Rhetorical history

Defined by the Sea was not intended as a history, but it is. It tells us a story about the past. That makes it a history. But it is not just any kind of history. It is rhetorical history. Companies use rhetorical history to establish valuable symbolic assets and competitive advantages (Suddaby et al, 2010). This involves ‘strategic use of the past as a persuasive strategy to manage key stakeholders of the firm’ (Suddaby et al, 2010). In this chapter, we will see that rhetorical history also helps assemble a ‘cluster’, ‘industry’, or ‘sector’. An industrial history can provide a kind of geopolitical competitive advantage (c.f. Porter, 1990; 2003). The narrative serves to attract interest and resources towards the future development of an ‘industry’. It establishes the industry or cluster as ‘historical fact’. Similarly, Philip Roundy has shown that narratives about entrepreneurship and place (or entrepreneurial ecosystems) can discursively construct regional advantages and disadvantages (Roundy, 2016, 2018; Roundy and Bayer, 2018). He argues that such regional narratives can coalsce over time (Roundy, 2018). But I have shown elsewhere that alternate narratives are always possible and present (MacNeil et al, 2021). Most of us take for granted that there should be one coherent story about a region, industry, innovation system, or entrepreneurial ecosystem (or whatever other container you wish). This seems natural if we accept the most powerful narrative at face value.

As we will see later in this chapter, Defined by the Sea provides us with a story about ocean technology in Nova Scotia that is politically motivated and temporally situated. We are meant to accept the version of the past that is presented: without any sense of sources, method, or authorship. After all, the past is merely background context for the real work: building the future of this industry. And, make no mistake, industry is the central concern. Public research organizations are cast as supporting characters. What about ocean science instruments? They are just one part of one subcategory of a huge industry – an industry anchored by shipbuilding. In this policy document, the industry and its past are rhetorically constructed.

It’s not that the government employees who wrote this report violated the rules of history. Almost everyone ‘does history’ this way. I did it in my PhD thesis; I just added more facts (and sources). I wrote a straightforward, realist account of the historical context for ocean science instrument innovation in Nova Scotia. ‘History’ provided the background context I needed to explain and interpret a ‘more rigorous’ quantitative network analysis. There was no need for historiographic complexities. I just needed readers to accept the past and move on. The context chapter of my thesis was a rhetorical history, just like Defined by the Sea. However, this chapter is not.

History as background

Despite ‘Schumpeter’s plea’ that we apply historical analysis to innovation and entrepreneurship (Wadhwani and Jones, 2014), there are hardly any historians in innovation studies (Godin, 2017, 2020). Just like management and organization studies, stories about the past are mostly taken for granted. History is treated as ‘background information secondary to the kind of “real” analysis and rigour the social sciences provide’ (Wadhwani and Bucheli, 2014, p 7). It is almost always relegated to the short ‘context’ and ‘background’ sections that can be found in many studies. There, the past is presented as ‘stylized facts’ (Kirsch et al, 2014). The emergence of a particular industrial context is an uncited preamble to present-day empirical analysis. For example, influential innovation studies describe the history of nations (for example, Freeman, 2002), regions (for example, Asheim and Coenen, 2005), or industries (for example, Cooke, 2002) without debate over how those histories might come to be known. Yes, time and change are important to innovation theory: temporal processes are at the core of evolutionary economics (Nelson and Winter, 1982) and the concept of path dependence (Liebowitz and Margolis, 1995). But generally, innovation studies do not engage with historiography. Instead, they reproduce what Gaddis (2004, p 92) has called the ‘don’t ask, we won’t tell’ approach to historiographic method. They remove all trace of the author and her/his method, and indirectly ask the reader to accept the history, as it is presented. White (1987, p ix) suggests that this writing style gives historical narrative ‘an illusory coherence’. It relies on a conventional view that the past is readily available to us.

However, only traces of the past remain: reports, notes, news articles, official and unofficial reports, and so on. We do not have a time machine. The past cannot be retrieved through cleverness of method or comprehensiveness of traces. Traces are simply ‘immutable mobiles’ (Latour, 1987): ideas that have been inscribed with a certain degree of permanence. They were authored and preserved (by whom? Which ones?). The traces that survive today can interact with other traces, readers, and authors. When we interact with a trace, translation (Callon, 1986) takes place. The trace might enrol us into its cause, and we might enrol the trace into our cause. In this way, traces are not objective (or even subjective) evidence of the past. They are nonhuman political actors that can build coalitions around their ideas. When we read a trace, we are given the opportunity to enrol in its network, to act on its behalf, to pass along its story. Traces can connect actors-long-gone with actors-in-the-present. In this way, knowledge of the past is constructed through the relations between actors. Any ‘history’ can be thought of as an actor-network – or an assemblage. It can be read at face value or disassembled and deconstructed.

