"Conceptualizing Technological Maintenance: Monsanto’s Roundup Weedkiller in Historical Perspective"

Historians of technology Lee Vinsel and Andrew Russell have recently articulated calls for research on maintenance as an important phase of technological innovation. Although maintaining a technology’s ability to create and capture value in a competitive environment would seem essential for any technology-based firm, neither business historians nor management scholars have devoted much attention to the concept of technological maintenance. There is, however, a robust literature on “institutional maintenance” in organizational studies that offers some insights on the processes by which firms are able to maintain their technology. This paper focuses on the case of Monsanto’s Roundup technology over a nearly five-decade time span to illustrate how a company may deploy different modes of technological maintenance to preserve value, benefit from efficiency gains, and create and capture new value. Monsanto’s Roundup weedkiller provides an especially interesting case study. Since its introduction in 1972, it has consistently been the most valuable technological resource for Monsanto, holding onto the top spot in global sales of herbicides over a remarkable span of time unmatched by any other firm or product in the agribusiness sector. Especially intriguing are the multiple ways in which, over half a century, Monsanto successfully fended off attacks on Roundup’s potential health hazards, environmental impacts, and effectiveness as an herbicide. Our paper, drawing on a robust set of archival documents from the Monsanto collections at Washington University, will explore this historical case to offer some preliminary contributions to how business historians and management scholars might conceptualize and build a future research agenda on technological maintenance.