10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17238




Drawing on pioneering work by Pinch and Foucault, this paper argues that the national innovation system (NIS) conceptual approach that emerged from innovation studies in the 1980s and 1990s constitutes a social technology intended to induce policymakers to adopt a sophisticated model of the role of innovation in a national economy when formulating policies for stimulating economic growth and development. In this respect the NIS approach has also served as an instrument of governmentality, making an emphasis on technological innovation attractive to the relevant actors in policymaking, industry, and related institutions. The paper draws on qualitative empirical research to show that, like any social technology, the NIS approach can be used for purposes other than those for which it was designed by revealing its use as a rhetorical device by Hong Kong policymakers for political purposes. The study reinvigorates the concept of a social technology for science and technology studies.




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Naubahar Sharif
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Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
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Understanding the “National Innovation System” Conceptual Approach as a Social and Governmental Technology
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Essays
2015-07-10
2023-06-17
2015-07-10
2023-07-31
33-60
TS
Naubahar Sharif
2015/07/10
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17238
33
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
2038-3460
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Hong Kong
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Understanding the “National Innovation System” Conceptual Approach as a Social and Governmental Technology
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6
                                                                                    Essay
Understanding the “National Innovation
System” Conceptual Approach as a
Social and Governmental Technology
	
  
Naubahar Sharif
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
	
  
              Abstract Drawing on pioneering work by Pinch and Foucault, this paper
              argues that the national innovation system (NIS) conceptual approach that
              emerged from innovation studies in the 1980s and 1990s constitutes a so-
              cial technology intended to induce policymakers to adopt a sophisticated
              model of the role of innovation in a national economy when formulating
              policies for stimulating economic growth and development. In this respect
              the NIS approach has also served as an instrument of governmentality,
              making an emphasis on technological innovation attractive to the relevant
              actors in policymaking, industry, and related institutions. The paper draws
              on qualitative empirical research to show that, like any social technology,
              the NIS approach can be used for purposes other than those for which it
              was designed by revealing its use as a rhetorical device by Hong Kong poli-
              cymakers for political purposes. The study reinvigorates the concept of a
              social technology for science and technology studies.

              Keywords: National innovation system; technology; social technology;
              governmentality; Honk Hong.

              Corresponding author: Naubahar Sharif, Division of Social Science, The
              Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Clear Water Bay, Kow-
              loon, Hong Kong SAR – Email: sosn@ust.hk.
       	
  



1. Introduction
   In this paper I draw on pioneering work by the sociologist of science
Trevor Pinch and the philosopher and intellectual historian Michel Fou-
cault to argue that a conceptual approach to the study of innovation and
economic development, one that has made its way from scholarly research
and discourse into policymaking circles, functions as a social technology
that has become what Foucault calls a governmental technology. I also
provide empirical evidence of its use as a social and governmental tech-
nology in Hong Kong.
TECNOSCIENZA
Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
	
   pp. 33-60 - ISSN 2038-3460
6(1)                                              2015
www.tecnoscienza.net
34                                                          Tecnoscienza - 6 (1)

    It is, to be sure, somewhat counterintuitive to conceive of an abstract
construct in the social sciences as a technology. When most people think
of a technology they imagine some new device or machine that makes a
specific task easier to accomplish. Both Pinch and Foucault identify sys-
tems containing abstract elements as “technologies,” however, and I will
attempt making a similar case that in regarding a scholarly conceptual
approach as a social technology we are able to see the key characteristics
of such a technology, which generally combines concrete with abstract
elements to do what all technologies do: change how people behave in
order to achieve some goal.
    The scholarly conceptual approach in question, broadly understood,
is that of a national innovation system (NIS). I will argue here that the
manner in which this conceptual approach has been developed in the ac-
ademic sphere and subsequently disseminated from there into education-
al, policymaking, and industrial institutions is characteristic of a social
technology. In the course of my argument I will introduce the NIS con-
ceptual approach, explain in what sense it has become a social technolo-
gy, and reflect on what that implies, again by reference to Pinch’s analyses
and Foucault’s thinking about what he termed “governmentality” in his
work on the development of the modern state and its relationship with
those whom it governs. When scholarly experts pass the NIS approach on
to policymakers, it becomes a technology of government, applied either
through government agencies or through non-governmental organizations
that in some cases are funded by government. To illustrate a possible im-
plication of my analysis I consider additional questions raised by Pinch
pertaining to the testing and implementation of social technologies. These
questions suggest that by treating the NIS conceptual approach as a social
technology we can achieve a richer understanding of the process through
which innovations are driven by and in turn drive developments in the
wider context of public and private institutions with potentially far-
reaching economic consequences.
    When I turn to the use of the NIS approach as a social technology in
Hong Kong, however, I show that, like any technology, its originally in-
tended use may be superseded for another purpose. In the Hong Kong
case, I offer evidence that government officials used the NIS approach for
rhetorical purposes rather than as a model for generating economic de-
velopment and growth (Sharif 2010). To be sure, this illustrates the
broader purposes of a governmental technology, which often includes lay-
ing the groundwork for making government policies easier to implement
by creating receptive constituents.
    The NIS approach was introduced by researchers in the 1980s in the
context of growing interest in economic development as international in-
stitutions studied the gap between the developing and the developed
world. Among these institutions is the Organisation for Economic Co-
operation and Development (OECD), which promotes financial stability
and the global spread of market forces with the goal of enhancing the
Sharif                                                                                                                                                                                                                             35
economic status of developing nations. In broad terms, according to the
OECD, an NIS comprises a “set of institutions that (jointly and individu-
ally) contribute to the development and diffusion of new technologies […
providing] a framework within which governments form and implement
policies to influence the innovation process” (OECD 1999, 24). As we
shall see, the institutions in question bring together actors in the public
and private sectors by marshalling resources from universities, industry,
research bodies, and government agencies in the course of which innova-
tions are created and commercialized. The NIS approach provides a
framework within which to comprehend the full scope of an innovation
system against the backdrop of global economic trends while taking the
play of historical and contemporary national specificities into account.
    In developing the NIS approach, innovation scholars have replaced a
linear, somewhat static model with a more dynamic model featuring in-
teractive, multidirectional relations with feedback loops among the com-
ponent parts or actors.1 If there is reciprocity in these relations between
actors, so there is, as Rose and Miller (2010 [1992]) argue, “reciprocity
between the social sciences and government. As government depends up-
on these sciences for its language and calculations, so the social sciences
thrive on the problems of government” (280). It is here that governmen-
tality through “technologies of government” (281) comes into play. If the
NIS conceptual approach is such a technology of government, then its
function as such depends on a “complex assemblage of diverse forces”
that enable “the decisions and actions of individuals, groups, organiza-
tions and populations […] to be understood and regulated in relation to
authoritative criteria” (281). As defined by the OECD, the NIS concep-
tual approach provides the criteria by which a government can channel
advantages and resources towards actors it hopes will engage in the sort
of innovation-related behavior that academic innovation experts assure
them will fuel economic growth.
    The NIS approach is a two-dimensional construct that has migrated
from academic into policymaking circles as innovation policy is utilized
increasingly to drive economic development. In this movement into the
hands of government actors, scholars propounding the NIS approach re-
flect Rose and Miller’s (2010 [1992]) observation that “experts […] ally
themselves with political authorities, focusing on their problems and
problematizing new issues, translating economic concerns about […] in-
novation […] into the vocabulary of management” (286). Indeed, as I will
argue, the NIS approach has become a social technology to the extent to
which it functions as a means of promoting innovation by altering the be-
havior of government policymakers and the agencies they represent, who
in turn utilize the approach as a governmental technology. Conceived in
	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  
                     1
      This makes the Hong Kong case all the more interesting because its version
of an NIS was more linear than holistic when I conducted research on this ques-
tion. See section 4 in this paper.
36                                                           Tecnoscienza - 6 (1)

