Beyond Innovation: Technology, Institution and Change as Categories for Social Analysis

Technology, Institution and Change as Categories for Social Analysis

Thomas Kaiserfeld

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137547125
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

Beyond Innovation counter weighs the present innovation monomania by broadening our thinking about technological and institutional change. It is done by a multidisciplinary review of the most common ideas about the dynamics between technology and institutions.

1

Innovation Monomania

Abstract: Innovation has become the buzzword in a number of policy areas including research policy, economic policy and environmental policy. In the struggle against economic stagnation, innovation policies, sometimes in alliance with the academic field of innovation studies, promote dreams about institutions and technologies in which change can never be turned into nightmares. The ambition of this book is, however, to point to a number of alternative models and theories within the social sciences that describe or explain dynamics between institutions and technologies. The purpose is to demonstrate the rich multitude of ideas about technology, institution and change beyond innovation in the context of liberal markets.

Keywords: innovation; innovation paradigm; innovation society; innovation studies

Kaiserfeld, Thomas. Beyond Innovation: Technology, Institution and Change as Categories for Social Analysis. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. DOI: 10.1057/9781137547125.0003.

Today’s Western society is obsessed with change and more specifically technological change. Innovation has become the buzzword in a number of policy areas including research policy, economic policy and environmental policy.¹ There does not seem to be a single challenge to humanity that cannot be remedied by some technological innovation including more drastic methods such as geoengineering. This trust in technology is often enough combined with an equally strong trust in economic institutions such as liberal markets, an ideal type where suppliers of identical products compete for consumers with a minimum of regulations to govern behaviour. Definitions of innovation accordingly include notions of some sort of check like a demand for success in one way or another. A typical definition thus frames innovation as “ideas successfully applied in organizational outcomes and processes.”² Consequently, considerable amounts of resources are funnelled into the development of different technologies or knowledge that is assumed to have a potential for commercialization.³ For instance, the European Union framework programme for research and innovation running from 2014 to 2020 and named Horizon 2020 includes an initiative called Innovation Union. This is a “strategy to create an innovation-friendly environment that makes it easier for great ideas to be turned into products and services that will bring our economy growth and jobs.”⁴

Innovation Union is a very representative symbol of the presently dominant view on technology, institution and change. With the right investments and the right strategy to create “an innovation-friendly environment”, commercial success stories are supposed to follow to everyone’s advantage. Such ideas rest on basic propositions of economic growth theory, “that in order to sustain a positive growth rate of output per capita in the long run, there must be continual advances in technological knowledge in the form of new goods, new markets, or new processes.”⁵ Important also are Joseph Schumpeter’s notions of quality-improving innovations, as the engine of capitalist growth with entrepreneurs driven by a strong will as the cornerstone. Since new innovations destroy the results of earlier ones, making them obsolete, an important result is so-called creative destruction.⁶ In the context of innovation, technological development is measured in commercial value, institutions according to how much they support the creation of new innovations, and, finally, change is always and in general beneficial. It is hardly surprising that innovation studies have thrived as an academic discipline in the social sciences and at business schools during the past decades.

Concepts such as “innovation society” and even “innovation paradigm” have been used to characterize the innovation monomania that dominates different policy initiatives, not the least in the European Union.⁷ As a consequence, representatives of innovation studies boast about the appreciation of their programme.

Innovation is increasingly recognized as a vitally important social and economic phenomenon worthy of serious research study. Firms are concerned about their innovation ability, particularly relative to their competitors, because they believe their future may depend on it. Politicians care about innovation, too, because of its presumed importance for growth, welfare, and employment. However, to recognize that innovation is desirable because of its assumed beneficial effects is not sufficient in itself. What is required is systematic and reliable knowledge about how best to influence innovation and exploit its effects to the full. Gaining such knowledge is the aim of innovation studies.⁸

Simultaneously, however, criticism against the academic and political focus on innovation as the high road to a better society has gained momentum.⁹ This has also led to reconsiderations of different more or less implicit assumptions traditionally made within innovation studies. One such assumption is that institutions can be arranged in order to efficiently support innovation activities or innovation transfer and, as a consequence, that regions and countries with the best institutions for innovation get a competitive advantage when attracting investments.¹⁰

Admittedly, there are emerging sub-disciplines of innovation studies in which alternative aims are being formulated such as responsible innovation or sustainable innovation.¹¹ Under these headings, efforts are made by researchers from different backgrounds to broaden the field of innovation studies to include innovations that may not exclusively meet demands played out on some sort of market or be measured against their contribution to economic growth. Complementary ideals for innovation activities, they claim, should or could also contain appreciated qualities such as sustainability or fair trade. These variations are launched either accepting market success as the dominant prerequisite of innovations or, in the more radical version, denying it. Regardless of its different forms, innovation studies in general tries to form alliances with innovation policies to promote dreams about institutions and technologies in which change can never be turned into nightmares.