This is an amodern understanding of history. It was introduced to me by my friend and colleague Gabrielle Durepos. Her ‘ANTi-History’ approach fuses ANT with ideas from critical historiography (Durepos and Mills, 2011, 2012). It provides a framework – a set of instrumentalities – for practising history differently. Many critical organization historians now use this approach (for example, Myrick et al, 2013; Peter and Lawrence, 2017; Tureta et al, 2021). It can reveal how knowledge of the past has been constructed and what other ways of knowing the past might be written off, written out, or marginalized.

ANTi-History

Early ANT studies focused on the construction of knowledge in scientific laboratories (Latour and Woolgar, 1986; Latour, 1987) and the social engineering of technologies (Callon, 1986a; Law, 1986). ANT has since been translated for use in organization studies to help retheorize a wide range of topics (Woolgar et al, 2009). But ANT is neither theory nor method in the traditional sense of those words (Latour, 1999; Law, 1999). It is more accurately described as a research approach (Alcadipani and Hassard, 2010).

An actor can be any entity (human or nonhuman, such as a piece of technology) with the capacity to act upon another (Law, 1986). Interactions between these entities form network relations. Callon (1986) calls this process ‘translation’ and breaks it down into four ‘moments’. The interactions begin with problematization: a problem is defined (by one or more of the actors) such that the actors seem indispensable to one another. For example, a policy maker might work to convince various organizations that they exist in a mutually beneficial industrial cluster (that is, their fortunes are tied together). The second moment is interessement: an actor ‘attempts to impose and stabilize the identity of the other actors it defines through its problematization’ (Callon, 1986, p 204). In other words, an organization might be convinced that its identity is defined through its association within an industrial cluster. Next, objections and negotiations are resolved during the third moment: enrolment. Here, some companies may find enrolment to be in their best interests: they benefit in some way from the association. Other companies may choose to resist. In the final moment, mobilization, those actors that were successfully enrolled may begin to act on behalf of the network. Company officials may begin to positively promote their home region to suppliers, customers, and partners. Of course, this process is not specific to the formation of industrial clusters.

When many actors begin to act in unison, their network is said to become punctuated (Latour, 1987); in other words, the network becomes an actor. One way in which networks punctuate is by inscribing their intent into a report (Latour, 1987), book (Durepos and Mills, 2012), technology (Akrich, 1994), or other material artefact. This object becomes a nonhuman actor, an immutable mobile (Latour, 1987) that can travel across time and space enrolling other actors into its cause. It also has the ability to appear as a ‘black box’ (Latour, 1987): concealing the network that led to its creation. Historical accounts are particularly interesting ‘black box’ inscription points.

ANTi-History (Durepos and Mills, 2011, 2012) is an approach for studying black-boxed organizational histories. It sidesteps the realist/relativist debate in history by providing a ‘relationalist’ ontological alternative (Durepos, Mills, and Weatherbee, 2012). This means treating historic accounts as knowledges that are embedded within network relations. Mannheim (1936) argued that knowledge must be understood from within the sociohistorical boundaries (‘communities’) in which it is created. From this perspective, our knowledge of a phenomenon depends on our situatedness. It is a function of our position within a particular network at a particular point in time. It is relational. This means that ‘two communities can have different knowledge of a phenomenon because of their differing relationships with it’ (Durepos and Mills, 2012, p 271).

The vast majority of ANT studies resemble ethnography, where researcher(s) literally follow and observe actors as they relate to one another in real time (for example, Latour, 1987). Meanwhile, ANT approaches are also used with textual data (for example, Callon, 1986a). In particular, ANTi-History research makes extensive use of archival sources (for example, Durepos and Mills, 2011; Hartt et al, 2014; Myrick et al, 2013) to ‘follow’ actor-network traces. Archival sources were once ‘largely ignored’ by organizational researchers (Kirsch et al, 2014, p 235). However, Kirsch et al called for researchers to engage with archival material ‘in order to create new analytical narratives of industry formation’ (2014, p 235).