this way, the NIS approach can be understood as an application of Fou-
cault’s analysis of power relations, that is, as an instance of the rational
application of techniques of government to serve (in this case) an eco-
nomic purpose.
     Foucault’s work on what many call the analytics of power led him, by
the late 1970s, to coin the term “governmentality”, providing him with a
concept that brings together his thinking about what he termed the “ge-
nealogy of the state” and the “genealogy of the subject”. As Rose (1993)
puts it, on Foucault’s analysis governing entails “a certain mentality of
rule. Governmentality is a way of problematizing life and acting on it”
(288, original emphasis). The need for governmentality, a rational ap-
proach to state governance, arose as a result of historical developments
running roughly from the sixteenth into the twentieth century as previous
modes of sovereignty gave way to the modern state. What Foucault calls
the problematic of government involves the state’s twin imperatives to
control and care for its subjects, now reconstituted as a “population”.
     In his later thinking Foucault came to view power or dominance as
but one modality of governance, arguing that similar relationships occur
at all levels of human interaction, among institutions as well as individu-
als. As the modern state evolved, a new category of analysis, that of politi-
cal economy, emerged with the state’s interest in duplicating in a whole
society the “economy” of the family, taking on the traditional role of the
father or household head, whose job it was to see to the orderly manage-
ment of his property and its inhabitants. In this way the state assumed a
kind of pastoral power over its subjects, which is as much about health
and welfare as about subjugation, even as it sought to consolidate its po-
litical power. This means that the state’s power relations with its popula-
tion involve much negotiating over the terms of those relations through
interactions between individuals and government agencies or institutions,
thus requiring considerable individual autonomy even as it also seeks to
mold individuals into proper citizens. The trick is to create a population
of individuals, or selves, who are properly governable.
     Governmentality thus signifies the development of the state as a
source of technologies the purpose of which is to secure these two over-
arching ends. Rather than controlling subjects like a sovereign monarch
through directly coercive “juridical” power, the state now seeks to incul-
cate in the population patterns of self-governance through “pastoral”
power, using state institutions to steer the population towards health and
prosperity. Foucault argues that in adopting this new role the modern
state must deploy governing technologies that operate at the level of the
individual subject, what he calls “individualizing” technologies, as well as
at the level of the whole population, what he calls “totalizing” technolo-
gies. In this regard he is, of course, concerned about the fate of the au-
tonomy of the subject, but for our purposes the important point is that
governmentality, whether in the hands of the state or in the hands of pri-
vate institutions through which state power is diffused, is about causing
Sharif                                                                                                                                                                                                                             37
other people to behave in particular ways that keep things running
smoothly. In this sense a government technology, as I will argue presently,
is also a social technology, a means of altering human behavior on a social
level to serve particular ends.
    At the same time, it is important to understand that although Fou-
cault’s work on governmentality resulted from a sweeping historical anal-
ysis of the genealogy of forms of state governance, the concept applies to
any relationship between people or institutions in which persuasive dis-
course and other techniques are deployed in an effort to shape behavior,
whether one’s own or another’s. Just as the modern “neo-liberal” state
uses governmentality to create a population susceptible to its technologies
of power, so individuals, and other non-state actors, use governmentality
to affect the behavior of others and themselves.2
    Accordingly, as the NIS approach has moved from academic to indus-
trial to government policymaking institutions, it has become an instru-
ment for engineering a particular set of social relations connecting actors
in each of those domains, namely those that constitute inputs to and out-
puts from the process of innovation, even while shaping the process it-
self.3 In Foucauldian terms, the set of institutional and personal relation-
ships, along with the material and abstract components that facilitate
those relationships, constitutes a “dispositif”, what Rose (1993) terms a
“machine for government, each of which is itself an assemblage of diverse
components, persons, forms of knowledge, technical procedures and
modes of judgment and sanction” (p. 287). In thus framing the NIS con-
struct, I am picking up a lost thread in the literature because the idea of a
social technology has received limited attention in S&TS recently (after
early work by, for example, Ashmore et al. 1989; Pinch et al. 1992; Mul-
cahy 1998).
    Before I introduce the NIS conceptual approach properly, I will brief-
ly mention the critique of the “social” levied by Latour (1993; 2005) and
Callon (1986; 1987). In short, I do not take up this issue robustly in this
paper, as I prefer to focus on how the NIS approach has been utilized ir-
respective of the appropriateness of the label “social” technology. I will
be clear about what this means for my purposes, and I will note at least
	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  
     2
       A concise but systematic introduction to Foucault’s concept of governmen-
tality is available in Burchell et al. (1991), which includes not only a lengthy intro-
duction to the concept by Graham Burchell (Burchell et al. 1991, 1-52), but also
excerpts from Foucault’s lectures in which he introduced the concept, under the
title ‘Governmentality’ (87-104).
     3
       An example of the way in which the NIS has become an instrument for en-
gineering a particular set of social relations can be found in Finland, where con-
necting actors in the innovation system has recently become an explicit policy
goal (see Schienstock and Hämäläinen 2001, 12 and 178-199). Within such a
framework, “the widening and deepening of network-cooperation has become
one of the central issues for the developing of innovation system” (The Science
and Technology Policy Council of Finland 1996, 42).
38                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 Tecnoscienza - 6 (1)

one juncture at which there is some commonality between my account of
a social technology and Latour’s and Callon’s approach, particularly re-
garding the role of material objects in an “actor–network”. On my ac-
count social technologies – as is true of the NIS conceptual approach –
very likely include material objects as components that act on other com-
ponents. This idea is part of Latour’s and Callon’s critique of the social,
but it would divert me far from my purposes to undertake a broad philo-
sophical defense of the social in this paper.


