Uneven and Combined development

While technological improvements can be indeed adopted by others, social
relations of production are much tougher to replicate, and rely on complex social
synergies that are held together by distinct structures of power. These are based on a precarious balance which history tells us is difficult to imitate. It took a long time for continental competitors to find a response to the innovations of English industry in the nineteenth century, and more recently, the attempts to replicate ‘Toyotism’ abroad, let alone in Japan, have shown that borrowing production practices is no simple matter (Streeck 1996 ). Most of the time, the results are very different from the initial model. The reason for this is that habits, traditions, regulations and other institutions all take part in a complex path-dependent development that is ridden with power relations and which leads producers down different trajectories. To simply transplant a practice to a different organization with its own dynamics of power is bound to produce different outcomes. [ Di Muzio ]
See: Tradition; Adoptionism; Adaptivity;