TECHNOLOGY MANAGEMENT ON THE GREAT BELT FIXED LINK

On large infrastructure projects the superior choice of technology is evidently taken within the environment of political and economic interests. The choice is an outcome of alliances contracted by different actors and their power relations. The available competence of technology experts is not taken into account for an overall assessment of each technological alternative. Rather representatives of these alternatives are applied "as experts" by political decision makers for boosting the reliability of their arguments. Thereby firms are on the other hand given the potential to influence the technology choice in a direction adequate to the actual or strategically planned capability of the firm. A position of power is achieved by distributing confirmatory information to the political forces working for the corresponding solution. The final choice of technology is then, as indicated above, more a question of power relations than representing engineering and science based studies of the appropriateness of a given technology. At the Great Belt for instance, the client’s role consequently was to perform within rather tight, politically given conditions, reducing his opportunities of optimising the technological properties of the project. Although the political interest are no longer directly deployed during design and production, the inefficiencies of the earlier choices start to materialise in these phases. But the technology management approach performed by the involved actors now typically focus on the adaptation of technology within the boundaries of business and project financial calculations. Such changes in management focus will basically characterise every level and phase of the project, corresponding to the varying technology conception of the specific actors. An obvious assumption concerning the consequenses of this relationism would probably highlight the counterproductive effects of discontinuities in managemen, and therefore urge a paradigmatic normalisation as discussed in the introduction of this paper. On the other hand from the perspective of the actors at stake their actions are undoubtedly driven by the most pressing logic. Therefore in the following the prime aim is explicitly to search for and to identify the management criteria affecting specific technological phenomena on the Great Belt. Secondly it will be analysed, whether the above suggested conceptual perspective actually exposes the limited rationality at work from a more holistic point of view.