Entanglements

I began this book with Ben Martin’s (2016, 2013) ‘dark matter’ analogy. I agreed that important phenomena are absent from innovation studies and yet I disagreed about the reasons. For Martin, the dark innovation challenge is about deficiencies in measurement. He was calling for new social science instrumentalities analogous to the supercollider technologies that he and Ben Irvine wrote about at the Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (CERN) (Irvine and Martin, 1984a; Martin and Irvine, 1984a, 1984b). From that perspective, researchers seem to need more ingenious measurement instruments to push the limits of our knowledge about innovation. Conversely, this book has been about surfacing the limits of our knowledge – inquiring into some assumptions that are embedded in conventional methods. In each chapter, I have attempted to fracture a methodological norm that is taken for granted in mainstream innovation studies. Through these cracks in the disciplinary matrix, we could see that methods conceal as much as they reveal. Empirically, I was interested in the ways that methods can conceal or reveal public innovation in goods. But that specific instance of dark innovation was a means to an end. The end is a much different dark innovation challenge than the one set out by Martin (2013, 2016). It is not so much about where or what we might observe next; instead, it is a call to critically examine how we understand innovation: to deconstruct the instrumentalities used in innovation research.

Interestingly, this is exactly the direction in which the dark matter analogy takes us (if we read the philosophy and sociology of physics). Because they recognize the complete mediating role of their instrument configurations, high energy physicists – like those at CERN – are obsessed with understanding their devices and surrounding assumptions (Knorr Cetina, 1999, p 56). In her ethnography at CERN, Karin Knorr Cetina noticed that ‘more time in an experiment is spent on designing, making, and installing its own components, and in particular on examining every aspect of their working, than on handling the data’ (1999, p 56). She stated that ‘the behaviour of this apparatus, its performance, blemishes, and ailments are not self evident to the physicists. These features must be learned, and the project of understanding the behaviour of the detector spells this out’ (1999, p 56). In other words, Knorr Cetina observed physicists acting as if all their instruments have poorly understood limitations. In their attempts to understand quantum mechanics, dark matter, and so on, these physicists were investing most of their time and energy in understanding their instrumentalities.

Remarkably, the scientists told Knorr Cetina that their measurements would be ‘meaningless’ (Knorr Cetina, 1999, pp 52–5) without this deep understanding of the instrumentalities. Here, as in Chapter 7, no one is suggesting that observations or measurements are completely disconnected from a material reality; instead, this is an assertion that measurements and instrumentalities are inseparable. Knorr Cetina explains that

in many fields, measurements, provided they are properly performed and safeguarded by experimenters, count as evidence. They are considered capable of proving or disproving theories, of suggesting new phenomena, of representing more or less interesting – and more or less publishable – ‘results’ … In high energy collider physics, however, measurements appear to be defined more by their imperfections and shortcomings than by anything they can do. It is as if high energy physicists recognized all the problems with measurements that philosophers and other analysts of scientific procedures occasionally investigate. (Knorr Cetina, 1999, p 53)

These scientists were not attempting to fix the problems of measurement. They were not trying to eliminate the ‘errors’ or ‘biases’ from their instruments. They were trying to account for the various ways in which their instruments mediate their observations of the universe.

Karen Barad (2007) takes this point further in Meeting the Universe Halfway – a book that fuses insights from quantum physics and queer feminist theory. Barad is both a bona fide physicist and a highly cited philosopher of science. In their groundbreaking book, Barad asserts that ‘one must inquire into the material specificities of the apparatuses that help constitute objects and subjects’ (Barad, 2007, p 115). A rough understanding of quantum physics might lead us to agree: ‘Of course! Didn’t someone show that photons become fixed as either waves or particles, depending on how we measure them?’ But this observation-is-everything argument harkens back to one of Heisenberg’s early formulations of the uncertainty principle – one he knew to be wrong (Barad, 2007). There is a risk that we social scientists might follow that argument back to the conclusion that all knowledge is relative. What Barad tells us, instead, is that ‘there is something fundamental about the nature of measurement interactions such that, given a particular measuring apparatus, certain properties become determinant, while others are specifically excluded’ (Barad, 2007, p 89). It is not that measurement is entirely meaningless – that is, detached from reality. Rather, observations and instrumentalities are entangled. Barad sums this up for all researchers by saying ‘our knowledge making practices are socio-material enactments that contribute to, and are part of, the phenomena we describe’ (Barad, 2007, p 113). Here, the physics of entanglement resemble the philosophies of knowledge; both tell us we must be attentive to the configuration of scientific practices.