I began my own archival work from the idea that Defined by the Sea (Government of Nova Scotia, 2012) had ‘revealed’ the neglected history of a vibrant ocean technologies cluster. This inspired me to search for older historical traces. I began by searching for ‘ocean technology/ies’ at the Nova Scotia Public Archives. I later added material from the Dalhousie University and the BIO libraries and archives. I examined a total of 70 documents dating from 1944 to 1995, including official and unofficial government/agency reports, books, newspaper clippings, and magazine articles. Over approximately one month of research, I produced 58 pages of notes and recorded 60 pages of annotated images. This work was not necessarily linear and chronological: an interesting point found in the 1980s would cause me to re-examine traces from the 1970s.

Among all the data I collected, three documents stand out for their attempts provide a comprehensive (historical) account of an ‘oceans cluster’ in Nova Scotia. Other related archival traces helped me to understand how each of these three accounts was situated within different actor-networks (or, different temporal and relational contexts). Let me begin with a closer examination of the most recent account – the one that my friend told me about that day over beer at the pub. Then, I will work ‘backwards’ through time, sharing accounts from 1980 and 1960. As we will see, these three histories disagree on the ‘context’ around ocean science and technology in Nova Scotia. Once I have explored each of them in their own time, I will turn to what we might learn about ‘practising context’ based on the tensions between these accounts.

Defined by the Sea

In the summer of 2012, the Government of Nova Scotia published Defined by the Sea: Nova Scotia’s Oceans Technology Sector Present and Future. This document was posted on the website of the Department of Economic and Rural Development as part of the governing New Democratic Party’s jobsHere initiative. This meta-initiative was a widely promoted job creation programme launched in the autumn of 2010, which served as a cornerstone of the New Democratic Party’s unsuccessful re-election campaign in 2013. The Defined by the Sea document positioned ‘ocean technologies’ as a priority sector within the jobsHere strategy.

The short 24-page report begins with ten ‘at-a-glance’ bullet-points about the sector. The first of these is a claim that the sector includes: ‘Over 200 companies. More than 60 innovators of new high-tech products and services’ (Government of Nova Scotia, 2012, p 1). The bullets also tell us that these companies have combined corporate revenues of $500 million, perform one third of all private research and development in the province, and pay nine times more taxes than the average Nova Scotian firm. Four major public research organizations are highlighted: the BIO, the National Research Council’s Institute for Marine Biosciences, the Defence Department’s Defence R&D Canada, and Dalhousie University. The mention of these institutions follows the claim that ‘Nova Scotia is home to 450 PhDs in oceans-related disciplines. Highest concentration in the world’ (Government of Nova Scotia, 2012, p 1). The final bullet in the summary addresses opportunities for sector growth: ‘Estimated annual global market value for ocean-related goods and services: US$3 trillion. Doubled in last six years’ (Government of Nova Scotia, 2012, p 1).

While Defined by the Sea does not describe the ‘evolution’ of this industry in historical terms, I have said that it is a history. Indeed, the document reads like a cross between an industrial cluster analysis and a glossy promotional booklet (complete with professional photographs of key private sector ocean activities). The text includes a general introduction to ‘the sector’, descriptions of successful companies, an assessment of market opportunities, a summary of public research capacity, and a description of the ‘enabling environment’ (such as training institutions, industry associations, and government funding programmes). It also includes an extensive collection of impressive ‘facts’ (without mention of their origin or authorship). The most tenuous of these relate to the size of the industry. The narrative assembles a wide range of companies into this ‘sector’ largely due to the broad definition used: ‘The oceans technology sector comprises “knowledge-based companies that invent, develop and produce high tech products for specific use in or on the ocean; or provide knowledge-intensive, technology-based services, unique to the ocean”’ (Government of Nova Scotia, 2012, p 2, emphasis added). Including all ocean-related knowledge-based companies means that the reader will encounter many unrelated firms. For example, the text discusses a recreational boat builder, a nutritional supplement company, and a naval defence sonar manufacturer. To accommodate this diversity, the sector is grouped into six ‘key areas of concentration’: ‘acoustics, sensors, and instrumentation; marine geomatics; marine biotechnology; marine unmanned surface and underwater vehicles; marine data, information, and communications systems; and naval architecture’ (Government of Nova Scotia, 2012, p 5). This definition provides for the claim that Nova Scotia has ‘North America’s highest concentration of oceans technology companies’ (Government of Nova Scotia, 2012, p 2).

Interestingly, oceans-related opportunities had also been within reach 30 years earlier.

