Paper short abstract:

The presentation will outline analytic approaches that can serve as guidance for future studies of innovation as a normative domain. I hope that this will contribute to the growing field by offering inspiration and structure to future STS research on innovation.

Paper long abstract:

Recent regional and national innovation policies indicate a revitalized role for the state and other central social institutions. However, while innovation theories call for ‘more state’, they continue to promote an apolitical and limited meaning of statehood with regards to innovation, where the principal focus is on the state as an economic entity. In this presentation I will use recent public events to distill a new meaning of innovation in relation to the state, regions and cultural identities. While innovation theory largely transpires from economic reason, where innovation is seen a rational expression of ‘good’ economic progress, I will take different position in which innovation is construed as a normative domain, where ideas and ideals of the ‘good’ plays out. With the use of instructive cases, I will outline some different analytic strategies for how to study innovation from a critical STS stance. The first analytic approach will draw out how innovation practices articulates the implicit morality of the ‘good’; the second approach analyzes the implicit social order understood to best cater to this end; the third approach concerns how innovation affects the social and political cohesion necessary for societies to operate as a polity.