10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17402
application/pdf
2038-3460
17402
1
en
Alessandro Mongili
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/
Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
Benoît Godin and Dominique Vinck (eds.), Critical Studies of Innovation. Alternative Approaches to the Pro-Innovation Bias, Edward Elgar, 2017
Text.Serial.Journal
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/
9
Book Reviews
2018-08-06
2023-06-25
2018-08-06
2023-08-28
130-134
TS
Alessandro Mongili
2018/08/06
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17402
130
Università di Padova
2038-3460
1
en
134
Benoît Godin and Dominique Vinck (eds.), Critical Studies of Innovation. Alternative Approaches to the Pro-Innovation Bias, Edward Elgar, 2017
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/17402/16260
9
130                                                              Tecnoscienza – 9 (1)

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        tal Philosophy Review”, 41 (3), pp. 367-383.
Latour, B. (2004) Why has critique run out of steam? From matters of fact to
        matters of concern, in “Critical Inquiry”, 30, pp. 225-248.
Law, J. (2004) After Method, London, Routledge.
Law, J. and Urry, J. (2005) Enacting the Social, in “Economy and Society”, 33 (3),
        pp. 390-410.

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    Benoît Godin and Dominique Vinck (eds.)
Critical Studies of Innovation. Alternative Approaches to the Pro-
Innovation Bias, Cheltenham and Northampton, Edward Elgar, pp.
335

Alessandro Mongili Università di Padova

    Studying innovation, I found processes addressed as “innovations”,
which did not change anything, and processes, which had a relevant im-
pact, with many consequences, which were not considered “innovations”
(Mongili 2015). What do we make then of the concept of “innovation”
and its incongruities?
    The book Critical Studies of Innovation. Alternative Approaches to
the Pro-Innovation Bias (CSoI), edited by Benoît Godin and Dominique
Vinck, is an attempt to remediate the lack of analysis concerning such in-
congruities and, at the same time, it is a relevant effort to develop a new
research program, in order to include innovation within a broader
framework, avoiding an ideological use of this concept.
    The main issues tackled by CSoI are: (a) the reconceptualization of
the very notion of innovation, as it appears in scholarship and in public
discourse; (b) the analysis of the phenomena, which are excluded from
current concepts of innovation; (c) the development of a theoretical pro-
posal, NOvation, aimed at a more comprehensive approach to socio-
technical phenomena, both included and excluded from the current defi-
nition of innovation.
    The book is organized in four parts containing a total of seventeen
contributions, enclosed within Godin and Vink’s “Introduction” and
“Conclusion”.
    In the first part, inconsistencies of the usual ideas of innovation are
analyzed. For instance, Godin’s opening article reflects about the fact
that imitation has no place in current analyses of innovation; whereas Ti-
ago Brandão and Carolina Bagatolli’s one analyzes the double bind be-
tween technoscience and politics focusing on the innovation policies in
Book Review                                                              131
the “peripheral countries”, implemented throughout the use of “best
practices”, seen as a-contextual idea of technological – and organizational
– transfer from more developed milieus to peripheral ones. The contribu-
tion of Sebastian M. Pfotenhauer and Joakim Juhl is similarly focused on
the connection between politics and innovation, however looking at the
Global North and its state policies, like the National Innovation Systems.
    In the second part, what is left out by the “pro-innovation bias” is
taken into account by considering, for instance, “withdrawal” as pro-
posed by Frédérick Goulet and Vinck. They brilliantly argue the insuffi-
ciency of a way of framing innovation as something, which is added. In-
deed, innovation can also take place by subtracting. Through withdrawal
complex dynamics “entailing delegitimization, disqualification and disso-
ciation, all of which can lead to controversy” can occur because the ele-
ments to be “withdrawn are associated with entities or properties that are
criticized or devalued and portrayed as incurring risks” (p. 110).
    The third part is dedicated to reactions to innovations and especially
to resistance. Within the traditional innovation frameworks, resistance is
negatively labelled and it is often connected with backwardness, given
that innovation is considered an “always good” process. By introducing a
different point of view, for instance, Hernan Thomas, Lucas Becerra and
Santiago Garrido analyze innovation not so much as a neutral improve-
ment or stabilization of a socio-technical process, but as a matter of con-
flict, which involve technology itself. Karl-Heinz Leitner, in turn, in his
“‘No’ and ‘slow’ innovation strategies as a response to increased innova-
tion spread”, describes how many companies prefer not to innovate, de-
spite their public claims, thus finding a way to escape or to resist fashion-
able innovative push.
    The last part of the book focuses on how to tackle the inconsistencies
of the current idea of innovation. Among the various essays composing
this part, Vinck’s one shows how failure can be intended as a resource for
technological improvement, whereas Lee Vinsel’s one helps to widen the
view of other incongruities of the idea of innovation by noticing that
most of the technologies around us are relatively old, and most innova-
tions are small and incremental (pp. 261- 271), so that focusing on stand-
ards, forms of classification, taxonomies, law enforcement, and other reg-
ulatory activities results more relevant than innovation in order to under-
stand technology. Carolina Cañibano, Maria–Isabel Encinar and Félix
Fernando Muñoz’s essay, in turn, explores the concept of NOvation, un-
derstood “not just [as] an outcome of action or an equilibrium state but
as a dynamic socio-economic process which is different from innovation
as conventionally defined” (pp. 240-241). This concept is thus “con-
cerned with the theoretical treatment of the situation in which the ex post
outcome of an action is the absence of innovation, either because the
agent did not plan to innovate (…) or because it did not manage to
achieve its innovative goals” (p. 243).
132                                                          Tecnoscienza – 9 (1)

