"Making Hands: A History of Knowledge and Production in Powered Arms"

In this book I examine the emergence of powered upper limbs from 1945 to 2020, with a focus on the research, development and innovation practices that led to novel commercial products. Management scholars have previously studied the industry, finding industrial emergence through not only competition between incumbents, new entrants and firms in other industries, but also commercialization-based collaboration. In this work I take a longer and alternative view of the industrial emergence. The book’s narrative is that electric powered upper limbs emerged in a socio-technical transition of three broad and overlapping changes of methods and meanings from 1945 to the present. The first change was from a shop-based, craft model to produce novel non-powered or body-powered prostheses (presented in chapter 3) to a predominantly university and clinic-based R&D model to produce primarily new powered limbs (outlined in chapter 4). From 1945 to the mid-1970s, the resulting R&D projects (explored in chapters 5-9) to produce powered artificial limbs were often discipline-based and run with little user involvement, limited to participation as test subjects. The second change, beginning in the 1970s, expanded the range of relevant social groups in definition of problems and solutions with electric hands. The third change was not to a new research and innovation method, but to new meanings of disability that used powered hands not to hide disability, as it had done since at least the eighteenth century, but to express it in hardware designs and colors that made no attempt to look like a natural hand.