The high-quality academic books, upper-level student texts and journal articles on our Business, Management and Economics list offer fresh perspectives on the economy, the future of work and organisations, and the relationship between business and addressing global social challenges.
The list is home to a number of series including Organizations and Activism and Feminist Perspectives on Work and Organization, all of which are edited by leading scholars from the field, along with our journals in the area: Journal of Public Finance and Public Choice, Work in the Global Economy and Global Political Economy.
Business, Management and Economics
In this concluding chapter, some readers might expect a research agenda setting out clear paths towards more dark innovation. They will find some specific opportunities for future research. But the focus of this chapter is on how researchers might further deconstruct the instrumentalities of innovation research. To this end, I deconstruct some of my own instrumentalities. I recount the moment I finally noticed the most influential oceans-related innovation to ever emerge from my part of the world and considers how the ‘epistemic culture’ of innovation studies pointed me and my tools away from it. Returning to the dark matter analogy, and with insights from both Karin Knorr Cetina and Karen Barad, this chapter explains why some physicists might think their observations are meaningless, and why this leads them to obsess over their instrumentalities. It argues that we need a similar humility and obsession in research on innovation.
The dark innovation challenge is a byproduct of disciplinary conventions. While innovation research remains fixated on certain classes of technology, it tends to ignore innovations that are harmful and ones that are simply taboo. For example, neoliberal biases make it difficult to notice the development of physical technologies by government organizations. This is thought to be the exclusive domain of the private sector. Prior research has ignored, dismissed, or minimized public innovation in goods. Rather than conceiving of this as a ‘gap’ in the literature, this chapter argues for a problematizing approach to the dark innovation challenge. It lays out the chapters in this book and the ways in which those chapters will problematize the neoliberal biases carried by various tools and techniques deployed in innovation research. Readers are introduced to the scientific instrument innovation happening within public organizations on Canada’s Atlantic coast – innovation that is critical for understanding and conserving the ocean and life below water.
Key figures in the history of innovation studies – Christopher Freeman, Stephen Kline, Nathan Rosenberg, and Eric von Hippel – all featured scientific instruments in their theory development. But when their theories are cited and discussed today, they are black boxed in such a way that the scientific instruments are easily forgotten. In response, this chapter is a history of innovation theory that centres scientific instrument innovation. This approach upends the commonly accepted junctures and chronology of innovation models. It shows how empirical research on scientific instruments over a twenty-year period shaped the linear model debates, the chain-linked model, and the innovation systems approach. Over time, these models of innovation started to position scientific research as a support function for technological development in private business. Scientific instruments are written off as ‘unusual’ because they do not fit that mould. By the end of this timeline, innovation research has turned towards ‘normal’ market-based technologies. This chapter concludes by arguing that (mental) models are our epistemic point of departure, and so research is always cognitively constrained by our sense of the past.
It is quite normal for research in innovation studies to include some discussion about the history of a regional-industrial context before engaging with primary data. But readers are typically asked to take the authors’ expert knowledge of the historical context for granted. Instead, this chapter uses an ANTi-History approach to (re)assemble three histories of one ocean science and technology sector in Nova Scotia, Canada. It examines three incompatible newspaper and magazine accounts of this sectors’ emergence – from 1960, 1980, and 2012. The earliest account of the sectoral history positions scientists, scientific instruments, science organizations, and geopolitics as key actors. But in the latest account, scientific instruments are not present; the main actors are private companies and science is lauded as the knowledge base that supports these companies. These three different histories are traces of efforts to define a sector/cluster/industry identity and to rhetorically impose that identity on various actors. They are ‘rhetorical histories’ that aim to ‘assemble’ a cluster as historical fact, thereby establishing a regional competitive advantage. Treating industrial history in this way demonstrates the need to take historical method (that is, historiography) seriously in research on innovation.
When we look to the past from a present-day neoliberal standpoint, we end up writing stories about market-dominant evolutionary processes. In contrast, this chapter presents the stories of three public research organizations and the politics around their establishment: the Canadian Naval Research Establishment, the BIO, and Dalhousie University’s Oceanography Department. In these organizational settings, private companies are enrolled in political missions of military defence, Canadian sovereignty, and scientific one-upmanship. The stories characterize public organizations as active political agents. Meanwhile, the private companies around them can be characterized as ‘quartermasters’ – like the individuals responsible for providing supplies to units in an army (or the Q Branch in James Bond). They were producing the scientific instrumentalities needed for multiple ‘cold wars’. But this relationship is also more nuanced than simple provision of equipment and services – it was often a close two-way partnership. The technical expertise provided by scientific instrument companies helps to set the course for science, and vice versa. Telling the past in this way makes the boundary between public and private organizations messier than it appears in neoliberal ideology.
