“social” Adoption of a Technology: Magnetic Resonance Imaging (mri) in India

In the debates over appropriate technologies, because of some underlying assumptions about technology development and deployment, the process of “social” adoption of technologies is shown as a mundane and straightforward exercise. An important consequence of such an approach is that historical and sociological studies of social adoptions of technologies in non-western societies are rarely conducted, which has an additional implication – theorization as well as policy-making are rarely based on proper context-specific data. In this paper I analyze the social adoption of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), a cutting-edge medical imaging technology, in clinics in India. I argue that technology deployment (like technology development) is a contingent process in which social, economic, and epistemic are intertwined. Hence social adoptions, including issues pertaining to appropriateness of technologies, have to be analyzed for particular technologies, at different stages of development and deployment, and within broader socio-economic-epistemic networks. Western technology is the appropriate technology of rich societies, with high income per head, a low increase of working population for whom jobs must be created, and high ratio of saving to income. Austin Robinson, Appropriate Technologies for Third World Development. Concerns with regard to social impact of technology have been expressed ever since Industrial “Revolution” occurred in some west European countries in the late 18 and 19 centuries. In the non-western societies such as India concerns over social impact of technology have had an additional dimension technological domination of the “west” in the last two hundred years. Such concerns gave rise to a particular line of debate during the anti-colonial struggle in India and elsewhere, which advocated for appropriate technologies, particularly for the non-western societies. This debate has continued in the postcolonial era with several scholars emphasizing the need for the development and deployment of appropriate technologies for the non-western societies in order to escape the continued (imperial) dominance of the west (Alvares 1980; Reddy 1988; Sardar 1988; Upawansa 1988). The debate over appropriate or alternative technologies is varied and very often widely contested. Nevertheless, it does have some common strands. I will discuss a particular aspect of this debate in relation to “social” adoption of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) in India: Even though concerns are raised over the impact of certain technologies in the “west,” appropriate or alternative technologies are advocated largely for the “nonwestern” societies. The presumptions in this regard are that non-western societies such as India lack expertise to handle cutting-edge technologies, that they have a scarcity of economic resources for expensive technologies such as MRI, and that, deployment of