2. The National Innovation Systems (NIS) Conceptual
Approach
2.1. Two Interdependent Dimensions

     To understand my focus on the national innovation system construct,
it is worth noting that, within academic and policy spheres, the innova-
tion system conceptual approach exhibits considerable variation with re-
spect to an innovation system’s scope or field of application – there likely
are regional innovation systems as well as innovation systems tied to par-
ticular technologies or industrial sectors.4 In regarding the innovation sys-
tem conceptual approach as a social and governmental technology, I am
committed to following its use among policymakers, and by focusing on
the effects of policy at the national level we can readily trace the influence
of the conceptual approach as an instrument of social engineering. I
therefore focus on the national innovation systems conceptual approach;
when I use the briefer “innovation system” it should be understood as a
reference to an NIS.
     In spite of its recent advent and relatively low profile in the S&TS lit-
erature (for exceptions, see Miettinen 2002; Sharif 2006; Albert and Lab-
erge 2007), the NIS construct has been used extensively in academic and
government circles. In the academic domain, innovation systems are the
focus of study in many scholarly research programs, especially across
northern Europe and Scandinavia.5 In the government domain, the inno-

	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  
                     4
      Innovation systems have been identified based on spatial, technological, and
sectoral criteria. In addition to ‘national’ innovation systems, for example, we can
identify ‘regional’ innovation systems (Silicon Valley is a clear example), ‘sectoral’
innovation systems, (such as is likely the case with energy-related industries); and
‘technological’ innovation systems (some would identify innovation in semicon-
ductor manufacturing as such a system). I shall not in this paper consider the
comparative merits of the delimiting criteria used in classifying innovation sys-
tems; what matters here is the structure and functioning of an innovation system,
which in all its permutations exhibits similar properties.
    5
      England houses the ‘Science Policy Research Unit’ (SPRU) in Brighton, and
in Manchester the ‘Institute of Innovation Research’ and the ‘Center for Research
Sharif                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       39
vation systems approach began to exert considerable influence during the
1990s. As a result, public policy in many countries and public institutions
shifted in orientation from supporting science and technology per se to
supporting the broader innovation process. That is, instead of supporting
science and technology for their own sakes, by channelling that support
through the innovation pipeline governments target economic develop-
ment or growth as the intended outcome of innovation policy. Led by
such international bodies as the OECD (OECD 1996, 1997, 1999) and
the European Commission (European Commission 1994, 1995, 1996,
2002), a number of government agencies have followed suit. As I will
show, the prestige of the OECD has drawn interest to its version of the
NIS approach beyond its European sphere of influence, specifically, in
Hong Kong. Yet the OECD’s conception of an NIS arguably loses its
purchase there, as Hong Kong government officials use it less to shape
than to sell its development policies.
    The NIS conceptual approach in practice exhibits two interdependent
dimensions – one descriptive and the other prescriptive – and to under-
stand it holistically we must understand how it has come to serve both
descriptive and prescriptive purposes. The descriptive dimension and the
prescriptive dimension co-determine one another, because how we de-
scribe and analyze an NIS is in part a function of the outcomes we pursue
with innovation policy, while policy options are delimited by what we
learn in analysis and description. In particular, targeting positive econom-
ic growth and development drives the description of an NIS insofar as it
channels analysis to identify social and productive relations that conduce
to such growth and development. On the other hand, effective innovation
policymaking depends on accurate identification and analysis of existing
conditions. It is difficult to move an economy from point A to point B if
you do not know where point A is. In Table 1 below I summarize the key
characteristics of the two dimensions of the NIS conceptual approach.
	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  
on Innovation and Competitiveness’ (CRIC). Germany hosts the ‘Fraunhofer In-
stitute for Systems and Innovation Research,’ while the Netherlands has the
‘Maastricht Economic Research Institute on Innovation and Technology’ and the
‘Eindhoven Center for Innovation Studies’ (ECIS). Scandinavia boasts the ‘Cen-
tre for Technology, Innovation and Culture’ (TIK) in Norway, and the ‘Danish
Research Unit for Industrial Dynamics’ (DRUID) in Denmark, largely populated
by researchers from Aalborg University. Denmark also features the ‘Copenhagen
Business School’, which studies innovation systems. Sweden features the ‘Centre
for Innovation, Research, and Competence in the Learning Economy’ (CIRCLE)
at Lund University and the ‘R&D and Innovation with Dynamics of Economics’
(RIDE) research center at the Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg.
At Linkoping, the Center for Studies of Humans, Technology, and Organization
also conducts innovation systems research. Across the Atlantic, Canada has the
Centre for Policy Research on Science and Technology at Simon Fraser University
(at Harbour Centre) in Vancouver, which employs the NIS conceptual approach
as its underlying framework.
40                                                                Tecnoscienza - 6 (1)




                  Descriptive Dimension             Prescriptive Dimension

                     Identification and
                                                    Analysis of the system’s
                 description of innovation
     What is                                       components to map their
                system inputs, outputs, and
     done?                                          interrelations and trace
                    relationships among
                                                        innovation flows
                 institutional components

                 Accurate representation of     Effective analysis of linkages –
                    inputs, outputs, and           including their nature and
 Why is it
                institutional components is     intensity – among factors that
  done?
                necessary to ensure effective   affect inputs so as to maximize
                           analysis                         outputs

 What are                                        Policy recommendations that
                 Well informed innovation
   the                                            lead to positive economic
                       policymaking
 results?                                                   growth


     Table 1 – Two Interactive Dimensions of the NIS Conceptual Approach.




2.2. Distinguishing the Descriptive from the Prescriptive
Dimension of the NIS Approach

    How scholars describe the constituent elements of an innovation sys-
tem partly determines how such a system is analyzed and subsequently
treated by policymakers. Here, then, we review the defining characteris-
tics of an NIS-based descriptive analysis in order to understand what it
means to adopt the NIS approach within the academic domain – com-
prising a set of interrelated academic disciplines – as well as within the
policymaking domain in which government agencies operate.
    As noted by Edquist and Johnson (1997) and Edquist (2005), defining
the science and technology components of an economy in NIS terms
serves two primary functions. Within the academic domain, the NIS ap-
proach creates boundaries by reference to which NIS practitioners and
policymakers can differentiate how they use the approach within their re-
spective domains from the ways in which others who study technological
change conceive of innovation. Second, the NIS approach establishes a
set of criteria on which to base assessments of the effects of innovation on
competitiveness and economic growth. In the policymaking domain, ap-
plying the NIS approach to a national system of innovation provides an
alternative to the outmoded linear model of innovation that lingers in pol-
Sharif                                                                   41
icymaking circles, capturing the multidirectionality of institutional rela-
tions whereby initial inputs beget intermediate outputs as well as back-
flows of information that inform ongoing innovative work.
    From a theoretical perspective the boundary issues raised by the NIS
approach shed light not only on its role in the transition through which
research breeds innovation that is eventually commercialized, but also on
the social constructivist approach to technology. In this latter connection,
Gieryn (1983; 1995), in addition to considering how boundaries in sci-
ence are used to demarcate science from non-science, emphasizes the
‘work’ conducted in creating boundaries. That is, boundaries are practi-
cal achievements that need continual maintenance, and this is particularly
true of the nexus that links research to the commercialization of innova-
tions, since the NIS conceptual approach carries over from the academic
domain to the policymaking domain, providing a lingua franca that serves
as a medium of communication through which knowledge flows. The de-
scriptive characteristics of the innovation systems conceptual approach
are conceived and defended by innovation systems practitioners to pro-
tect their particular ways of thinking. We see this not only in the academ-
ic sphere but also in the policymaking sphere, where NIS-style thinking
has influenced government technology policies. As Gieryn suggests, the
communities of scholars and policymakers who use the NIS conceptual
approach set boundaries in order to access resources, protect autonomy,
and maintain control over their domain of intellectual thought.
    In addition to serving as a boundary object, the NIS construct also
provides “a way of seeing” or a way of conceptualizing an economy that
facilitates both research about and intervention in innovative activity. We
cannot understand the NIS construct if we forget that, as it has made its
way out of the academy into the market, it takes on a prescriptive or nor-
mative dimension in supporting recommendations to policymakers by
making an in-depth understanding of any given innovation system acces-
sible to non-scholarly actors, who are able to use it in comparing their na-
tional innovation systems with those of other countries in what has be-
come, since the Cold War ended, “a world of international technology
competition” (Elam 1999, 18). In this respect the NIS conceptual ap-
proach in effect induces governments to integrate technology and innova-
tion policy into their broader economic policies. In so doing, govern-
ments avail themselves of a new tool, a governmental technology, for
managing knowledge on an economy-wide basis. That it has also been
used for rhetorical purposes might alter its influence on policy design, but
it also illustrates another aspect it has in common with all technologies,
namely being open to interpretation and a multiplicity of uses (see Miet-
innen 2002, Sharif 2010).
42                                                          Tecnoscienza - 6 (1)

