Engaged Program or Prosperity Gospel?: “Innovation” and the Evolution of STS

• In Event: Is STS an Innovation Discipline? Bridging Critique and Practice

Abstract

This talk maps how STS has engaged with “innovation” from the field’s beginnings to the present. My purpose is to insist that a critical stance toward innovation recognize its formative role in the very foundations of what STS is. At the same time, I hope to aid those who productively engage the contested idea of innovation as an analytical tool, object of inquiry, or normative posture. STS has a long-told origin story of an epistemological “high church” and an activist “low church.” In his influential essay “STS and an Engaged Program,” Sergio Sismondo revised this story by describing a growing hybrid of praxis-driven STS work. I describe how this praxis orientation has a longer history, how it relates to studies of innovation, and how it has long been fraught. I explore what role formal innovation studies (e.g. Gabriel Tarde or William Ogburn) played in the thought and organization of early STS units in Europe and the United States. I question how STS scholars from the 1970s onward approached innovation as a topic of critical inquiry--whether as a part of the military-industrial complex to be critiqued, a central feature of scientific discovery to understand, or as a normative goal of STS scholarship. I investigate the relationship between theories of innovation and constructivist theories of socio-technical change. I explore the political, financial, and personal entanglements of STS with pro-innovation institutions, projects, and ideologies. Finally, I ask how those who pursue this path today navigate such entanglements.

Author

• Matthew Wisnioski, Virginia Tech