Paper short abstract:

This paper explores different modalities through which culture comes to matter for innovation and policy. This allows us to cast the spotlight on the co-stabilization between innovation and culture, the continuities within supposedly disruptive proposals, and patterns of control and exclusion.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, we explore what can be gained by rethinking innovation and innovation policy more seriously through the lens of culture (see also Pfotenhauer et al. 2023). We explore three modalities in which culture comes to matter in the context of innovation (policy): First, innovation initiatives need to tap into cultural resources in order to be legible and acceptable. Second, cultural actors and formations need to come to terms with innovation to demonstrate their continued relevance and actively manage novelty and change. Third, innovation imperatives increasingly invade our popular understanding of (creative) culture, with tensions ensuing between those forms of creativity that can be valorized in entrepreneurial regimes and those that cannot. In our paper, we use various case studies from the city of Munich to illustrate each of these three points. We draw on Steve Hilgartner’s (2015, 2017) work on “vanguard visions” and “knowledge control regimes” as well as sensitivities from feminist STS to argue that innovation should not primarily be understood as a naturalized imperative of technological change and disruption, but as a material-discursive space that serves to capture and control the future – often by extending incumbent socio-economic structures from the past. What is more, the innovation discourse allows key actors to reconfigure key areas of social life – such as desirable forms of cultural expression or debates about the identity of a region – along exclusive criteria of commercial viability and fit with hegemonial norms.