     Besides other essays by Gérarad Gaglio, Johan Söderberg, Karl-Erik
Sveiby, Martin W. Bauer, Beata Segercrantz, Karin Berglund and John
Langrish, the book is framed by Godin and Vinck’s “Introduction” and
“Conclusion”, where they emphasize the lack of accuracy of the concept
of innovation, as well as its ideological distortion. Godin and Vinck dis-
cuss also the “pro-innovation bias”, which is grounded in the shared be-
lief that “innovation is good, always good”, but also in a view of innova-
tion as a planned process, following a rational vision, or state- or compa-
nies-oriented strategies. They argue that this frame produces a neglect of
a huge amount of phenomena, relative to socio-technical processes. In
order to recover these phenomena they propose to give a crucial rele-
vance to imitation, incremental innovation and learning from failure, but
also to “that major part of the iceberg composed of user engagement, re-
shaping, adaptation and translation (not transfer) into situations that are
generally specific and unexpected” (p. 322, see also pp. 2-3). Therefore,
Godin and Vinck with CSoI clearly aim at developing a more compre-
hensive framework, in order to make room for other aspects of innova-
tion, as well as for aspects that are not less relevant than innovation for
understanding technology and for explaining the very innovation (p.
319), even if these aspects can appear mindless or sub-rational (p. 3).
They propose to include all these issues into the concept of NOvation,
thus developing a new field of inquiry, which gives the title to the book.
The main justification for this turn toward critical studies of innovation is
to free innovation, considered as a process, which does not necessarily
produce outcomes, from any ideological framing, thus having the possi-
bility to consider thoroughly conflicts, power and interests.
     Because of such approach, CSoI pays a great attention to what we
could called the “orphans” of the pro-innovation bias, like imitation,
standards, maintenance and repair, incrementaility, failure and resistance.
     As for imitation, Godin (pp. 17-31) shows that it has no place in inno-
vation studies, despite it is a pivotal mechanism of diffusion, which is not
necessarily passive, though often determined by uncertainty, as Brandão
and Bagattolli remind us (p. 58). Imitation allows introducing a practice
gradually in a new context, usually adapting, transforming or re-inventing
it, so that while imitating, people torque artifacts and systems. Therefore,
imitation as a process of diffusion is very relevant and complex: it pre-
supposes interactions where practices are crucial.
     Throughout the book, the idea that relevant technologies for our every-
day life are mostly old emerges, and that ascertainment makes maintenance
and repair, incremental innovation and standards very crucial research fields.
     Since technologies are old, many activities addressed toward them are
aimed at maintaining and repairing them, keeping them going, using, re-
using, re-cycling, “rather than creating anything truly novel” (p. 261).
Therefore, diffusion and “articulation work” are characterized also by
widespread and continuous practices of care (p. 262) – a dimension
Book Review                                                               133
called “broken World thinking” by Steven Jackson (2014). Through such
framework, our World is not viewed as ordered and stabilized thanks to
the works of institutions, but as an arena of on-going processes, in which
decay, vulnerability, material and organizational fragility of things and
systems reign, so that a logic of care or fixing is at the very core of every-
one’s socio-technical experience – see, for instance, the Tecnoscienza
Special Issue on “Maintenance and Repair” (Denis, Mongili and Pontille
2015).
    The fact that most of our technologies are old entails that most inno-
vations are not radical, but incremental, i.e. a change to certain part of an
unchanged technological system or device, as it occurs with the automo-
tive system (pp. 257-258), as already noticed by various scholars, among
which John Urry. “Incremental innovation” is actually strictly related to
maintenance and repair practices, because it can emerge in relation to
these activities, when new solutions may be invented (Graham and Thrift
2007, p. 5). On the other hand, “incremental innovation” is also connect-
ed to standards, since, as already noticed by Susan Leigh Star, the stabili-
zation that allows “incremental innovation” is made possible by standards
and regulatory activities (pp. 257-258; 267).
    As a result, failures have also their role in processes of innovation and
change, since they point out limits or mistakes to innovators or other rel-
evant actors. Therefore, failures can play a positive role in socio-technical
processes, as shown in the present book by Vinck.
    Finally, resistance to innovation is explored in detail by Bauer, by
Leitner and by Thomas, Becerra and Garrido, who identify three forms of
resistance present in socio-technical processes: an interpretive negotiation
regarding technologies, a conflict between different or oppositive technolo-
gies, and generation of “counter-hegemonic public policies” (p. 183).
    CSoI relates with many streams of researches about technologies go-
ing on today within and outside STS. It also offers a way to critically look
at STS and to integrate them. Indeed, for long time STS used to enact
their own “pro-innovation bias”, so that analysis have been quite unbal-
anced, marginalizing use and articulation work. In SCOT approaches, for
instance, the chain artefacts-problems-solutions-new artefact is seen in an
evolutionist-like way, as directed towards stabilization, through a conflict
of interpretations. As noted by Goulet and Vinck (p. 102), Actor-
Network Theory (ANT) translation model, conceptualizing innovation as
a “rearrangement of a variety of entities (actors, objects, institutions,
norms, meanings), which mutually redefine themselves and their rela-
tions”, allows to take into account complex processes, which can also in-
clude, for instance “the power dimension” (p. 188). Notwithstanding
that, approaches like ANT tend to overlook the role of politics, by privi-
leging local arrangements of actors. However, “the state continues to play
a central role in framing contemporary public policy, including innova-
tion policy” (p. 80), as noticed by Pfotenhauer and Juhl.
134                                                              Tecnoscienza – 9 (1)

