Table Of ContentTechnical Knowledge
and Development
‘Targeting his analytical skills upon interactions among development professionals
and their in-country interlocutors, Grammig encounters and empirically unpacks
the cultural constraints to our notion of Technical Assistance. While others lace their
development discourse with imprecise ideas about “culture”, Grammig is laser-sharp
in his theoretical stance and empirical framework. The results are sobering and
provocative, with important implications for social science’s contribution to the
development process.’
William Partridge, Lead Anthropologist
Latin America and the Caribbean Region, World Bank
Development assistance often fails to improve managerial and technological capacity.
The reform of these projects has been a widely acknowledged challenge for three
decades.
Whereas interpretative social sciences have enhanced knowledge habits, learning
and participation within commercial firms, in development assistance the politics of
international relations has frequently rendered project implementation problematic,
or even counter-productive. Moreover, technical knowledge is modified in substance
and meaning when it passes from one social context to another.
This book seeks to overcome this legacy by theoretically and empirically
demonstrating how development practitioners shape the organizational, social and
intercultural dynamics of project implementation in industry.
The author demonstrates a fieldwork approach used by French contemporary
anthropologists to grasp the cultural and social components of high- and low-
technology projects as he considers and defines:
• the role of technical knowledge and know-how;
• project dynamics;
• constitutive sociocultural processes and communication structures;
• management tools for cultural distance.
Grammig argues for a limitation of planning and management in development
agencies and proposes tools definable by the practitioners concerned for each context.
This work will be of essential interest to development practitioners, planners and
evaluators, and to students of innovation, industrial development, international
technology co-operation and project management, science and technology studies,
technical change and intercultural communication.
Thomas Grammig, after studying chemical engineering in Frankfurt, spent 6years
as a consultant in Technical Assistance. Following studies in development economics
at Sussex University, he obtained a PhD in anthropology at the EHESS in Paris.
Since 1996, he has served as Academic Director in the Leadership for Environment and
Development (Lead-Europe) foundation in Geneva.
Routledge studies in development and society
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Edited by Isa Baud and Ines Smyth
The Life Region
The social and cultural ecology of sustainable development
Edited by Per Råberg
Dams as Aid
Anne Usher
Politics of Development Cooperation
NGOs, gender and partnership in Kenya
Lisa Aubrey
Psychology of Aid
A motivational perspective
Stuart Carr, Eilish McAuliffe and Malcolm MacLachlan
Gender, Ethnicity and Place
Women and identity in Guyana
Linda Peake and D. Alissa Trotz
Housing and Finance in Developing Countries
Edited by Kavitta Datta and Gareth Jones
Peasants and Religion
A socioeconomic study of Dios Olivorio and the Palma Sola
religion in the Dominican Republic
Jan Lundius and Mats Lundahl
Environment and Development in the Straits of Malacca
Mark Cleary and Goh Kim Chuan
Ethnic Minorities, Indigenous Peoples and the Impact
of Development
Edited by Gerard Clarke and Alan Rew
Technical Knowledge and Development
Observing aid projects and processes
Thomas Grammig
Technical Knowledge
and Development
Observing aid projects and processes
Thomas Grammig
London and New York
First published 2002
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2003.
© 2002 Thomas Grammig
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,
or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Grammig, Thomas, 1960–
Technical knowledge and development: observing aid projects
and processes / Thomas Grammig.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Technical assistance – Developing countries. 2. Technology
transfer – Developing countries. I. Title.