‘One of the three biggest’

Canadian Geographic ran a 12-page feature story about Nova Scotia’s ‘marine science cluster’ in its October/November 1980 issue (Watkins, 1980). The headline reads ‘Halifax-Dartmouth area: one of the three biggest marine science centres in Western Hemisphere’ (Watkins, 1980, p 12). The author goes on suggest that this ‘probably is the third largest (if not the second largest) concentration of marine research and development facilities and personnel in North America’ (Watkins, 1980, p 13). His claim is highlighted in a pull-quote: ‘Public and private enterprises oriented to the sea have assembled the largest concentration of marine scientific and technical personnel to be found in Canada, outnumbered in the Americas only by the Boston-Woods Hole area in Massachusetts and perhaps the Scripps Institution in California’ (Watkins, 1980, p 12).

This story places a great deal of emphasis on the ‘evolution’ of the cluster. On the first page, the author invokes a sense of loss over the region’s shipbuilding/sailing history. He claims that ‘marine science’ is restoring Canada’s ‘maritime reputation’ (Watkins, 1980, p 12). The article’s purpose is framed in this way: ‘This is the story of that renaissance, a look at some of the scientific and developmental involvement behind Canada’s rise to international oceanographic prominence. It is an accomplishment far better known abroad than it is at home’ (Watkins, 1980, pp 12–13, emphasis added). The author situates the origins of his ‘renaissance’ in the establishment of a naval defence research unit during the Second World War. His focus, however, is on the work of the federal government’s BIO. He explains that: ‘The Bedford Institute of Oceanography is at the core of a cluster of marine-oriented establishments which includes the Nova Scotia Research Foundation, Dalhousie,¹ and the newly-named Technical U. of N.S.’ (Watkins, 1980, p 12).

The article is nearly exclusively focused on these public research organizations. For example, it speaks of the BIO-led first-ever circumnavigation of the Americas, aboard the scientific vessel CSS Hudson² (in 1970). There is also a lengthy section about ongoing work to assess the possible ecological impacts of tidal power dams. The text is accompanied by photographs of scientists and scientific activities, including a crew lowering a rock-core sampling drill into the ocean. A few general photos of Halifax harbour are included, with captions that point to the location of key public research buildings.

Notice the focus on how this device was developed and used by the scientists. They are being supported by an unnamed organization (Guildline Instruments) in Ontario.

There is also a strong focus on offshore (Arctic) oil and gas opportunities at the end of the article. This is presented as a potential stimulus for the cluster’s future growth. The emphasis on petroleum development is partly explained by the author’s bio: ‘as a result of his interest in shipping and marine affairs he was aboard the tanker Manhattan during her pioneer voyage through the Northwest Passage in 1969’ (Watkins, 1980, p 12). But it is also partly explained by BIO’s research agenda, which had long been devoted to Arctic exploration (for the purpose of Canadian Arctic sovereignty) and had become particularly focused on Arctic petroleum development throughout the 1970s (Nichols, 2002).³ Similarly, the Nova Scotia Research Foundation (NSRF: a crown corporation devoted to applied research for economic development) had become focused on offshore petroleum resources. When this article was published, the NSRF had been led for over a decade by Dr J. Ewart Blanchard, a marine geophysicist, who was recruited from the original faculty of Dalhousie’s Oceanography Institute.

Notably absent from the author’s description of the cluster is naval defence. Its role is relegated to activities during the Second World War. The only sense of Cold War tensions in this article arises in a discussion of BIO’s work to detect nuclear waste disposal in Canadian waters. The absence of naval research became clearer when public archivist Rosemary Barbour helped me locate ‘Knots, volts and decibels: an informal history of the Naval Research Establishment, 1940–1967’ (Longard, 1993). Written in 1977, the foreword to this booklet explains that the Department of Defense deemed it too sensitive to publish until the 1990s. This suggests that the Defense Department R&D division may have remained an unmentioned actor in the Canadian Geographic article because its work was highly secretive at that time (for more on this, see Chapter 4).

‘Internationally important’

Canadian Geographic’s discovery of a marine science cluster in Nova Scotia was pre-dated by a similar discovery in the local newspaper a decade earlier. On 6 August 1960, the Chronicle Herald proudly proclaimed: ‘Halifax is becoming an internationally important base for one of Canada’s biggest tasks – the oceanographic study of her virtually unexplored northern waters’ (Trenbirth, 1960). This article is presented as an origin story: it speaks of how Halifax is ‘becoming’ an important region for a field of science that is ‘in its infancy’ (p 6). It describes in detail the vessels, personnel, and technologies that left Halifax harbour that summer to conduct oceanographic research. It notes the use of ‘radar screens’ and ‘echo sounders’ and ‘a trail of moored detectors. Left bobbing on the surface they will self-record information while the ship continues its trip’ (Trenbirth, 1960). Individual scientists and ship’s crew are applauded for their skill. The key organizational actors in this story are arms of the Government of Canada: the Canadian Committee on Oceanography and its Atlantic Oceanographic Group.

