered here are in part conflicts related to international technology transfer.

The Scandinavian economies have always been highly open trading economies, firmly integrated with the trading systems of the Hanseatic League, the Dutch Baltic trade, and then the ‘new’ Atlantic economy (based on trade between Europe and the American colonies) which emerged in the eighteenth century.