    The opportunity of an integration of STS comes also from the fact
that CSoI pays attention to pre-STS social researches on innovation, and
above all to Everett Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovations (1962) – from which
also the expression “pro-innovation bias” is taken. Godin notices also
that Rogers’ idea of diffusion is not so different from Tarde’s imitation,
which is becoming today so relevant for STS.
    Through all its contributions and all the issues it tackles, CSoI is able
to promote a new research program, based on the idea of NOvation, ar-
ticulated in four levels, or avenues. The first aims at clarifying the very
concept of innovation; the second aims at developing a deeper inquiry on
the mechanics of different forms of resistance and of discourses produced
by or being part of these processes; the third aims at studying unintended
consequences of mainstream innovation, often disruptive or unexpected;
the fourth aims at fully considering the central role that regulations,
maintenance and repair and standardization play in innovation processes.
    I deem developing such research program very important. However, I
think it should, on the one hand, focus less on economic dynamics, which
risk to make the interesting contribution it can deliver unripe or not im-
mediately fruitful for other fields of analysis, even if terminologically rich.
On the other, more attention should be paid to design and making prac-
tices, which are closely related to use and to the care, involving aspects of
de-assembling, assembling and re-assembling, in order to produce newly
designed networks.

References
Denis J., A. Mongili and D. Pontille (2015) Maintenance and Repair in Science
   and Technology Studies, in “Tecnoscienza”, 6 (2), pp. 5-15.
Graham, S. and N. Thrift (2007) Out of order: Understanding maintenance and
   repair, in “Theory, Culture and Society”, 24 (3), pp. 1–25
Jackson S.J. (2014) Rethinking repair, in T. Gillespie, P.J. Boczkowski and K.A.
    Foot (eds.), Media technologies: Essays on communication, materiality, and
    society, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, pp. 221–240.
Mongili. A. (2015) Topologie postcoloniali. Innovazione e modernizzazione in
  Sardegna, Cagliari, Condaghes.
Rogers E.M. (1962) Diffusion of Innovations, New York, The Free Press.




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