Seven months earlier, the federal Department of Mines and Technical Surveys had announced $3 million (approximately $30 million in today’s Canadian dollars) to build BIO, on the advice of the Canadian Committee on Oceanography (BIO, 1962–92; ‘Canadian Institute of Oceanography’, 1959). The facility would be home to various federal government departments and agencies engaged in fisheries and oceans research. The previous year, $90,000 in federal funding (equivalent to approximately $950,000 Canadian dollars in 2023) had been announced to establish an oceanography institute at Dalhousie University (Hayes, 1959). Dalhousie had been lobbying heavily since 1949 when the University of British Columbia secured federal funding for its own west coast oceanography institute (Mills, 1994). These two major funding announcements made ocean research particularly noteworthy in Nova Scotia during the summer of 1960. The Chronicle Herald article directly addresses the future impact of this funding with an anecdote about research on tidal currents in the Bay of Fundy: ‘their instruments were unable to record the rapid tide flow, estimated at eight knots. But when the Oceanographic Institute at Bedford Basin gets down to business in 1962, they hope to manufacture their own instruments instead of importing them from Europe and America’ (Trenbirth, 1960, p 6). Here we see a desire for Canadian economic and technoscientific sovereignty; this was the same decade that saw the repatriation of the Canadian Constitution from the British government. And through anecdotes like this, the Chronicle Herald article also articulates the anticipation that some Nova Scotians felt towards these new ocean research institutes and a possible research cluster. As BIO’s 1963 annual report would later state: ‘It seems doubtful if even the new Dartmouth brewery will be more warmly welcomed’ (BIO, 1962–92, vol 1963, p 1).

As in the Canadian Geographic publication, defence research remains notably absent from this article. There is a brief reference to military research interests, but these are quickly brushed aside. A naval vessel, the HMS Sackville, is an important actor in the story, but she is an ‘auxiliary’ vessel and therefore deployed for science rather than defence. Cold War tensions are explicit in the article, but they are described in terms of scientific supremacy. This begins in the second sentence: ‘Canada and the United States have merged forces. The Russians also have been in this port’ (Trenbirth, 1960, p 6). The author names two Soviet ships that called on Halifax harbour earlier in the year. Then, near the end of the article, Russia is described as having a competitive advantage over Canada: ‘Canada, with its long coastlines, has a lot of leeway to make up. Russia years ago seized on to the importance of oceanography’ (Trenbirth, 1960, p 6). This article positions ocean science as an international competition. Meanwhile, several annual reports from the BIO (1962–92) present similar visits by Russian research vessels as international collaboration.

In addition to the absence of naval research, a notable actor from the Canadian Geographic history is also missing from the 1960 account. The NSRF was already well established (having been founded in 1946) when Trenbirth’s (1960) newspaper story went to press. However, its annual reports demonstrate that it was first focused on agriculture, mining, and fisheries The NSRF’s oceans research would not begin in earnest until later in the 1960s (NSRF, 1946–95), following the lead of these other institutes. The provincial government therefore does not appear to be a significant actor in this early network. Instead, the federal government, and its funding of scientific research, is the central actor. Note that this article was published at a time when the Canadian and American governments were both making significant investments in science for the purpose of stimulating industry development (Doern, Castle, and Phillips, 2016).

Interessement

Ten years ago, I went to the Nova Scotia Public Archives hoping for enough material to write a simple context chapter. That work was complicated by these three accounts of the past – each constructed in (and now abstracted from) a different temporal context. At each of these three points in time (1960, 1980, and 2012), the reader is informed that historical processes have recently pulled together a cohesive oceans cluster. In Defined by the Sea, the reader is previously unaware of the cluster because the government has ‘omitted’ it from history, due to ‘a reserved reluctance to tell the story, until now’ (Government of Nova Scotia, 2012, p 2). In the Canadian Geographic article, the reader is unaware because the cluster is ‘far better known abroad than it is at home’ (Watkins, 1980, pp 12–13). And in the Chronicle Herald article, the reader is unaware because she/he is assumed to have missed major funding announcements over the preceding year (Trenbirth, 1960).

