Question

For decades, the standard historical narrative regarding the mechanical clock posited it as an autonomous agent of social change. According to this view, championed by technological determinists, the introduction of the mechanical clock in fourteenth-century Europe unilaterally imposed a rigid, abstract framework of hours and minutes onto society, thereby fundamentally reshaping labor practices and daily routines. Recently, however, a group of scholars known as social-integrationists has challenged this narrative. The social-integrationists argue that the mechanical clock did not independently generate a cultural shift toward strict timekeeping; rather, it was adopted precisely because a nascent cultural demand for temporal regulation already existed. They note that the rigorous schedules of Benedictine monasteries and the complex coordination required in the Flemish textile trade necessitated precise timekeeping long before mechanical escapements were widely available. In the integrationists' view, the mechanical clock was merely a technological fulfillment of a socioeconomic order that was already crystallizing.

Based on the passage, the social-integrationists would be most likely to agree with which one of the following statements regarding the relationship between technology and society?