Paper short abstract:

Based on ethnographic data collected from a makerspace affiliated with a University Entrepreneurship Center, we show how established organizations translate ‘making’ into their organizational reality.

Paper long abstract:

The Maker Movement has generated worldwide attention due to its claims of drastically democratizing innovation. Yet, critical voices within the maker culture itself as well as in STS increasingly point to the growing danger of an instrumentalization of their 'countercultural' promises. At the core of this debate stands the argument of bottom-up approaches becoming increasingly integrated into deeply rooted top-down structures.

We will diverge from such views by arguing that this stance can only be upheld because there is, as yet, little knowledge about the ways of how organizations translate 'making' into their organizational reality. Based on ethnographic data collected from a makerspace affiliated with a University Entrepreneurship Center, our talk will address this question by analyzing the transition towards maker culture in the context of engineering in higher education and business. By this, it presents the result of qualitative research conducted at the makerspace as well as ethnographic work on a 14-days hackathon for students of engineering and business.

Our thesis is that 'the' maker culture is neither substantially 'democratic' nor immediately susceptible to instrumentalization. Instead, an institutionalization of 'making' is only possible through the process of (re-)constructing and (re-)performing it. Organizations that aim to incorporate 'making' have to re-organize and re-specify the identities of their members, knowledge-practices and spaces accordingly. At the same time, the identity of 'making' itself gets subtly transformed by the in(ter)ventions of multiple actors within the organizations that try to perform it. Our paper will discuss this reciprocal process of translations.