3. The National Innovations Systems (NIS) Conceptual
Approach as a Social Technology

    Over its relatively short history, the NIS conceptual approach has be-
come well established in innovation studies and in policymaking circles as
a way of analyzing an economy to determine how innovations can be
promoted for the purposes of economic growth, particularly in the
OECD and European Commission, where growth and development are
compared on a country-by-country basis. To show that the NIS concep-
tual approach has been deployed as a social technology, I first recall con-
ventional characterizations of what makes something a technology, and
then concentrate on features that pertain specifically to social technolo-
gies. In particular, I adopt the view that social technologies are designed
explicitly and primarily to alter human behavior, which, in the case of the
NIS conceptual approach, means first the behavior of government poli-
cymakers and the agencies they represent, and ultimately the behavior of
actors at all levels of an innovation system, from technology researchers to
designers to entrepreneurs – in short, everyone who plays a role in bring-
ing innovative products to the marketplace. In Foucauldian terms, the
NIS approach in effect reconstitutes all these academic, industrial, finan-
cial and government actors as innovation actors, and in so doing it har-
nesses both “individualizing” and “totalizing” technologies to boost eco-
nomic growth.
    Before exploring these and other implications of my characterization
of the NIS conceptual approach as a social technology, however, we
begin with a broad characterization of a technology per se. The difficulty
of defining the term “technology” has been noted often by S&TS scholars
(see, for example, Bijker et al. 1987; Kline 1995; Oldenziel 1999; Mac-
kenzie and Wajcman 1999). To flesh out the idea that a technology is a
practical application of a scheme for achieving a productive goal, I follow
Wajcman (1991, 14-15) and Mackenzie and Wajcman (1999) in charac-
terizing a technology in terms of three principal elements. First, a tech-
nology involves artifacts and systems that constitute what is primarily a
material element, as it were the concrete objects and physical processes
used in producing and applying the technology. Second, a technology in-
cludes an informational element, a combination of knowledge and skills
that support specific techniques employed in producing and implement-
ing it. The informational element of a technology provides the abstract
structure that characterizes the productive relations through which the
material components are manufactured. The third element of a technolo-
gy is the set of social practices and relations that provide the framework
within which the technology serves the purposes for which it was devised.
In characterizing the NIS conceptual approach as a technology, I am
committed to an analysis according to which it features all three of these
elements – the material, the informational, and the social.
Sharif                                                                     43
    Note that such a combination of elements exhibits the heterogeneity
that Latour and Callon attempt to capture with the concept of an actor–
network, which typically includes nonhuman animate and inanimate ob-
jects as actors. Actor–network theory (ANT) thus posits that “an actor
could be either a human or non-human entity and it could have both ma-
terial and “social” components” constituted “by a shifting network of
connections with, and differences from, other entities. [...] Instead of
speaking of actors and their networks as if they were distinct objects, this
approach suggested that it would be more appropriate to speak of “ac-
tor–networks’” (Berry and Slater 2010, 177). As I have noted, I am not
addressing the applicability of ANT to the NIS conceptual approach here
because I do not wish to address the question as to whether the nonhu-
man or inanimate elements of a technology, social or otherwise, constitute
actors, or to take up an explicit defense of the social. As to whether a giv-
en technology has social effects, the effects that I describe later in the pa-
per occur whether or not they are properly labeled “social”.
    In distinguishing the NIS conceptual approach considered as a social
technology from material or machine technologies I nevertheless
acknowledge its material elements, including the mundane physical items
used by researchers and policymakers, such as computers, printers, com-
munication devices and other forms of office infrastructure – paper, ink,
etc. – as well as other physical manifestations – printed academic papers,
policy documents, and so on. This paper is not the site for an extended
discussion of differences between the role of material objects in what I am
defining as a social technology and their role in a Latourian actor–
network, but I will note that I am perfectly comfortable with the idea that
each of these components plays a particular role only within the overall
context of the way in which a social technology is applied to achieve its
designed purpose. A particular configuration of ink on a page, for exam-
ple, becomes part of a social technology because the context in which it is
used in part determines what it means to other actors in the system
through which the technology is applied.
    In addition to the research-based content of the NIS conceptual ap-
proach – scholarly papers and the theories they expound, diagrams and
other figures, for example (noteworthy for the role they have played in
Hong Kong, which I discuss below) – we should also include in the in-
formational element the software that computers and other devices run as
well as the channels of communication through which content is passed
from one actor to another. There is in this respect a rhetorical element
through which NIS practitioners employ its descriptive and prescriptive
dimensions in attempting to realize the objective of harnessing innovation
to drive an economy’s economic growth and development. That is, the
rhetoric of the NIS concept when used as a social technology – the ways
in which the particular configuration of components I have catalogued
here are harnessed to act on human behaviour – determines how it is in-
terpreted as a model of innovative activity at the national scale (or at
44                                                            Tecnoscienza - 6 (1)

