A Companion to the Philosophy of Technology

What Is Technology?

But what exactly is meant by the term “technology”? According to Dean and LeMaster (1995, p. 19), technology is defined as “firm-specific information concerning characteristics and performance properties of production processes and product design.” While Contractor and Sagafi-Nejad (1981) describe technology simply as “a bundle of information, rights and services,” Maskus (2004, p. 9) defines technology as “the information necessary to achieve a certain production outcome from a particular mean of combining or processing selected inputs.” However, Maskus (2004) solely distinguishes between embodied and disembodied technology, whereas Kedia and Bhagat (1988) recommend a more detailed classification into process-, product- and person-embodied technology.

Technology represents the combination of human understanding of natural laws and phenomena accumulated since ancient times to make things that fulfill our needs and desires or that perform certain functions (Karatsu 1990). In other words, technology has to create things that benefit human beings. Miles (1995) defines technology as the means by which we apply our understanding of the natural world to the solution of practical problems. It is a combination of “hardware” (buildings, plant and equipment) and “software” (skills, knowledge, experience, together with suitable organizational and institutional arrangement).

The UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) has provided the following definition:

Technology ...