Problematizing 'Innovation' as a Critical Project

Suchman, Lucy; Bishop, Libby

doi:10.1080/713698477

Cited by 102 publications

(53 citation statements)

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“…That is why, as noted by Jackson, foregrounding the importance of care, maintenance and repair to the very material sustaining of the world is a step in challenging teleological, progressive, 'shiny', ideals of innovation. Care time's irreducibility to productive aims could contribute to reveal the overestimated value of the productionist imaginary in innovation (Suchman & Bishop, 2000). Thinking from the significance of caring relations suggests that no output, no growth in the future, and one could say, no innovation or emergence of newness is possible without a commitment to the everyday maintenance and repair that supports the work of care (Jackson, 2014) and the continuity of life that is the domain of a present thickened by care.…”

Section: Making Time For Soil Timementioning

confidence: 99%

Making time for soil: Technoscientific futurity and the pace of care

2015

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The dominant drive for understanding soil has been to pace its fertility with human demand. But today warnings about soil's exhaustion and endangered ecology raise concerns that they have been mistreated throughout history. These worries are marked by fears of gloomy environmental futures, prompting us, and specially scientists and soil practitioners to urgently develop better ways of taking care of soils. Yet the pace required by ecological soil care could be at odds with the predominant temporal orientation of technoscientific intervention: driven by an inherently progressivist, productionist and restless mode of futurity. Through a conceptual and historical approach to the soil sciences and other domains of soil knowledge the paper looks for soil ontologies and approaches to human-soil relations that are obscured by this predominant timescape. Discussions about the future of the soil sciences already expose tensions between 'progress as usual' -by intensifying productivity -and the need to protect the pace of soil renewal. However it is in the interrogation of the intimate relation of soil science with productionism, and in the emergence of soil ecology conceptions that emphasise soil as a living community rather than a receptacle for crops, that we could see emerging alternative soil ontologies and human-soil relations paced by a temporality of care. The 'foodweb' model of soil ecology in particular has become a figure of alternative human-soil relations for environmental activists and practitioners, promoting soil care practices that intensify the involvement of practitioners with soil's temporality. Reading these ways of relating to soil ways of making time for 'care time', helps to reveal a diversity of more-than-human interdependent temporalities, disrupting the anthropocentric appeal of predominant timescales of technoscientific futurity and their reductive notion of innovation.

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Section: Making Time For Soil Timementioning

confidence: 99%

Making time for soil: Technoscientific futurity and the pace of care

2015

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“…In the field of technological design, the work of adjusting and assuming responsibility has been called 'artful integrations' (Suchman and Bishop, 2000), understood as a mode of connecting diverse actors, interests, practices and ways of work, and reorganising them to negotiate a common interest mediated through technology. It is a process of situating technology in an attempt to negotiate 'one's own technology' across practices in which it is used or planned to be used (Suchman and Bishop, 2000: 9).…”

Section: Infrastructuring Through Repairmentioning

confidence: 99%

Repairing and developing software infrastructures: The case of Morevna Project in Russia

Velkova

2017

New Media & Society

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This article discusses how alternative software infrastructures can emerge out of frictions, failure, and repair in the attempts of media creators to evade piracy. Using a case from the geographical fringes of Russia called Morevna Project, and theories of infrastructures and repair, the article suggests how repair can lead to the slow, mundane and fragile formation of what I refer to as ‘situated’ digital infrastructures for cultural production. While pirate-based media production can push creators to search for and develop alternative infrastructures, the latter emerge as fragile frameworks that are constantly threatened from collapse and suspension. The continuous work of integrating diverse interests across local and online media-related contexts and practices becomes an essential stabilising force needed to perpetuate these infrastructures and prevents them from falling back into oblivion.

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“…The relevant Other has become the user or, more recently, the consumer, whose needs and desires (or "experiences") the anthropologis t is charged with capturing and bringing home to her commercial employer. (Suchman & Bishop, 2000). Our observations of new technology, work redesign, and organizational change initiatives indicate that "innovation " in these contexts requires analysis not simply as a process that takes place (or does not), but as a highly politicized construct taken up by speci c actors and made to work in particular ways.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…On the other hand, invisibilit y affords certain spaces for actions that, rather than being celebrated once the light is shone on them, may rather be threatened with closure. So, for example, in the organizations with which I am familiar large, highly visible change agendas may actually create incentives to keep local innovation s hidden (see Suchman & Bishop, 2000). Insofar as the latter are dependent on particular social relations and ways of working, their appropriation into global initiatives runs the risk of destroying the very conditions that make the local innovation s possible.…”

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confidence: 99%