These repeated attempts to establish a coherent cluster identity are made possible through the failure of similar attempts in previous decades. These appear to be failures in translation (Callon, 1986). The first moment of translation, problematization (Callon, 1986), was similar in all three of the accounts I studied. Each author argued that the cluster’s existence was going unnoticed. They all rhetorically positioned the cluster as one of the biggest and best in the world. Furthermore, they all argued that the cluster was on the cusp of tremendous growth. It is presented as a point of pride for those involved and for Nova Scotians at large. Many public and private ocean science organizations are drawn into these problematizations.

This provides for the second moment of translation: interessement (Callon, 1986b). Here, the authors each impose a collective identity on the characters in their stories. While each story uses similar words for the ‘ocean science’ (and technology) cluster, they each define the ‘contents’ of that cluster differently. The sectoral/industrial boundaries are produced through the rhetorical devices used by each author to include/exclude the actors that may align with their cause (for more on this, see Chapter 6). Similarly, the geographical boundaries for the cluster are an interest-driven choice. The Chronicle Herald article (Trenbirth, 1960) uses ‘Halifax’, the Canadian Geographic article (Watkins, 1980) uses ‘Halifax-Dartmouth area’ (the harbour is the area of focus), and the government report (Government of Nova Scotia, 2012) uses the entire Province of Nova Scotia. These geographical labels not only help to explain which actors might be inside or outside the network/cluster, but are also a form of geopolitical identity work (for more on this, see Chapter 6). The authors attempt to make this cluster a part of the provincial, or at least capital city, identity. This form of rhetorical positioning then becomes a symbolic asset: one that might be used to generate regional competitive advantage.

However, the translation process does not seem to have progressed beyond interessement for very many actors over the past 50 years. Perhaps the various ‘ocean cluster’ identities simply could not be negotiated among such a diverse set of actors? Actors need to become enrolled in the network for each ‘cluster’ to exist ‘beyond the page’. On another level, readers need to become enrolled in a history in order for it to be accepted and then passed along. However, in these three examples we observe a singular cluster that is (re)discovered, with notable differences, time and time again. These histories seem unable to enrol and mobilize actors. The ‘cluster’ they purport to discover is therefore unable to remain black boxed outside pages of these histories. It ‘disappears’ into bits and pieces that await (re)assembly at some future point. Along the way, some bits and pieces of story are lost, and others are set aside.

Elision

Astute readers will have noticed parallels between this chapter and the last. In Chapter 2, I noted the disappearance of scientific instruments from their privileged position in innovation theory. Now, in this chapter, we have seen the disappearance of ocean science instruments from their privileged position in Nova Scotia’s history. The earliest account of the sectoral history (1960) positions scientists, scientific instruments, science organizations, and geopolitics as key actors. But in the latest account (2012), scientific instruments are marginal; the main actors are private companies (especially shipbuilding), and science is described as providing supportive human capital. No doubt, the lessons from Chapter 2 apply here: Defined by the Sea (2012) was written with a mental model connected to the ideas of industrial clusters and regional innovation (eco)systems. As we have seen, those models centre on businesses and markets. They position science in the background, base, or foundation of an industry’s evolution. Kirsch et al (2014) explain that such models can shape the stories we tell about industry emergence. Missing pieces of story can be ‘the result of a certain retrospective myopia that comes from imposing an extant social scientific explanation on evidence from an industry’s past’ (2014, p 228).

But let’s not overstate the case. It is not that ocean science and scientific instrument innovation have been forgotten or lost to time in Nova Scotia. Scientific actors have not disappeared; they have been repositioned. While they were central to the accounts of 1960 and 1980, they were marginalized in favour of more important actors in 2012. And so, the full scope of their role has been elided, but their presence has not. These changes in the narrative are related to changes in the dominant social scientific models. But the historiographic definition of an industry and its evolution is a practical problem before it is a scholarly one (Kirsch et al, 2014). The cognitive view of industries tells us that individuals have their own sense of what industry they are participating in, what companies and products it contains, how these are defined/categorized, and which pieces of the industrial puzzle are the most valuable (Porac et al, 1995; 2011; Kirsch et al, 2014; Khaire, 2014). Theory and mental models are one thing, but the broader and more important questions are related to cultural and historical context.

Traces of the industrial past are elided and ‘facts’ are stylized based on our sense of what is important now rather than what was important then (Kirsch et al, 2014). In other words, we are situated in a cultural context whenever we write or read about the past. This is historicism (see Kirsch et al, 2014). The alternative – presentism – is the bias we apply when we read and write about events of the past with current cultural lenses. It is an instrumental bias.

