The Impacts of Technological Change on the Industry- The Case of the Scandinavian cement industry in the 20th century

• Main Author: Olavi H. Uusitalo
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Lehto; Iceland
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.604.9712; http://impgroup.org/uploads/papers/6891.pdf

Purpose of the paper and literature addressed The aim of the study is to find out the deep reasons for the structural changes in the Scandinavian (including Finland but excluding Iceland) cement industry in 1950-2000. The cement technology has evolved from the wet methods to dry methods. The cement burning technologies in the late 1970s, changed the structure of the U.S. cement industry (Anderson and Tushman, 1990). However, according to some industry specialists the reasons for structural changes at least in the Finnish cement industry have been the large scale plants and the vision of reduced construction activities in Finland (Lehto, 1996). Conceptually our goal is to define how well the modified version of the model suits to our task to identify the impacts of technological change on the Scandinavian cement industry. We also apply the network perspective to industry evolution (Lundgren, 1993, Håkansson and Snehota, 1995). Research method To study the actual problem, a technological change in the market, a longitudinal, historical and contextual case was applied. “Pettigrew (1985) ” argues that to understand a change one has to study