For this reason, this chapter will not include a list of the ‘most promising’ places to find dark innovation next, or a list of the ‘best’ instrumentalities for studying dark innovation. Instead, it will conclude my argument for open inquiry into the instrumentalities of innovation research. My point of departure for this concluding chapter has been the idea that observations and instrumentalities are entangled. Next, this leads to a brief review of the observations and ‘equipment list’ contained in this book. Then, to reaffirm that all methods create absences, I share a brief confessional account on a highly important ocean innovation I overlooked. That oversight brings me deeper into the work of Barad (2007) and Donna Harraway (1988, 1990) to situate ‘the researcher’ in any dark innovation toolkit.

Instrumentalities

It would be fair to say that I chose an easy path into questions about dark innovation. Neoliberalism and innovation are closely coupled concepts. Langdon Winner has argued that the ‘cult of innovation’ is ‘the jewel in the crown of neoliberalism’ (2018, p 67). There is also already a relatively well-developed critique of neoliberal ideology in innovation studies (see Fløysand and Jakobsen, 2011; Gallouj and Zanfei, 2013; Cruz et al, 2015; Cooke, 2016; Lundvall, 2016; Godin, 2017; Pfotenhauer and Juhl, 2017; Winner, 2018). Yet, my experience has been that calling out these politics remains ‘taboo’. The ‘epistemic culture’ (Knorr Cetina, 1999) of innovation studies not only discourages critique of neoliberal perspectives, but also inhibits alternative knowledge. For example, we have now seen how some artefacts and practices of mainstream innovation research inhibit direct knowledge about public innovation in goods. Benoît Godin said that ‘the persistence of the market-first perspective speaks more about the values of the scholars promoting it than to its contribution to understanding technological innovation’ (2017, p 125). But I have been hesitant to accuse any individual of explicit neoliberal bias. From Chapter 1 onwards, I have argued that neoliberalization is a disciplinary achievement, and I have called for change in the instrumentalities of innovation studies.

In Chapter 2, I approached theoretical models as especially powerful ‘noncorporeal’ (Hartt, 2013, 2019) tools or instruments. Important innovation scholars observed the same phenomena (scientific instrument innovation) to behave very differently through different theoretical assumptions, and this led to quite different theoretical models. I noted how these different models share a focus on firms and markets. And this is not the only way in which theoretical models mediate knowledge of innovation. Godin pointed out that innovation models generally exclude ‘human and social needs’ (2017, p 125). He lamented ‘the lack of reflexivity on models of innovation (models have a history that is too often forgotten)’ (2017, p 3). More research is needed.

In Chapters 3 and 4, I engaged with the instrumentalities of history. First, I suggested that we cannot take the idea of ‘context’ for granted. We must consider how, why, and by whom stories of the industrial/technological past are written. This includes the stories we write in our research. In Chapters 3 and 4, I had to make choices about what to include and exclude. Also, only certain material traces were available (because the past is inaccessible to us). However, I made my intentions clear, cited the traces of the past I deployed, presented plausible arguments, and remained open to other possibilities. Indeed, Chapter 4 was about opening up possibilities for knowing and telling stories of innovation. I confronted the metanarrative of neoliberalism with three short stories that focused on public organizations and did not end in ‘market’ resolution. This recharacterized public research organizations as active agents and private companies as supportive quartermasters. These stories were written against the grain of narrative neoliberalization, and there are other innovation metanarratives worth deconstructing in this way in future research, such as ‘evolution’ and ‘progress’.

Chapter 5 was focused on the most popular set of classification tools in innovation studies: the taxonomies of innovation. Beyond the well-criticized issues of industrial classification, I examined the instrumentality that makes the whole taxonomic puzzle possible: the organization-as-organism metaphor. I argued that this biological metaphor was a key inscription point for conservative, neoliberal ideas about innovation. Old ideas about politics and economy persist through Pavitt’s taxonomy and its heirs. These taxonomic ideas continue to shape the organizations and industries we value. They constrain our ability to notice things that do not quite fit, such as public and nonmarket innovations. At one extreme, some criminal and terrorist activities are enacted in ‘innovative’ ways to ensure that no one will be able to ‘pin down’ the organization/organism. At another extreme, we should note that humans are not the only biological organisms involved in organizing for innovation (see O’Doherty, 2023). Overall, much more work is needed on questions of classification and valuation in innovation studies. Even in biology, the metaphors and assumptions that drive taxonomic classification are being debated.