This is a review intended to moderate that dream. The ambition is to point to a number of alternative models and theories within the social sciences that describe or explain dynamics between institutions and technologies. The purpose is to demonstrate the rich multitude of ideas about technology, institution and change beyond innovation in the context of liberal markets. “Economics of innovation”, as some critics have claimed, “does not, by and large, open the black box of technology, and it fails to engage with the increasingly sophisticated analyses of technology coming from history and sociology of technology”.¹² Others have added, “there is in [innovation studies] little evidence of openness to debate on fundamental issues (assumptions, approaches, models, concepts, typologies, biases and limitations)”.¹³

A case in point could be the problem of how to manage spent nuclear fuel from nuclear power plants, as of 2015 in operation in 31 different countries of the world. Already, there exists about 270,000 tonnes of spent nuclear fuel with an annual addition of about 12,000 tonnes of which 3,000 goes to reprocessing.¹⁴ In order to develop methods to securely store this waste for the ten to hundred millennia it takes for the radioactivity to wear off, countries with nuclear power have different research and development programmes, many of them aiming for deep geological storage. The problems are to some extent technical, for instance, how to encapsulate the waste in order to seal it off from the environment in the storage. In addition, there are a number of social challenges, most importantly perhaps to develop democratic processes to decide the sites selected for storage.¹⁵ While technical and scientific research for the development of methods for deep geological storage of spent nuclear fuel has been pursued since the 1970s, the development of social institutions for democratic site-selection processes is still an under-developed field despite many different efforts.

There are, to be sure, alternative solutions to the problem too, at least hypothetically. Today’s conventional reactor technologies extract only small parts of the potential energy content of fissile material used in nuclear power plants. In order to improve efficiency, proponents of nuclear power want to develop so-called breeder reactors, which use the fuel more efficiently. Breeder technologies exist in different versions and stages of research and development which are sometimes named Generation IV reactors, or Gen IV for short. In common, however, they share a number of shortcomings making it likely to take decades of further research to develop them to be suitable for commercially competitive power production. But the research and development needed is uncertain in terms of outcomes while simultaneously being extremely expensive. The uncertainty surrounding Gen IV reactors has created a genuine insecurity regarding what to do with the spent nuclear fuel that has already been generated at existing nuclear power plants. Is the best solution really to store it in deep geological deposits more or less irretrievably or should this extremely radioactive and dangerous material be stockpiled for possible future use in Gen IV reactors although this may attract interest among those who want to access and use it to harm people?

From the traditional innovation perspective, the solution is of course to funnel resources to develop new reactor technologies while keeping the already spent nuclear fuel accessible. This is already going on in different national projects, in Europe through the European Atomic Energy Community (abbreviated to Euratom) and internationally in Generation IV International Forum with a number of partner countries as well as Euratom representing the European Commission and the member states of the European Union. In Europe, different initiatives to develop three different Generation IV reactor prototypes have been calculated to cost close to 11 billion euros supplied by the European Commission with additional support from different participating countries.¹⁶

In comparison, only negligible resources are spent on the problem of developing social institutions to secure necessary transports of spent nuclear fuel from power plants to reprocessing plants and back again. In addition, equally small resources are spent on the problem of how to set up institutions to secure the storage of spent nuclear fuel, either retrievably or irretrievably. Different social institutions are beginning to be reviewed and considered in order to find new ways of preserving and maintaining knowledge and memory regarding different sites and deposits for spent nuclear fuel. But this work is only starting and is not being pursued in any more systematic way. The problem is often a lack of knowledge about the multitude of existing institutions and their respective efficiency when set out to solve different problems.

This book is intended to supply a comprehensive review of different ways of thinking about how to combine changing technologies and institutions in order to meet different challenges, ideas that go beyond what is usually offered in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Innovation Monomania
• 2  Technology, Institution and Change
• 3  Market Institutions
• 4  Evolutionary Economics
• 5  Performativity
• 6  Knowledge
• 7  Agency
• 8  Clusters, Systems and Blocks
• 9  Resistance to Change
• 10  Commons
• 11  Technological Determinism
• 12  Modernity and Its Critics
• 13  Postmodernity
• 14  Hybridity and Technology Transfer
• 15  Conclusions
• Bibliography
• Index