whatever scale it is calibrated at). The material and information elements
act as technological components to the extent that they serve a technolog-
ical purpose.
    The social element of the NIS approach, then, resides in a set of insti-
tutional and personal relationships – some more formal than others –
through which academics, business interests, and policymakers work to-
gether in conceiving, sharing, and implementing it in practice. What mat-
ters for my purposes is that it is through these institutional and personal
relationships, facilitated by its various material and abstract or rhetorical
components, that the NIS conceptual approach finds practical expression.
    While the last two elements of a technology – informational content
and social relations – may seem too human-centered or “low-tech” to fit
our idea of a technology, they cannot be ignored because they change the
organization of work as well as the organization of society and social rela-
tionships. The three principal elements of a technology may produce un-
intended consequences that undermine or alter the application of that
technology, but they converge on an explicit purpose or pre-determined
goal, and it is in terms of that goal that we should understand such a
technology. I contend that the NIS conceptual approach is a form of
knowledge, applied through the abovementioned combination of ele-
ments, that is used to conceptualize and analyze the ecology of an econo-
my’s institutions that affect innovations and on that basis it is also used to
construct policy recommendations intended to alter the behavior of those
constituent institutions and the actors who work within them. It is, there-
fore, a form of technology. It remains, then, to explain more fully why
this particular technology is best understood as a social technology in the
sense in which I am using that term.
    To demonstrate that the NIS conceptual approach is a social technol-
ogy, I refer to Pinch’s research, in which he identifies several examples of
social technologies that, in his words, include “artifacts, processes, or
procedures (or combinations of these) which are built around or have
embedded within them a systematic attempt to change human behavior”
(Pinch 1987a, 2). To be sure, any technology once deployed influences
human behavior in the trivial sense that, for example, we now use wireless
communication devices instead of wired devices on a daily basis. Such a
technological shift might well alter behavior on a social scale, of course,
but there is no particular pattern of behavior beyond that of a new con-
sumption behavior underlying the development of wireless communica-
tion devices. To say that the NIS conceptual approach is a social technol-
ogy is therefore to say that its purpose is precisely to bring about new be-
haviors on the part of a class of actors taken as a population or significant
segment of a population. In Foucauldian terms, as I have noted, when in-
novation actors operate within the framework of the NIS conceptual ap-
proach they have been reconstituted as members of a particular popula-
tion or social class, as a totality that can be directed towards a common
goal. To illustrate this, then, I shall briefly discuss two of Pinch’s exam-
Sharif                                                                    45
ples, showing how they meet the above-mentioned criteria in virtue of
which they are indeed technologies, and then consider his characteriza-
tion of a social technology as one that is intended to affect behavior on a
social scale.
     Insofar as our characterization of a social technology builds on the
aforementioned characterization of a technology per se, it also faces the
difficulty of clearly distinguishing the various elements of a technology
from one another. Distinguishing artifacts, processes, and procedures
from one another can seem arbitrary. To illustrate this, we first briefly re-
visit Pinch’s account of an attempt to change the behavior of prisoners in
the British penal system in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (from
around 1770 until around 1840). The so-called “Separate System” of
prison reform that was implemented during the Victorian era is, in
Pinch’s view, “a classic attempt to change the behavior of prisoners with-
in the framework of a technological system” (Pinch 1987a, 2-3).
     The idea of the Separate System was to keep prisoners in complete
isolation from one another at all times of the day and night while subject-
ing them to a regular dose of Bible-bashing. The goal was to replace a
prisoner’s criminal personality with an open, “impressible” temperament
that would render him susceptible to what we might now call behavior
modification in the course of which the prisoner would be transformed
into a person whose disposition would now be conducive to learning and
practicing appropriate self-regulation and interpersonal behavior.
     In this example, the social technology works within the framework of
a largely material technological system (the prison). The component parts
of this social technology included therefore many material artifacts: the
prison itself, elaborate equipment that enabled wardens to usher prison-
ers in and out of group assemblies without seeing one another, and sever-
al machines that performed no useful work but nevertheless occupied
prisoners’ time in physical labor. To these material objects Pinch adds the
personnel responsible for applying the Separate System, adding that “the
Separate System along with the “technicians” [wardens, inspectors and
the prison chaplains] who operated it comprised a potent social technol-
ogy” (my italics; Pinch 1987a, 5). Finally, we must also include as essen-
tial components of this technology the set of abstract processes that speci-
fied the use of the physical components as well as the supervisory roles
played by prison personnel as they regulated the behavior of the prisoners.
     This description of the Separate System does seem to match our char-
acterization of a technology, comprising the material, informational, and
social elements. What makes it a social technology is its purpose, which as
we have noted was to alter the behavior of the prisoners, to turn each
prisoner, in Pinch’s words, from “‘criminal man’ into an ordinary citizen”
(Pinch 1987a, 19). It is this objective that made the Separate System, ac-
cording to Pinch, a “classic example” of a social technology.
     Foucault, of course, famously analyzed the emergence of the modern
prison system (Foucault 1978 [1975]), but as he developed the concept of
46                                                          Tecnoscienza - 6 (1)

governmentality his analysis of power relations underwent considerable
refinement. In his later thinking domination becomes but one type of
power relation among others, not all of which are intrinsically bad for ei-
ther party (governing other people’s behavior sometimes requires em-
powering them), and his new lines of thought superseded key elements of
his earlier analysis. In later Foucauldian terms, the Separate System clear-
ly wields both individualizing and totalizing technologies. The elaborate
lengths to which the system goes to prevent prisoners from interacting
with one another isolates them as subjects of the pastoral function of the
emerging modern state, rendering them more susceptible to the individu-
al moral uplift that the system was meant to facilitate. At the same time,
however, the system also works at transforming the entire prison popula-
tion, treating every case similarly, and glossing distinguishing features of
their individual cases or personal histories in an effort to create a new
class of citizens.
    We have seen that, in the description of an NIS that follows from the
NIS conceptual approach, we find counterparts to the components of a
technology per se, but what makes the NIS conceptual approach a social
technology is ultimately its purpose, which is to change the ways in which
economic and innovation-related policymakers act in setting and revising
economic policy and in turn to encourage innovation-oriented behavior
on the part of actors throughout a national innovation system. In Fou-
cauldian terms these policymakers and associated actors and stakeholders
constitute a population, albeit a small one, that becomes the target of the
NIS conceptual approach. In particular, the NIS approach operates by
shifting the focus of policymakers from conventional policy frameworks
(which often approach innovation policy with a largely repudiated linear
model of innovation) to one that privileges innovation as a key driver of
growth and development. It is this emphasis on shifting the framework
within which policymakers and other associated actors operate as a popu-
lation that has convinced me that the NIS conceptual approach is a social
technology.
    We can bring out some interesting consequences of this position by
considering now another example of a social technology that Pinch has
studied. Pinch et al. (1992) discuss an example that is perhaps more like
the NIS case than the Separate System during the course of their analysis
of the introduction of “clinical budgeting systems” into the British Na-
tional Health Service (NHS) in the 1980s. Here they focus on an analyti-
cal technique that was intended to be applied to a large system that is, in
terms of the scale involved, more on a par with a national innovation sys-
tem, namely the NHS.
    The clinical budgeting system was conceived as a way of bringing
medical practice in the NHS into something akin to a market framework.
In this sense it might represent what Berry and Slater (2010) have noted
as “the role of economics in the constitution of markets” (175-176). In
the face of a budget crisis the idea was to establish a new system for the
Sharif                                                                           47
allocation of medical resources that would replace the old model, under
which the ability of patients to pay for services played no role in deter-
mining that allocation. In analyzing this attempt, Pinch, Ashmore, and
Mulkay committed themselves to treating “clinical budgeting as a “social
technology” […] clinical budgeting incorporates some material techno-
logical artifacts – in this case the micro-computers and associated hard-
ware and software. Again, however, such artifacts only take on meaning
within the overall system. And again within this system is embedded a
particular view of social behavior – the aim of clinical budgeting being to
change the behavior of clinicians and to a lesser extent managers” (Pinch,
1987a, 17).
    Here again this example of a social technology intersects an important
point in Foucault’s thinking, as he argued in an early work (Foucault
1973 [1963]) that clinical medicine had reconstituted the subject of med-
ical practice with the elevation of the medical case as the primary focus of
treatment. To be sure, Foucault’s conception of power evolved consider-
ably after this early work as a result of the self-criticism to which he sub-
jected himself in the mid-1970s. As I have already noted, his expanded
analysis of power and governing relations acknowledges non-juridical re-
lations that involve more than simple domination. In its pastoral modali-
ty, Foucault argues, the modern state has assumed responsibilities for the
welfare of its subjects that were akin to those assumed by pastoral Chris-
tianity for its parishioners. Here in the example of the British clinical
budgeting system we have a social and governmental technology that
clearly adopts the case as the determinant of medical treatment, a trend
that is lamented by Tierney (2004), who argues that a recent movement to
restore “the voice of the patient” to medical practice involves both the
juridical power of the physician to judge the patient’s responsibility for
her own health and the pastoral power that individualizes a patient’s spe-
cific history and health status.
    In the clinical budgeting system example, the efforts on the part of the
British NHS to identify cost-effective treatments of medical cases reori-
ented the pastoral responsibility of the state while reconstituting the indi-
vidual patient as but one component of a system that would make costs
easier to manage. In a study of nursing practice in the Australian health
system that references Foucault, we find a similar reconstitution, as the
hospital bed becomes less a place of caring than a commodity to be allo-
cated:
        Though current nursing textbooks affirm the bed as a materialised lo-
    cation for nursing practice, its temporo-spatial representation now forms
    part of patient-management practices […]. Beds are a discursively con-
    tested location for nurses. Like patient medical records and the white-
    boards used to map patient bed allocations, hospital beds are increasingly
    understood to have become rule bound as spaces for the administration or
    disciplining of time. (Heartfield 2005, 23)
48                                                               Tecnoscienza - 6 (1)