I considered the possibilities for alternative innovation metaphors in Chapter 6. There, my focus was on the normal topological assumptions made when framing innovation systems and collecting survey data. I examined some specific ways in which the default ‘regional’ topology requires ‘surveyable’ boundaries. Some things must be excluded to draw boundaries around a regional volume. But different topological metaphors – network/rhizome, fluid, and fire – can also bring different understandings of innovation into focus, and this was evident in the margins, gaps, and shadows of my ocean science instrumentality data. I argued that alternative topologies are critical for observing dark innovation – just as some physicists have argued that dark matter and dark energy might not be observable in Euclidean space. Our default topologies are Euro-colonial (Law, 1999) and will not be able to help us see past the ‘Western bias’ (Chaturvedi, 2023) in innovation studies. Future research might turn to new metaphors, like ‘hyperobject’ (Rehn and Örtenblad, 2023). Or future research might aim for the ‘interruption of topology’ by advancing Damian O’Doherty’s ideas about ‘topology of method’ (2013, p 213).

Although Chapter 7 used personal narrative (auto-), my inquiry was into the cultural experience (ethnography) of producing innovation statistics. It was my expression of existential ‘revolt’ against statistical norms. I recounted the Sisyphean task of producing statistical evidence that might have some ‘meaningful’ scholarly and policy impact. In the end, I found myself alienated from statistical practices that produced linearity, triviality, and insignificance (in the true, nonstatistical sense). Turning to autoethnography allowed me to make meaning from the frustrations of this work. Given the gendered and racialized nature of datafication (D’Ignazio and Klein, 2020), I believe that we need more autoethnographies about innovation numbers and statistics from non-White, nonmale scholars (for example, Liu and Pechenkina, 2019). There is also much more unrealized potential for autoethnography (and existential philosophy) in critical studies of innovation.

In this way, Chapter 7 was also an echo of the ideas from Karl Weick that I introduced at the end of Chapter 2. Weick (1996) noted that tools can be cultural and personal. Reflecting on his study of the Mann Gulch firefighting disaster, he advised (management) academics that disciplinary affinities can cause us to hold some tools too tightly: ‘the fusion of tools with group membership makes it hard for firefighters to consider tools as something apart from themselves that can be discarded, just as it makes it hard for scholars to consider concepts as something apart from themselves’ (Weick, 1996, p 312). Concepts and other instrumentalities are entangled in any disciplinary construction. And yet, the dark innovation challenge cannot be resolved by swapping out one set of tools for another. To illustrate, let me recall an email that forced me to drop the tools I used in this book.

Absences

It was a brief message. I had recently ‘finished’ my research at the Nova Scotia Public Archives. Archivist Rosemary Barbour was following up to let me know that the Elizabeth Mann Borgese fonds were now available at the Dalhousie University Archives. Unfortunately, I had no idea who Rosemary was writing me about or why this might be important. I had no memory of encountering Elizabeth Mann Borgese in the traces of past ocean science and technology efforts in Nova Scotia. So, I promptly googled the name. I was floored by the results. I had missed Nova Scotia’s most influential oceans innovator and her radically disruptive innovation.

While it is not possible to draw a straight line between Mann Borgese and the words contained in the UNCLOS (Meyer, 2022), there is little doubt that her diplomatic efforts shaped the international governance of all human relations with the ocean. Her work was what the OECD (2005) might label ‘organizational innovation’; it disrupted the way we organize ocean governance. As a result, at the time of her death in 2002 (aged 83), she had been awarded the Order of Canada, the German Order of Merit, the Order of Columbia, the Austrian Metal of High Merit, the Friendship Prize from the People’s Republic of China, the United Nation’s Sasakawa International Environment Prize, and five honorary doctorates (including one from my alma mater, Mount Saint Vincent University) (International Ocean Institute, n.d.). Her legacy continues today through the International Ocean Institute, an independent NGO she founded in 1972 to develop capacities in international governance for ocean sustainability (International Ocean Institute, n.d.). I could not understand how I missed this woman and her work.

Once I went looking, Elizabeth Mann Borgese was easy to find. For example, it took very little time to walk across my campus, pull one of her books from the library stacks, and locate her ideas about ocean technology in the index. It seemed that Mann Borgese (1998) had anticipated the way I would emphasize technoscientific innovations over the sociopolitical ones she had advanced. She said

it is the nature of the oceans that pushes science and technology into the foreground. Without marine science and technology we would be blatantly unable to explore, exploit, manage, and conserve marine resources or to navigate safely or to protect our coasts. And it is the nature of the marine environment that forces us to recognize that this science must be interdisciplinary … and that it must be international. (Mann Borgese, 1998, p 114)

But on the same page she also warned that ‘there is indeed a danger inherent in the strong emphasis on science and technology. In ocean governance, given the imbalance between “North” and “South,” this emphasis could reinforce the dominance of the North’ (Mann Borgese, 1998, p 114). And elsewhere in the same book, she explored Ghandi’s ideas about ‘appropriate technology’ for the ocean – technology that meets human needs and does ‘no harm to the body, mind, or soul’ (Mann Borgese, 1998, p 97).

