Beyond Innovation: Technology, Institution, and Change as Categories for Social Analysis by Thomas Kaiserfeld (review)

In recent years, a few students of technology have begun to question the rhetoric of “innovation studies.” The phrase comes from scholars of European origin, who have worked to develop a disciplinary discourse related to technological innovation under that rubric. According to scholars in this field, innovation studies originated at the Science Policy Research Unit in Brighton, England, and the forefather of such studies is the economist Joseph Schumpeter. To its practitioners, the notion of a National System of Innovation provides the best framework for the study of technological innovation.

Beyond Innovation is one of several recent works contesting the field. The purpose of the book, writes Thomas Kaiserfeld, “is to demonstrate the multitude of ideas about technology, institution and change … beyond what is usually offered in innovation studies” (pp. 4–5). Kaiserfeld starts by discussing the concepts of technology, institution, and change. He then proceeds, chapter after chapter (no chapter has more than ten pages), to look at studies produced in STS whose analysis of technological change differs from that of “innovation studies.” While innovation studies places great importance on market forces and entrepreneurship, these STS-based studies bring many factors and analytic techniques into the study of technology, including evolutionary perspectives on technological change, social construction as an analytic mode, the study of technology in relation to performativity, the examination of agencies other than the entrepreneur, and more contextual studies of resistance to change.

Kaiserfeld’s book is certainly a long-due beginning of the criticism of this now-dominant framework for the study of technological innovation. As the author points out, innovation studies and studies of technological innovation or of technology are quite different things. Studies of technology in an STS mode have a far greater scope than innovation studies do. Innovation studies is firm-centric and policy-oriented. It has very little to say on the social aspects of technology or the history of technology. At the same time, one may wonder: to what extent is Beyond Innovation really criticizing “innovation studies?” I am far from convinced that Kaiserfeld succeeds in this enterprise. Many of the concepts he discusses, such as knowledge, system, and evolutionism, are central to the work of scholars in innovation studies. Kaiserfeld does point to STS literature that covers these same issues in different ways, hoping to make us notice other literature on technology, not just that on innovation studies.

All in all, Beyond Innovation is certainly a book that STS scholars will appreciate. Year after year, these scholars ask themselves, in workshops and conferences, how can one obtain more “relevance” and be heard more by policymakers. Kaiserfeld makes some links between the two fields (STS and innovation studies). But it remains to others, namely historians, to do the same between innovation studies and the history of technology.