    This shift of focus to the case has in turn redefined the terms by which
a successful disposition of a case is measured. Now length of stay, as indi-
cated by bed turnover and re-allocation via whiteboards, becomes the key
performance measure:

         As an intellectual technology, the whiteboard transforms the bed into
     a resource-space in which nurses enact managerialist administrative re-
     sponsibilities to ensure smooth, stable, predictable and preferably brief
     patient hospital stays (Heartfield 2005, 25).

    This process through which the bed is commoditized in an economy
of resource allocation, which as we can see involves a range of mundane
technologies such as medical records and whiteboards, parallels the in-
tended effects of a reform such as clinical budgeting on the British NHS
and exemplifies the results of the governmentalization of medicine.
    The clinical budgeting system deployed by the British NHS can be
seen as part of a general trend towards the replacement of individual pa-
tient care in which practitioners treat individual subjects as it were at
ground level with a system in which administrators determine regimes of
care based on population-level data on risk factors, and the administra-
tors whom the reforms were meant to turn into budget-minded efficiency
experts would through their efforts reconstitute the individual patient as
an incidental statistical adjunct to the case. Here the social technology
was meant to operate by turning medical professionals into experts on
risk and cost-benefit analysis.
    Applying this model of a social technology to the NIS conceptual ap-
proach, it is not difficult to identify in both the clinical budgeting system
and the NIS conceptual approach the elements of a technology, with the
former falling into the category of a social technology in virtue of its pur-
pose, which was to alter the behavior of a subpopulation of actors within
the British NHS. To see this, however, it is first necessary to distinguish
two interrelated facets of the NIS conceptual approach. On the one hand,
a national innovation system considered as an entity in itself is a system of
objects and institutional/personal relations that operates within the geo-
graphic boundaries of a particular nation. A nation’s innovation system
thus comprises material and human elements such as firms, universities,
research organizations, public and private laboratories, government agen-
cies and facilities, and so on. On the other hand, the NIS conceptual ap-
proach aids in the understanding of innovation, technological change,
competitiveness, and growth in the framework of theoretical or economic
analysis. As an analytical tool, the NIS conceptual approach – as we have
noted – is utilized not merely descriptively as a kind of inventory of mate-
rial and human resources, but also prescriptively, with the express pur-
pose of producing change in the way scholars and policymakers under-
stand an economy’s functioning, how innovations can be promoted (or
inhibited), and how contributions to economic growth can be made
Sharif                                                                     49
through the pursuit of innovative activity. In other words, as a policy tool
it engenders changes in behavior in a small but influential population.
Thus its role vis-à-vis a national innovation system is similar to the role of
clinical budgeting vis-à-vis the British NHS.
     This prescriptive dimension seems clearly to exemplify Foucault’s cen-
tral assertion that knowledge when harnessed in a social technology al-
ways involves power relations or governmentality. The informational ele-
ments of a social technology serve to empower experts (prison wardens,
hospital administrators, influential academics specializing in innovation
studies) to apply the technology to target populations (prisoners, medical
care providers, economic policymakers) with the intention of building
new efficiencies or orderliness into the institutions in which they operate.
     Perhaps it would strengthen the intuitive appeal of the concept of a
social technology and its application to the NIS conceptual approach to
remember that, as I have described it, the components of both an actual
national innovation system and of the process of analyzing such a system
under the NIS conceptual approach include material elements. Whereas
the material elements of the former include a set of institutions and or-
ganizations (for example, firms, research labs, government facilities, uni-
versity facilities, and so on operating within a framework of laws, regula-
tions, practices, and channels of communication), the latter – the NIS ap-
proach when deployed as a policy tool – also includes material elements
such as papers, policy documents, and the computers used in the process
of formulating, issuing, and implementing policy recommendations as
well as the people associated with policymaking. Thus, while a national
innovation system comprises among other things the material elements of
a comprehensive multisectoral system, ultimately the purpose of the NIS
conceptual approach (with its own material components) is to provide an
analytical framework within which to understand those elements – mate-
rial, information-related, and social – so as to change the behavior of tar-
geted actors, institutions, and organizations primarily in a way that alters
the nature and strength of their linkages through policy intervention.
     Once we conceive of the NIS conceptual approach as a social tech-
nology, we can apply other S&TS theories, models, and tools to it in new
ways as we analyze its advantages and disadvantages. For example, one
such promising S&TS approach applicable to the study of an NIS is
called the Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) model, with which
it is possible to deconstruct the NIS social technology and examine the
extent to which it has stabilized (Pinch and Bijker 1984, Bijker, Hughes,
and Pinch 1987). It should be possible, using the concept of a social
technology, to expand the domain of NIS analysis within S&TS yet fur-
ther, perhaps in reference to other widely applied terms such as the “Tri-
ple Helix”, the “Knowledge-based economy”, and so forth. Surely there
are, as well, other social technologies that would interest scholars in social
studies of science and S&TS, and part of my purpose here is to remind
scholars of this possibility.
50                                                                  Tecnoscienza - 6 (1)

    I close my argument that the NIS conceptual approach constitutes a
social technology with an observation apropos of Pinch’s original work
on technologies. The research agenda pursued by scholars interested in
technology studies has included analysis of the conditions under which
technologies are tested. Pinch (1987b) examined, for example, the inves-
tigation of the failure of O-rings in NASA’s space shuttle Columbia in
1986, concluding that interpretations of tests of the O-rings on the part of
engineers and NASA management were at odds. Some of the engineers,
based on their interpretation of O-ring test results, had wanted to alter
the criteria for launch pertaining to air temperature by applying limits to
individual parts of the space shuttle rather than to the ship as a whole.
Management overruled, with tragic consequences, fearing long delays in
the flight schedule as a result. As Pinch describes it:

         It seems that two different interpretations of the [Launch Commit
     Criteria] were available. This, of course, is a point familiar within the so-
     ciology of science – rules have to be interpreted and it is this which allows
     interpretive flexibility to enter […]. Whether or not the Space Shuttle was
     in a working condition such that it could be launched depended on which
     of these two interpretations won out (Pinch 1987b, 12).