She was right, of course. We get carried away by the promise of technoscience for development. That discourse privileges the Global North. It assumes that all innovation is good. To produce the ‘public goods’ of peace and environmental sustainability, we need innovation in global ocean governance. In my prior career, I knew that good governance must always come before flashy technoindustry. And yet, in my research, I had done exactly as Elizabeth Mann Borgese worried we might all do: I brought technoscience into sharp focus and missed the immense importance of activism, diplomacy, and advocacy.

Some might say that I was in the dark about Mann Borgese because there were archival silences – that is, my awareness of her work was mediated by the politics of the archive and its traces (for example, Corrigan and Mills, 2012). In other words, there was missing data, or I had not dug deeply enough. Others might say that I was using the wrong tools – that I approached the archives with an ANT toolkit that is insufficiently critical (for example, Whelan, 2001; de la Bellacasa, 2010). Still others might say that my ignorance towards Mann Borgese and her work points away from dark innovation and towards an entirely different problem in innovation studies. Ben Martin (2013, 2016) would call this the ‘boys’ toys’ challenge – that is, the challenge of gender bias in innovation studies.

While Martin outlines ‘dark innovation’ as a challenge of unknown absences, he sees ‘boys’ toys’ as a challenge of excessive presences. He points out that the journal Research Policy is overwhelmingly focused on computers, cars, televisions, and various electronics (Martin, 2013, 2016). He attributes this ‘skew’ to two factors: ‘(i) a high proportion of researchers in the field are men; and (ii) researchers are likely to focus their empirical work on an area they feel passionate about’ (Martin, 2013, p 172). His solution is also twofold: to increase the proportion of female researchers in the field and to produce research on innovations ‘that have freed women from the domestic drudgery of being “housewives”’ (Martin, 2013, p 172), such as refrigerators, microwaves, and washing machines (Martin, 2016). The first of these is a proposal with which I can agree, while the second is a proposal that I find highly problematic (not only because I am surprised by such gendered ideas about housework). Here, Martin fails to notice decades of research on gender and technoscience: research that led me to the conclusion that ‘we are the tools’.

Tools

I stood up at the 2019 International Critical Management Studies Conference and called myself a ‘tool’ for overlooking Elizabeth Mann Borgese (MacNeil, 2019). On the one hand, I was invoking the vulgar insult I might have received in high school after making such a stupid mistake. On the other hand, I was trying to throw myself in with the whole set of instrumentalities that had surfaced public innovation in goods while absenting Mann Borgese’s innovation for the public good. I was, of course, agreeing with Anne-Jorunn Berg and Merete Lie that ‘artifacts do have gender and gender politics in the sense that they are designed and used in gendered contexts’ (1995, p 347). The technologies of ocean science – indeed, all scientific instruments – tend to be masculinized. I was also attempting to acknowledge my ‘geek masculine’ identity work (Bell, 2013; Morgan, 2014) and surface ‘the male pleasures that are made in the knowing and telling of machines’ (Law, 1998, p 45). But my experience was also unlike the one that John Law describes in his rambling essay about the ‘machinic pleasures’ that ‘interpellated’ him into a study of military technologies (Law, 1998). Missing Mann Borgese was not as crude and simple as ‘men love machines’ (and ‘women care for nature/others’). I agree with Sine Just and Sara Dahlman (2023) that we must think beyond such binary stereotypes – not to achieve gender blindness, but to advance ‘norm-critical’ perspectives.

In the autoethnographic vignettes throughout this book, I have described many reasons why I was drawn to this study of public innovation in goods. In short, this research was motivated by a desire to change public policy. The devices – the scientific instruments – were secondary. If anything, the ‘geeky masculinity’ that I catch myself performing would normally privilege governance over gadgets. Mine is a post-Captain Kirk, millennial generation, Trekkie masculinity. I am interpolated by the kind of cashless, classless, utopianism espoused by Gene Roddenberry in his Star Trek philosophy. I am further inspired by new Trek’s attempts to confront and deconstruct whiteness, colonialism, multiculturalism, and the gender binary. However, this is only a piece of my identity – all identities are ‘fractured’ (Haraway, 1990). At the time I overlooked Mann Borgese, I was also attempting to join in the epistemic culture of mainstream innovation studies, where a collective goal seems to be changing public policy in ways that only advance our current (dysfunctional) socioeconomic system. Inside the trappings of neoliberalized innovation studies, I felt like I was being assimilated by the Borg.