HC60.G644 2001
338.9'26'091724–dc21 2001019765
ISBN 0-203-16468-7 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-25891-6 (Adobe eReader Format)
ISBN 0-415-25364-0 (Print Edition)
Contents
Preface vii
1 Introduction 1
1.1 Historical context 1
1.2 Development events observed 3
1.3 Basic questions 6
1.4 Results 7
1.5 About the text 9
2 Development anthropology 12
2.1 Phases in development anthropology 13
2.2 Specificity of the phases 16
2.3 Actor-oriented approach in applied research 20
2.4 The debate about the object of development anthropology 23
3 Constructing the intelligibility of the events based
on participant observation 28
3.1 Project dynamics generated by the actors’
life-worlds 31
3.2 The position of an observer and the effects of observer
presence 37
3.3 Responses to the results by the actors and development
agencies 44
3.4 Other repercussions from the fieldwork 49
4 Interpretation of the events 52
4.1 Implementing Appui Technique 54
4.2 Implementing Autogeneración 65
vi Contents
5 Latent processes in technical assistance 74
5.1 Mutual appreciation of technology and the
content process 75
5.2 Project dynamics generated by the exchange
process 82
5.3 Interface between developers and developees 89
5.4 Communication structures and the comparative
approach 103
5.5 Evaluation science 113
6 Technical assistance event management 131
6.1 Dimensions of the developer–developee encounter 134
6.2 Conceptualizing management goals 153
6.3 Implementing technical assistance 164
7 Outlook 174
7.1 Research outlook 182
Appendix 1 189
Appendix 2 194
Notes 196
Bibliography 224
Index 238
Preface
The institutional (aid politics) and organizational (donor inertia) obstacles
to producing anthropology of development efforts are immense. I could use
the material resources and, more importantly, the motivation from 6years
as an engineering consultant mostly in energy projects funded by the US
Agency for International Development (USAID) and the World Bank. Pierre
Achard, Allan Hoben, Mick Howes and Michael Schönhuth encouraged me
to try. Gérard Althabe and Monique Selim have taught me ethnography and
made this research viable. Christine Jones translated and improved my
writing. I would also not have been able to get this far without the generous
advice of Raymond Apthorpe, Michael J. Chadwick, Jean-Pierre Chauveau,
Kim Forss, Georgia Kaufmann, Arturo Lara Rivero, Anne LeNaelou, Fabrizio
Sabelli and Michel Tibon-Cornillot. Finally, I owe the opportunity to produce
this text to those who appear anonymously in these pages and I am deeply
grateful for their trust.
Some management fads spreading in business schools actually damage
commercial companies and are later uncritically applied to development
efforts. Knowledge management could be a new one. In a global market where
most power rests in the control over science and technology, ‘managing’
technical knowledge can be a versatile smokescreen. If I have contributed to
filling rhetoric with ethnographic evidence of knowledge exchanges, reading
this will be worth your time. Technology can enhance a developee’s autonomy,
affirm a developer’s identity and even alter the forms that globalization takes.
Little of this occurs because most developer–developee efforts disfigure their
skills instead of using them for the interests of both. When developers and
developees mutually admit this, they radically change their relationship.
Often, engineers discover that their skills are impregnated with social
and political ambitions, and then they become social scientists to undo what
their education made them believe and want. I am quite typical in that respect.
In the North–South context, ethnologists are much better equipped for that
discovery because their discipline came about within it. They do not need
years of practice to face their assumptions about progress and social history.
However, the ethnologists’ problem of reflexivity is not made smaller because
participant observation only produces insight into social reality when it is a
viii Preface
shared effort of observer and observed. I certainly savour bringing my
understanding to interact with the understanding of the protagonists of
development efforts. Many of those who appear in these pages had similar
feelings when we talked about the complexity of the development effort. I
have taken a few prudent steps further into social theory and technology
studies and assert that these steps are real opportunities for development
assistance and for technology co-operation in industry.
Thomas Grammig
email: trgram@compuserve.com
1 Introduction
Beyond the common approach of examining development aid for its impact,
we investigate its potential. In the area of technical assistance in particular,
there is ample scope to explore the microlevel1 and use theory never
considered before to demonstrate that potential. Rather than only criticizing
what is going on in technical assistance, we explore how it could evolve.
Aid practitioners are submerged in project implementation problems,
reacting passively while searching for explanations. The insider perspective
of technical assistance remains far apart from the outsider perspective, where
planners and the public use vague hypotheses to form opinions. This study
renders the two perspectives mutually intelligible. Based on the idiosyncrasies
of each situation, a theory of practice explains the practitioners’ daily efforts
to understand each other and the resulting dynamics of an encounter between
developers and developees. Throughout their careers, the developers and
developees toil within the cultural dimensions of the economics, the
technologies and the management on which their careers depend. Their
dilemma is how to transfer technologies between societies. Without normative
reactions, this research approach follows their intentions. Our premise is
that modifying practitioners’ work conditions will have far-reaching
consequences for management, evaluation and social science research about
technical assistance.
1.1 Historical context
The term technology transfer appeared in the 1950s in post-war
reconstruction plans. Many development agencies now use the broader terms
of technical assistance, technical co-operation or building technological capacity. In
general, these differ only stylistically, and technology transfer remains the
most persistent conceptual blank spot in all development aid by the
industrialized countries. Technology transfer still appears in most policy
packages produced for developing countries. This is understandable since
changes in technology were the prime factor behind industrial expansion in
the twentieth century, and are possibly responsible for 80 per cent of gross
domestic product (GDP) growth in the North.2 Actual technology transfer is