     Pinch argues that “negotiations over the “workability” of a piece of
technology do occur and this is a fruitful location for what he calls in that
work the new sociology of technology. It is also another illustration of
governmentality, insofar as every aspect of a social technology may be ne-
gotiated and such negotiations inevitably involve power relations and the
defense of boundaries. Until disaster struck, NASA accepted a degree of
risk that accommodated its need for launch and mission efficiency and
defined what constituted a successful testing outcome accordingly.
     In reference to the clinical budgeting case that I have mentioned here,
Pinch and his colleagues observed that, even though few if any of the de-
sired outcomes of the trial were realized, higher-level policymakers essen-
tially ignored these outcomes because they were under budgetary pres-
sure and they believed that clinical budgeting made sense “in principle.”
     The point here is that the testing of a social technology, like scientific
testing and the testing of a machine technology, involves both interpreta-
tion of results and persuasive discourse. By the time a social technology
reaches the stage of being tested in practice, there is often a social impera-
tive behind it (Miettinen 2002, Sharif 2010; I show in the next section
that government officials in Hong Kong felt such a social imperative
when they adapted the NIS conceptual approach to their purposes, but it
had less to do with shaping economic policy than with legitimizing their
role as policymakers). Moreover, the testing environment of a technology
is highly public, which distinguishes it from the testing of scientific hy-
potheses within the scientific community. Even a machine technology
(such as an O-ring) is tested in a much more public arena than a typical
Sharif                                                                              51
hypothesis in the physical sciences, but the testing environment of a social
technology is by definition in the public arena. Yet the difference be-
tween testing a machine and a social technology is one of degree only:
         This difference in the testing of machine and social technologies is on-
    ly a matter of degree and not one of principle. Indeed the whole weight of
    my argument is that for analytical purposes the underlying rhetorical and
    persuasive processes in science, in machine and material technologies, and
    in social technologies, should all be treated in the same way. (Pinch 1987a,
    13)

    Thus the British authorities in the NHS largely dismissed the negative
results of their trials of clinical budgeting. They argued, first, that the test-
ing environment was irremediably compromised by its being, in effect,
the real world of clinical medicine, in which it was virtually impossible to
control for a host of variables that might affect the results. Second, it was
argued that because it was so difficult to change the culture of medical
care within the testing environment, only a deracinated version of clinical
budgeting was tested. Most social technologies, designed to alter human
behavior in the service of some policy imperative, will be similarly diffi-
cult to test.
    In the case of the NIS conceptual approach, we have already seen that
the original research program out of which the conceptual approach
emerged to be made into a social technology has not determined the form
in which the conceptual approach has been adopted by the policymaking
community. In some cases policymakers have referenced the NIS concep-
tual approach without fully appreciating the multidirectional complexity
of the model. In Hong Kong, for example (which I discuss at greater
length below), the NIS conceptual approach has served primarily a rhe-
torical purpose independently of the intent of those who formulated and
developed it in academic work (Sharif 2010). Since the NIS conceptual
approach has come into the policy arena with the express purpose of
changing the behavior of key actors so as to encourage innovations that
drive economic growth and development, the ultimate test of an NIS that
reflects the conceptual approach is whether or not the economy adopting
it experiences new or accelerated growth and development as a result.
Clearly the public nature of the “testing” environment will make it diffi-
cult to control for a host of factors as well as to maintain the original con-
tent of the NIS conceptual approach itself. In such an environment, every
political faction is likely to interpret the economic outcomes of innova-
tion-related investment differently. Such is the effect of governmentaliz-
ing innovation.
    Considering the complexity of a national innovation system, there
would seem to be many processes and social transactions to which schol-
ars in both social studies of science and S&TS might apply their analytical
tools in order to understand the full range of issues that affect the inven-
tion and implementation of this social technology.
52                                                          Tecnoscienza - 6 (1)


4. The NIS Conceptual Approach at Work as a Social
Technology
     Analyzing the NIS conceptual approach as a social technology com-
mits me to the claim that, in the hands of academic experts and govern-
ment policymakers, the framing of the relationship between innovation
and economic growth and development through the concept of an NIS
has influenced both the policymakers who are in a position to apply it to
their work and the actors in an NIS who carry out economic activities. In
this section I discuss evidence of this influence that I have discovered in
past research, but I also note that several countries have adopted some
form of the NIS conceptual approach in their policymaking agencies, in-
cluding Sweden, through its “Systems of Innovation Authority” (known
as VINNOVA); Finland, through its National Technology Agency of Fin-
land (2002); the Government of Canada (2002); the Government of New
Zealand (2002); the UK Office of Science and Technology (2002); the
Government of the People’s Republic of China (International Develop-
ment Research Center, 1997); and Hong Kong, through the Innovation
and Technology Commission in the Hong Kong Special Administrative
Region Government (2004). In what follows I discuss in greater detail the
case with which I am most familiar, that of Hong Kong, where ultimately
the NIS approach seems to have played a different role from that which
characterizes its application by the other aforementioned governments.
     The case I discuss involves the use of the NIS approach by Hong
Kong policymakers primarily for rhetorical purposes, but as I have noted
I am not the first to study the rhetoric involved in the NIS conceptual ap-
proach. For example, Miettinen (2002) focuses on the political rhetoric
involved in applying the concept of an innovation system to national eco-
nomic policy. Albert and Laberge (2007) conducted an ethnographic
study of how international organizations (in particular, the OECD) and
regional public administrations (in their case, that of the province of
Quebec, Canada) apply legitimation and dissemination processes, eluci-
dating the socio-cultural processes that have led government officials to
adopt the innovation systems approach in policymaking.
     As I have noted, the brief account of the use of the NIS approach by
policymakers in Hong Kong I now offer summarizes a study I have pub-
lished elsewhere (Sharif, 2010). In the context of the present study the
outcome may well seem ironic, because my research demonstrated that
Hong Kong policymakers indeed used the NIS conceptual approach as a
social technology to support its policymaking posture, but not as it was
intended or expected by the scholarly experts who developed it (see Sha-
rif, 2006, for an account of the development of the NIS conceptual ap-
proach) or as it was utilized by the OECD as a guide for policymakers.
     Following the Asian financial crisis of 1997, Hong Kong’s government
struggled to reorient its economic policy so as to reinvigorate economic
Sharif                                                                           53
growth by entering the emerging global knowledge economy. Hong Kong
sought to plot a new economic policy by emphasizing technology and in-
novation, producing a series of policy briefs, forming commissions, and
funding development institutions all aimed at generating economic
growth through innovation and new technology. This new policy direc-
tion played out against a history of weak research and development
(R&D) and innovation activity in Hong Kong’s industrial sectors, com-
prising mostly small-to-medium-size enterprises that were reluctant to
commit resources to risky endeavors such as new product development.
They profited mostly from low-cost manufacturing operations and bor-
rowed innovations.
    Evidence of the Hong Kong government’s awareness of the NIS con-
ceptual approach took explicit form in a 2004 report issued by the Inno-
vation and Technology Commission, titled New Strategy of Innovation
and Technology Development (HKSAR 2004). To the best of my
knowledge the term “innovation system” was used for the first time in an
official Hong Kong document in this report, or consultation paper, and it
was accompanied by a diagram of Hong Kong’s innovation system (fig. 1).




