While considerable research has been done on the politics, economics, and cultural implications of technological change, most such work does not integrate either the various facets of technological change or the technological artifact with its dialectically-linked social meaning. In this study of technology, productivism, and consumerism in interwar France, Dr. Frost is utilizing an integrated theory and methodology to explain the emergence of a set of technologically linked cultural images and the social impact of technological discourse within French society at a time when the breadth of technological change was slight. This research focuses particularly upon the contradiction between an emerging modernist view of "progress" and a genuine lack of concrete technological change. An integrated approach like the one that Dr. Frost is using offers an opportunity to observe and define the mutual prestructuring of technological text and social context. Techniques for this study therefore stretch from technical design analysis, through micro- and macroeconomic calculation, to the analysis and interpretation of technological discourse--from economics to semiotics--using a range of sources from demographic and economic statistics to trade fairs and advertising brochures. this study is developing conclusions about the processes of innovation and diffusion, the invention of new social roles concurrent with the invention f artifacts, the economics and finances of innovation, and the fracture between technological images and artifacts in interwar (1919-1930) France. The results should prove extraordinarily helpful in pointing the way toward a comprehensive approach to the study of the processes of technological innovation.