Why does scholarship on innovation fixate on certain classes of technology? Could our research tools and techniques be concealing as much as they reveal?
Ryan T. MacNeil shows how the common instrumentalities of innovation research carry neoliberal market biases. He calls for critical scholars to examine how we observe and understand innovation, offering ways forward to deconstruct and reform disciplinary conventions.
This book makes a valuable contribution to critical management and science and technology studies by shedding light on the ‘dark matter’ of innovation. This will be an important resource for scholars and practitioners interested in disruptive ideas about innovation.
There has been considerable research on the problematic assumptions embedded in standardized innovation measures. But to address some other problems of statistical practice, this chapter develops and deploys a method called autoethnostatistics. This is a fusion of autoethnography and ethnostatistics. Rather than producing a distanced critique of how other people do statistics, I use this approach to examine my own experiences inside the cult of numbers that dominates mainstream innovation studies. Following the norms for reporting statistical work, the chapter presents four analyses of data on ocean science instrumentality innovation in Nova Scotia. From the outset, simple descriptive statistics provide evidence to falsify any claim against the existence of public innovation in goods. But these numbers also lack credibility because they lack any measure of statistical significance. And so, the descriptive statistics are followed by three sets of statistically significant results. These results follow the canonical progression of innovation theory discussed (and debunked) in Chapter 2. After each analysis, the chapter breaks into an autoethnographic discussion on the meaning(lessness) of those results, eventually turning to insights from Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus.
This chapter approaches ‘region’ as a spatial metaphor that both enables and constrains the systems of innovation literature. Thinking about innovation as a regional phenomenon allows for the surveyable, measurable, Euclidean spaces we call innovation systems. But this makes it difficult to observe innovation processes that fold people, things, and places together in new ways. This chapter explores the different possibilities that come from framing innovation as a region, network, fire, or fluid object. First, it unpacks the regional metaphor by describing the boundary choices that had to be made while preparing a survey of ocean science instrumentality innovation. Then it describes ‘excess’ data that extended beyond the defined region, and other observations that would have ‘flooded’ or ‘set fire’ to the idea of regional boundaries. On these grounds, this chapter questions the ‘hegemony’ of regionalism within innovation studies. Many innovation scholars would say that we need the regional metaphor so we can pin things down, survey them, and quantify them – otherwise they do not count. But this chapter suggests a turn towards critical geography and science and technology studies, where other topological metaphors can provide novel ways of understanding space, time, and innovation.
Ocean technology is very clearly a ‘folk taxonomy’. It is akin to the way many people speak of spiders as ‘bugs’. This makes it a useful category for demonstrating that sectoral boundaries are not as ‘natural’ as innovation research assumes. Product-based industrial classifications have been embedded within innovation theory since Keith Pavitt introduced his famous taxonomy of innovation. The arising ideas have been widely used in research and public policy. But the whole notion of taxonomic classification is superficially borrowed from biology. Using analogies from biology, this chapter reconsiders three major methodological problems already described in the innovation taxonomies literature. This includes, but is not limited to, the taxonomic separation of public and private organizations. It then turns to the deeper problems that arise from the implicit use of an organizations-as-organisms analogy. Following the work of Gareth Morgan, this chapter explores the metatheoretical implications of the organism metaphor and the corresponding political assumptions that are inscribed in sectoral classification tools. It concludes with the argument that we will need other metaphors if we hope to observe other innovation patterns.
How does a Forstian theory of transnational justice help us understand regional governance structures of the Arctic, such as the Arctic Council, and how could it contribute to implementing procedural aspects of justice? The purpose of this chapter is to discuss transnational justice for the Arctic, taking into account the regional, indigenous and environmental aspects of this specific region. Based on literature reviews on normative traditions of justice, the account suggested here draws on Critical Theory, primarily the work of Rainer Forst (2001, 2014 and 2020). The suggested framework proposes normative criteria required for a comprehensive theory of Arctic justice. In addition, it also recommends an analytical structure for assessing justice in the Arctic. The guiding principles suggested as the backbone for a theory of Arctic justice are reciprocity, generality, transparency and responsibility. Inherently important in the current structure are also the principle of sovereignty and the ‘all affected’ principle, which are discussed and assessed in this chapter.