                                                                                      	
  

    Figure 1 – Diagram of Hong Kong’s innovation system from 2004 Innovation
    and Technology Commission consultation paper, under caption “Figure 3: In-
    novation under the New Strategy” (source: Sharif, 2006, from HKSAR, 2004,
    p. 18).
54                                                               Tecnoscienza - 6 (1)

   This diagram appeared in chapter three of the report, “New Strategy
of Innovation and Technology Development”, accompanied by the fol-
lowing brief paragraph, which appeared under the heading “Innovation
System”:
         Under the new strategic framework, it is hoped that various elements
     of the innovation and technology program could work closely together to
     generate greater impact along the R&D value chain from basic research to
     commercialization and production. [The] figure below illustrates the in-
     novation system […] under the new strategy (HKSAR 2004, 17).

    That this represents the entirety of any reference to Hong Kong’s NIS
in the paper informed my conclusion that in the government’s hands the
NIS conceptual approach was indeed a governmental and social technol-
ogy.




     Figure 2 – OECD representation of a NIS (source: Sharif, 2006, from OECD,
     1999, p. 23).
Sharif                                                                            55
    Yet another critical component of my research, which involved inter-
viewing relevant figures in and out of the Hong Kong government who
were involved in designing and carrying out its technology and economic
development policies, led me to the conclusion that its purpose was pri-
marily rhetorical. Based on these interviews I learned that Hong Kong
policymakers were interested primarily in leveraging the prestige of the
OECD to enhance the credibility of the government in its efforts to pro-
mote technology and innovation, not in following the model of the NIS
approach that its academic progenitors or its advocates at the OECD
would have recommended. Figure 2, which is a diagram of an NIS pub-
lished by the OECD, makes this clear.
    The OECD diagram depicts an NIS holistically as a nonlinear process
involving actors from multiple sectors in complex interrelationships in-
volving knowledge transfer and feedback. By contrast, Hong Kong’s dia-
gram of its own NIS represents a primarily linear process that proceeds
from inputs at the top of the diagram to outputs at the bottom. I have
shown (Sharif 2006) that the NIS conceptual approach was developed in
the 1980s and 1990s precisely to supersede such an understanding of an
innovation system. To be sure, the Hong Kong diagram depicts some de-
gree of reflexivity in the system, but it depicts firms (represented by “In-
dustry” at the bottom of the figure) almost as passive recipients of innova-
tion outputs rather than as central actors in the heart of the process, as
depicted by the OECD.
    Thus although the designed purpose of the NIS conceptual approach
would have been to help policymakers direct, or persuade, a wide range
of actors to adopt practices that would strengthen links of the sort that
are depicted in figure 2, instead its purpose was to persuade the public at
large, which had lost confidence in the government, that it could be trust-
ed to develop effective economic policy. To this end Hong Kong policy-
makers made a show of following OECD guidelines, something that I was
told by one of my interviewees (this is a paraphrase of the remarks, not a
direct quote, as none of my interviewees agreed to be identified or rec-
orded):
        We do not just act blindly in arriving at our policy formulations. Our
    policies usually follow internationally accepted practices as found in the
    major publications, such as the OECD. When we see that the OECD and
    its member countries are adhering to certain guidelines, it helps – for in-
    ternational comparisons – that Hong Kong also follows the same interna-
    tional guidelines. Hong Kong is an international city! This helps when we
    want to compare ourselves to, say, Singapore or Taiwan or any of our oth-
    er neighbours […]. The OECD has published reports on the innovation
    systems model showing it is an important model (Sharif 2010, 425).

   Thus, while policymakers published their own version of Hong
Kong’s innovation system that misrepresents how those who developed
the NIS approach understood it, they also in the abovementioned consul-
56                                                          Tecnoscienza - 6 (1)

tation paper referenced the OECD to assure its readers that their plans
for promoting economic growth through technology and innovation con-
formed to international norms.
    This case illustrates the interpretive flexibility of the NIS conceptual
approach as a social technology, but apart from the circumstances of its
actual use by Hong Kong policymakers – who departed from its de-
signed-for use – we see here also that the NIS approach features the sig-
nature elements of a governmental technology. As it migrated from aca-
demic studies to a non-governmental development organization to a gov-
ernment agency, it involved a heterogeneous “assemblage” (Rose 1993) of
human, material, and abstract components – or actors – including the di-
agrams reproduced in figures 1 and 2, which illustrate the rhetorical
component of the NIS approach.


5. Conclusions
    In arguing that the NIS conceptual approach is a social technology, I
have attempted to revive a largely forgotten category of analysis. This
should benefit, I believe, both those who are interested in innovation as a
driver of growth and development and scholars in the sociology of tech-
nology and S&TS. The former, an interdisciplinary and multisectoral
community of scholars, engineers, corporate strategists, and policymakers
in government and the public sector, may be able to pursue their com-
mon interests more effectively with a shared understanding of the NIS
conceptual approach as a social technology. All actors interested in lever-
aging innovation to drive growth and development would profit from a
better understanding of the ways in which their narrow interests might
lead to interpretative conflict as they work together to allocate resources
and implement strategies towards their ultimate goal. Similarly, scholars
in sociology of technology and S&TS should achieve new levels of under-
standing by applying the concept of a social technology to a wide range of
social phenomena and public policy initiatives.
    By framing the governmentalization of the NIS approach partly in
Foucauldian terms, I hope to have provided a familiar theoretical context
within which to understand social technologies. These technologies fall
into the broader class of governmental technologies, serving in this case
to empower or reward individual and institutional behavior in a way that
serves the state’s economic purpose of fuelling growth. As actors in aca-
demia, industry, and government are reconstituted as actors in a national
innovation system, as their roles are redefined and the terms over which
they negotiate resource allocation and successful outputs evolve, scholars
may benefit by situating these developments within a Foucauldian
framework, in which they are seen as part of a wider genealogical fabric
that weaves together individualizing and totalizing technologies in the
state’s ongoing historical development.
Sharif                                                                         57
    Whether or not one accepts the broad sweep of Foucault’s analysis of
the genealogy of the state, one need not view my analysis of the NIS con-
ceptual approach as a social technology as suggesting an ominous exten-
sion of state power into the economic sphere. In its mature form Fou-
cault’s analytics of power, as we have noted, acknowledges beneficial out-
comes of power relationships and the emergence of positive values in
spite of the inherent dangers represented by totalizing technologies. By
emphasizing the two-dimensional character of the NIS conceptual ap-
proach – consisting of both descriptive and prescriptive phases – I argue
that it enables a new perspective on the process of innovation. This new
perspective makes it possible to achieve a more complex understanding
of a national innovation system with a multidirectional model that more
clearly demarcates and delineates the various components and actors in
an NIS, as knowledge flows and innovative developments travel back and
forth along channels of communication and collaboration involving the
higher education, industrial, and public sectors. By adding to this analysis
the classification of the NIS conceptual approach as a social technology, I
have made it possible to begin a new phase in innovation studies in which
a better informed innovation community might more effectively utilize
the resources available in order to modify the behavior of those actors
and agencies who are best able to affect the outcomes of the innovation
process.
    More broadly, I have not only brought a specific area of study into the
social studies of science arena, but I have, I hope, provided a basis upon
which to add (or restore) the social technology construct to the conceptu-
al toolkit of the sociologist of science and S&TS scholar. With this tool in
hand, such scholars can open up new areas of study across a wide range
of subject areas involving the public interest and sociological analysis. It
may also provide a means by which to narrow the frequently wide gap be-
tween scholarly knowledge and policymaking reality as scholars, industri-
alists, and government agents pursue disparate interests for the sake of
the common good.



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