However, this book has demonstrated that was not the case. The Borg in Star Trek are drones whose technological appendages preclude individual thought and agency. They cannot drop their tools. We would be better to think of ourselves through Donna Harraway’s notion of the cyborg. For her, ‘a cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction’ – and ‘we are all cyborgs’ (Haraway, 1990, p 191). Haraway argued that ‘cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves’ (1990, p 223). Here, my instrumentalities and I are neither separate nor whole (you too have a role as reader). All told, there is a ‘situatedness’ to my study of public innovation in ocean science instruments. But I cannot simply reflect on my position and then neglect other possible knowledge positions. The cyborg metaphor is a call to refuse the ‘allure’ (Bell and Willmott, 2019) and ‘safety’ (Bochner, 2012) of feigning omniscience.

What we have, that the Borg do not, is the capacity for ‘methodological humility’ (Law and Singleton, 2005, p 350). We can inquire into our limits, and the limits of our tools, while accepting that we will never know it all. As I have just suggested, this is something more than methodological reflectivity. Law says that ‘we cannot deconstruct all our subjectivities at the same time. And it may be that parts cannot be deconstructed at all’ (1998, p 23). So, after neoliberal tools and techniques, we might begin to explore possibilities for ‘disruptive reflexivity’ (Bell and Willmott, 2019) or ‘diffractive methodology’ (Barad, 2007).

The first of these – disruptive reflexivity – is advocated by critical organizational scholars Emma Bell and Hugh Willmott (2019). It is a ‘crafty’ form of research practice that ‘amplifies doubt by breaching convention and challenging the basis of knowledge claims’ (Bell and Willmott, 2019, p 1370). It is about focusing on ‘contingencies, paradoxes, and uncertainties in (social) scientific endeavour’ (Bell and Willmott, 2019, p 1370). Bell and Willmott present this as a hallmark of ‘intellectual craftship’ (2019, p 1375), which they describe as ‘an ethical and political, as well as skillful, embodied and imaginative activity’ (2019, p 1380). They present it as a counterpoint to ‘methodological fetishism’ (2019, p 1375) and they incorporate Barad’s (2007) ideas on entanglement.

Barad’s diffractive methodology is the second major methodological direction that might advance a dark innovation agenda. Diffractive methodology is what Barad does when they read quantum physics and queer feminist philosophy ‘through one another’ (2007, p 30) – noticing the diffraction patterns. Barad argues ‘that a diffractive methodology is respectful of the entanglement of ideas and other materials in ways that reflexive methodologies are not’ (2007, p 29). This idea is itself entangled within the queer, feminist, decolonial theorizing of feminist new materialism (Harris and Ashcraft, 2023). It is one of many relational approaches that acknowledge how ‘efforts to know a thing also enact that thing in particular ways’ (Harris and Ashcraft, 2023, p 1). The method seeks creative rather than critical insights, through ‘respectful engagements with different disciplinary practices’ (Barad, 2007).

I built towards such approaches throughout this book, and yet there is still much work to be done. I have tried to disrupt innovation studies conventions but also to establish new diffractive patterns from the entanglements we call innovation studies, critical management studies, critical geography, science and technology studies, and ocean science. And like the high energy physicists, I have been primarily interested in establishing ‘knowledge of the limits of knowing, of the mistakes we make in trying to know, of the things that interfere with our knowing, of what we are not interested in and do not really want to know’ (Knorr Cetina, 1999, p 64). I have been obsessed with understanding how knowledge about innovation is disciplined through common tools and techniques.

This obsession means that I am concluding the book with more questions than answers. A reviewer told me that

after all these twists and turns, I am not sure how much better I understand dark innovation. In fact, I feel like I have a better understanding of how difficult it is to beat back the darkness, and why innovation studies has opted against the path of thickets and thorns.

If you feel this same way, then the book has met its objective. It has shown that observing dark innovation will never be a leisurely day at the beach. I agree with Alf Rehn and Anders Örtenblad that what we need now is ‘less clarity about innovation’ and ‘more challenges and debate’ (2023, p 7). Innovation studies are entangled in an assemblage of land technologies. These help us cling to the safety of the shoreline. But dark innovation involves uncharted and unchartable waters – and that is where we must go if we are truly committed to the study of novelty.