To avoid this, we must do more than question our own interpretive prejudices. Critical hermeneutics also suggests that we should deconstruct ideology found within text and context (Prasad, 2002). On that note, it would be easy to explain away differences in the 1960, 1980, and 2012 stories earlier in this chapter with ‘the rise of neoliberalism’. But good historical analysis also requires a more situated explanation. Here, ANTi-History helps us avoid getting lost in generalities and the circular logic of interpretivism. It provides an alternative analytical metaphor (or an alternative instrumentality): advising us to rhizomatically ‘follow the actors’ (Latour, 2005). This allows us to deconstruct our own positions, and the positions of the actors/traces we engage with in our research.

For example, let’s deconstruct the ‘neoliberal’ explanation by examining how public and private organizations were enrolled into these different ‘oceans cluster’ histories. The most recent account (2012) tells us that naval defence is, and has always been, a critical part of the cluster. However, this role is muted or absent in the earlier accounts (1960 and 1980, respectively). In the oldest account, the federal government (in its role as research patron) and its Canadian Committee on Oceanography are the central players in a relatively small network of actors (research vessels, technologies, and skilled experts). By 1980, the BIO has become central to a cluster of predominantly public sector organizations. Then in 2012, over a dozen private sector companies are named as main characters in the story and several public research organizations are named as a supporting cast. In short, the earliest account expressly focuses on the role of federal government science organizations and funding in establishing the cluster, and this goes unmentioned in the most recent of accounts. In both 1980 and 2012, private markets are providing the cluster with its capital. This contrast, between a predominantly public and predominantly private sector characterization, is likely explained by the rise of a broader neoliberal economic discourse in Canada over this period (Carroll and Shaw, 2001). But we can follow the actors to a more specific and situated explanation. Indeed, Defined by the Sea was written at the height of neoliberal attacks on science in Canada. Rather than taking its narrative at face value, we must try to understand Defined by the Sea by what it omits from its own historical context.

Cutting science

Science journalist Hannah Hoag describes these cuts as a policy shift away from basic science and towards applied partnership with industry (Hoag, 2011, 2012, 2013). This is further to a global trend in science policy (Sá and Litwin, 2011; Archibugi and Filippetti, 2018). Bailey et al (2016) have also suggested that leadership in the Canadian government was attempting to ‘devolve’ ocean science activities to universities and the private sector. They explain that these cuts served to ‘eviscerate Canada’s federal aquatic science programs – staff reductions, closures of laboratories, closures of marine science libraries, and cessation of key research programs’ (Bailey et al, 2016, p 1). This, too, is further to a global trend in science policy – a shift of resources towards university research labs and away from other types of PROs (Salazar and Holbrook, 2007; Archibugi and Filippetti, 2018).

Turner argues that this shift in policy was grounded in the belief that ‘the purpose of research – of science generally – is to create economic opportunities for industry, and the purpose of government is to assist in that process in whatever way that it can’ (Turner, 2013, p 112). He describes movement away from ‘the open spirit of scientific inquiry’ (2013, p 132) towards the view that ‘government’s job is to deliver innovations like theatre tickets to the front desk of a posh hotel’ (2013, p 112). In other words, those in power came to believe that PROs exist to serve the market. This belief has been linked to New Public Management (NPM) practices – a particular set of neoliberal strategies that were popular across Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries for decades.

NPM is a label applied to a ‘set of broadly similar administrative doctrines which dominated the administrative reform agenda in many of the OECD group of countries from the late 1970s’ (Hood, 1991, pp 3–4). The NPM agenda has been studied and critiqued as a set of organizational innovations in the public sector (Schubert, 2009; Hansen, 2011; Lorenz, 2012). NPM has been directly linked to neoliberalism because NPM reforms were intended to make public organizations more business-like (Atkinson-Grosjean, 2006; Lorenz, 2012). While the effectiveness of NPM is debatable (Hood, 1991; Schubert, 2009; Lorenz, 2012), it is accepted that NPM reforms dramatically changed the management and organization of public science in Canada beginning in the 1980s (Atkinson-Grosjean, 2006) and 1990s (Smith, 2004). In these previous waves of reform, public science was reorganized and increasingly aligned to private interests (Atkinson-Grosjean, 2002, 2006). The recent wave of reforms has resulted in substantive cuts to PROs across Canada and particularly to those that were engaged in ocean science (Turner, 2013). Daniele Archibugi and Andrea Filippetti discussed these ‘neoliberal forces’ (2018, p 98) and argued that the decline in public science globally will have ‘long term adverse consequences’ (2018, p 12) for development.

