Mapping Controversies over a Potential Turn to Quality in Chinese Wind Power
- Publication date
- Publisher
- 2015
Abstract
The thesis inquires into dynamics and controversies of constructing a market for
wind power in China. Inquiring into what the thesis dubs a quality crisis in
Chinese wind power after years of high growth rates, and into a potential turn to
quality, the thesis traces such current ambiguous winds of change with point of
departure in the notion of global innovation networks (GINs). Thus, it looks into
how international collaborations on critical components, such as software
programmes, play a critical role in the qualification of wind power as a
‘sustainable’ renewable energy source.
However, with a structural rather than micro-relational or processual lens, the
existing GIN literature is claimed to be ill-equipped to grasp the genesis,
dynamics, and agency of GINs. To fill this gap, the thesis develops a situational,
constructivist framework based in Science and Technology Studies, which renders
a processual and relational understanding of GINs as part and parcel of market
construction. It does this by initially ‘looking away’ from the original metaphor of
GINs, with the result of effectively reconceptualising it. This is done by
illustrating the dynamics and the agency of GIN genesis through a mapping of
controversies over issues of Intellectual Property Rights, standardisation, money,
and cost and price calculations, entangled in a Chinese ‘system problem’ of stateowned
actors and a Chinese experimental pragmatism of market construction,
which has had unintended effects.
Tracing one potential GIN taking shape around a critical component, the thesis
also contributes to the GIN literature through a new methodological approach.
Illustrating the potentially disruptive dynamics of GIN construction, and how the
emerging GIN around software programmes possesses disruptive agency in regard
to the framing of the emerging Chinese wind power market, the thesis sheds light
on some of the socio-material work needed to construct and maintain GINs and
the markets it co-constitutes and is co-constituted by, as well as the negotiated
roles, identities, and positions of actors in a developmental context of China. The
thesis coins the seemingly particular Chinese mode of market construction within
wind power a fragmented and experimental ‘pragmatics of (green) market
construction’, with its agile responses to emerging issues. Last, to overcome the dualism between structural and processual accounts, the
thesis draws on the pragmatist notion of figuration (Elias, 1978). After
demonstrating a potential figurational change reflected in the ongoing turn to
quality, the thesis also considers the implications that the inquiry has for other
related literatures, hereunder proposing a new research agenda for New Economic
Sociology to understand market and GIN construction in a developmental context,
which holds a promise for inquiring into China’s self- and other-disruptive, yet
potentially path-creating modes of development and upgrading