Ziegler presents case studies of France and Germany as they dealt with the challenge of promoting innovation in three separate technologies: telecommunications switching, digitally controlled machine tools, and semiconductors. His cases are well selected. France and Germany represent very different knowledge-group cultures, while the cross-sectoral comparisons control for the impact that the unique technical challenges facing a single economic sector might have on the innovative means selected by the state and the relevant outcome.

French educational policies created a highly selective group of knowledge-bearing elites. In addition to creating the national technical elite and controlling access to it, the national technical enterprise was also largely a state function. Thus, France’s knowledge-bearing elites tended to exist in a closed, self-replicating system. The system emphasized general reasoning skills, following the logic that general skills could be applied to specific problems. To a large degree, technically trained elites moved directly from the university to public administration. Germany, by contrast, possessed a broader, less-selective, knowledge-bearing elite and stressed an educational system focused on occupational skill training. Whereas French engineers stood at the top of the technical food chain and might have little interaction with other, non-knowledge-bearing elites, German knowledge-bearing groups were developed in a more open fashion and possessed a culture more inclined to encourage collaboration among different groups.

Ziegler finds that French technical culture (closed, elite, and centrally-managed) is more effective at mobilizing national resources (controlled by the state) to achieve a mission-oriented innovation goal, such as successfully integrating new switching technologies into the national telecommunications infrastructure. By contrast, he finds that German culture (open, mobile, and decentralized) is more effective at making the types of incremental, diffusion-oriented changes associated with process innovation such as the efficient introduction of digitally controlled machine tools in the manufacturing sector. Ziegler’s discussion of efforts in both countries to develop autarky in semiconductors demonstrates the persistence of previous approaches to new problems. France unsuccessfully applied the centrally managed strategy of mobilizing national resources that had served it well in the case of telecommunications switching, while Germany’s persistence in the cooperative diffusion of technology proved disappointing. For Ziegler, the persistence of these approaches in the face of new technological challenges demonstrates the hold that culture has on the policy process. Ziegler concludes that the connection of professional identities to institutional structures determines the nature of the “national innovation system” and gives each country a distinctive technical style. He thus falls into the analytical camp that doubts globalization will result in a homogenized, global technical innovation system. State divergence will persist.

Ziegler’s work is smoothly written, well researched, and pointedly original. While he presents a powerful argument, the book suffers from one major flaw. Ziegler fails to tackle the connection between the political power of knowledge-bearing groups and the nature of the innovation problem. In this case, the relative political power of technical elites, and not their culture, may play a more decisive role in determining how states approach innovation. Because they possessed the technical expertise to determine a rational policy option and exercised a sufficient degree of political control over state resources to implement it, French knowledge-bearing groups could solve the technical challenge before them in the case of switching technology. In contrast, German technical elites lacked the political power (and perspective) necessary to address an infrastructure problem such as digital switching, but the separation of political power from technical expertise resulted in a diffuse, and successful, policy supporting the adoption of digitally controlled machine tools at the firm level. Ziegler concedes as much in his conclusion to the chapter on telecommunications, so it is surprising that he did not more explicitly consider this alternative explanation.

Ziegler’s work is extremely valuable as one of the most probing assessments of how culture affects innovation. However, his conclusion, that innovative success will “depend broadly and often decisively on the ways in which knowledge-bearing elites define themselves and their relationship to the public sphere,” ultimately is not proven. More often than not, knowledge-bearing groups will not define their culture or identity for themselves, but it will evolve and be defined for them by society and their role in it. In this sense, the culture of knowledge-bearing groups is not a significant independent variable, but an intermediate variable. Its value is first affected by the culture of the society in general, which is likely to help determine the position within the state that knowledge-bearing elites will occupy in the process of policy formulation.

This suggests a different global economy than the one Ziegler envisions, which appears to be a modified version of traditional notions of specialization. Since culture changes slowly, Ziegler believes that individual countries will not be able to adjust quickly to changes in the global economy. This is a fair reaction to earlier expectations that institutions of innovation would converge around a most efficient model. However, if the culture of technical elites is not the chief determinant of the character of a state’s national innovation system, then individual countries may be able to change their innovation systems by changing their institutional arrangements. Even so, it does not follow that institutional arrangements will converge toward a common model, since each state’s political system and structure will differ. The incentive structure and political space available to rearrange institutions will vary from state to state. In that event, we may find as much variety in the way states approach innovation as Ziegler expects, but for entirely different reasons.