Radical innovation as a multilevel process: introducing floating grain elevators in the Port of Rotterdam

No abstrac

Confronting the second deep transition through the historical imagination

Leonardo da Vinci Addres

The contested rise of a modernist technology politics

No abstract

Strategies for shifting technological systems : the case of the automobile system

Californian and Dutch efforts to produce electric vehicles are explored and compared. Three strategies are put forward that could turn electric vehicles from an elusive legend, a plaything, into a marketable product: technology forcing creating a market of early promises, experiments geared towards niche development and upscaling (strategic niche management), and the creation of new alliances (technological nexus) which bring technology, the market, regulation and many other factors together. These strategies deployed in the Californian and Dutch context are analysed in detail to explore their relative strengths and weaknesses and to argue in the end that a combined use of all three will increase the chances that the dominant technological system will change. The succesful workings of these strategies crucially depend on the coupling of the variation and selection processes, building blocks for any evolutionary theory of technical change. Evolutionary theory lacks understanding of these coupling processes. Building on recent insights from the sociology of technology, the authors propose a quasi-evolutionary model which underpins the analysis of suggested strategies

Rethinking society for the 21st century: developing a science and technology studies perspective

The role of science and technology in social progress will be drawn out as a special cross- cutting theme in the final 'Rethinking Society for the 21st Century' report. Uniquely, this theme has been subject to special co-ordination amongst report contributors, led by Helga Nowotny and Johan Schot and co-ordinated from SPRU – Science Policy Research Unit at the University of Sussex. In January of this year Science, Technology and Society (STS) authors met at the Volkswagenstiftung in Herrenhausen, Hannover to reflect on chapter work so far, and consider emergent themes. Following on from that workshop, in this blog we reflect on five perspectives on science, technology and innovation which are deeply implicated not only with social progress, but how we frame and assess progress in the first place. These perspectives will be embedded directly in a large number of the report chapters

Deep transitions: theorizing the long-term patterns of socio-technical change

The contemporary world is confronted by a double challenge: environmental degradation and social inequality. This challenge is linked to the dynamics of the First Deep Transition (Schot, 2016): the creation and expansion of a wide range of socio-technical systems in a similar direction over the past 200–250 years. Extending the theoretical framework of Schot and Kanger (2018), this paper proposes that the First Deep Transition has been built up through successive Great Surges of Development (Perez, 2002), leading to the emergence of a macro-level selection environment called industrial modernity. This has resulted in the formation of a portfolio of directionality, characterized by dominant and durable directions and occasional discontinuous shifts in addition to a continuous variety of alternatives sustained in niches or single systems. This historically-informed view on the co-evolution of single socio-technical systems, complexes of systems and industrial modernity has distinctive implications for policy-making targeted at resolving the current challenges

Deep transitions: emergence, acceleration, stabilization and directionality

Industrial society has not only led to high levels of wealth and welfare in the Western world, but also to increasing global ecological degradation and social inequality. The socio-technical systems that underlay contemporary societies have substantially contributed to these outcomes. This paper proposes that these socio-technical systems are an expression of a limited number of meta-rules that, for the past 250 years, have driven innovation and hence system evolution in a particular direction, thereby constituting the First Deep Transition. Meeting the cumulative social and ecological consequences of the overall direction of the First Deep Transition would require a radical change, not only in socio-technical systems but also in the meta-rules driving their evolution – the Second Deep Transition. This paper develops a new theoretical framework that aims to explain the emergence, acceleration, stabilization and directionality of Deep Transitions. It does so through the synthesis of two literatures that have attempted to explain large-scale and long-term socio-technical change: the Multi-level Perspective (MLP) on socio-technical transitions, and Techno-economic Paradigm (TEP) framework