It is surprising that these consequences are not front and centre in Defined by the Sea. Indeed, that document was written during a ‘critical juncture’ (Mills, 2010) where science policy and industrial policy were moving in opposite directions. The worst federal cuts to ocean and environmental science were happening while all levels of government were investing heavily in ‘ocean technologies’ as a priority sector for economic development. Hot on the heels of Defined by the Sea, ocean technology became a priority development sector for the City of Halifax’s economic development agency (Greater Halifax Partnership, 2012). It had already been a priority for the federal government’s multi-provincial Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency (ACOA) (Atlantic Coastal Zone Information Steering Committee, 2006). In their rhetoric, these various governmental organizations appeared blissfully unaware of the implications the war on science might have for their industrial aspirations. Ocean science had come to be understood as a support system for ocean industry. Ocean science instruments were interesting due to their technical sophistication and market potential. But they were not seen to be as important as other activities, particularly naval shipbuilding. As we have seen, this was quite different in 1960 and 1980.

Practising context

In this chapter, I have tried to show that how we read and write about context matters. This would be a drastically different book if I had taken Defined by the Sea at face value or if I had begun my work in 1960 or 1980 (or at any other juncture, with any other narrative). I could have written a much simpler chapter by choosing one storyline. But I have been interested in how knowledge of this ‘context’ has been constructed and what that might leave out. I agree with Kirsch et al (2014) that we need strong historical reasoning in the study of industrial evolution. As they say, the tools of historiography ‘can highlight aspects of industry emergence and evolution that are systematically left out or elided both by the passage of time and by our own social scientific models of industry evolution’ (Kirsch et al, 2014, p 218). Choices must be made ‘as both contemporary actors and subsequently the social scientists studying them come to focus on certain knowledge as constituting the industry’ (Kirsch et al, 2014, p 219). We strip away the complexity of these choices when we take context for granted (McLaren and Durepos, 2019).

Like much of the research in organization studies, economics, and elsewhere, innovation research typically presents context as brief background material. It is mostly framed as a ‘fixed container, broad environment, or macrolevel feature’ of the phenomenon we choose to study (McLaren and Durepos, 2019). Trish McLaren and Gabrielle Durepos have written against this naïve conceptualization of context. They problematize the tendency to ‘either ignore context or treat context in a way that assigns it fixity and immutability’ (McLaren and Durepos, 2019, p 78). When we do that, context becomes ‘just another variable which is isolatable and thus stripped of its complexity and fluidity’ (2019, p 78). They argue that ‘comprehensive explanations of context are rare. Also rare are the ontological, epistemological, and methodological considerations that should accompany a rigorous consideration of context’ (2019, p 76). There is little space (or appetite) in our scholarly texts for rigorous examinations of context.

But centuries of hermeneutic philosophy have argued that text and context are inextricably linked. Indeed, text and context are only separate in our writing. We choose to write one phenomenon into the foreground and others into the background. These choices are situated. The choices have their own context which must also be considered. Like me, you might fear getting lost in this hermeneutic circularity. And yes, a purely interpretivist approach could lead us to wreck our ships on the ‘reef of solipsism’ (Sartre and Richmond, 1956) – a place where all text and context are relative. This is likely no better than the purely realist view that the ‘facts’ of history must be clear and indisputable.

ANTi-History has given us a path out of this quagmire. I do not say this only because Durepos is a friend. I say it because an actor-network approach (or actant-rhizome ontology, if you prefer that metaphor) treats knowledge as relational. Rather than attempting to determine the ‘truth’ of different traces and accounts, discounting ‘inaccuracies’, and writing a ‘better’ version, we can take note of the different actors and relations present. In this way, we can understand each of the three histories in this chapter as valid relational and situated accounts produced by different actor-networks. Here, context is ontologically ‘multiple’ (Mol, 2002).

This chapter is yet another relational and situated account. I have invited you to follow my (de)construction of Nova Scotia’s ocean science and technology past. We began on the day I first learned of Defined by the Sea. We entered the archives to locate and understand prior accounts. We then returned to consider the silenced context of the ‘war on science’. This was not meant as a self-aggrandizing adventure. Rather, I have tried to ‘practice context’ (McLaren and Durepos, 2019) and to demonstrate a potentially useful historiographic instrumentality. I submit that this is an alternative to taking context for granted.