Observing Dark Innovation: After Neoliberal Tools and Techniques

✍ Scribed by Ryan T. MacNeil

• Publisher: Bristol University Press
• Year: 2024
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 193
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Available open access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND licence. Why does scholarship on innovation fixate on certain classes of technology? Could our research tools and techniques be concealing as much as they reveal? Ryan T. MacNeil shows how the common instrumentalities of innovation research carry neoliberal market biases. He calls for critical scholars to examine how we observe and understand innovation, offering ways forward to deconstruct and reform disciplinary conventions. This book makes a valuable contribution to critical management and science and technology studies by shedding light on the ‘dark matter’ of innovation. This will be an important resource for scholars and practitioners interested in disruptive ideas about innovation.

✦ Table of Contents

Front Cover
Observing Dark Innovation: After Neoliberal Tools and Techniques
Copyright information
Table of Contents
List of Figures and Tables
Acknowledgements
1 Dark Innovation
The challenge
Problematization
Instrumentalities
Overview of methods and chapters
2 Extant Theory
Instrumental innovation models
‘Linear’ developments
‘Pushmi-pullyu’ devices
‘Chain-linked’ processes
Changing lenses
Focusing on ‘systems’
Neoliberal instruments
Models as instruments
Instrumental neoliberalism
Instrumentality innovation
3 Historiographic Context
History?
Rhetorical history
History as background
ANTi-History
Three historical accounts
Defined by the Sea
‘One of the three biggest’
‘Internationally important’
Context?
Interessement
Elision
Cutting science
Practising context
4 Narrative Politics
Narrative devices
Narrative neoliberalization
Restorying analysis
My narrative approach
Three short stories
Naval research in Halifax, 1940–70
Dalhousie University’s Department of Oceanography, 1949–74
The Bedford Institute of Oceanography, 1962–92
Narrative implications
Characterization
Public agents
Private quartermasters
Plot
5 Taxonomic Classification
The taxonomic puzzle
Pavitt’s taxonomy
Government as wastebasket taxon
The dragons of mare incognitum
Industrial parataxonomy
The organism metaphor
Organizations as organisms
‘Inherited’ characteristics
Innovative agency
Functional (dis)unity
Hybridity
Symbiosis
Away from biological metaphors
Moving beyond speciation
Towards other classification tools
6 Surveying Topologies
Regional networks
Innovation system boundaries
Testing regional boundaries
Mapping the system
Topological alternatives
Regions
Networks
Fluids
Fire
Other topological metaphors
7 Sisyphean Statistics
Descriptive statistics
Results
Significance?
Locus of innovation
Results
Linearity?
Chain links
Results
Triviality?
System dynamics
Results
Attack!
Significant but meaningless
8 After Observation
Entanglements
Instrumentalities
Absences
Tools
Notes
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
References
Index