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Paper short abstract

What makes a constraint generative rather than merely domesticated? Drawing on two Responsible Innovation case studies and a narrative approach, this paper develops an initial theorization of hard and soft constraints and the narrative work they enable or foreclose.

Paper long abstract

What makes a constraint generative rather than merely domesticated? This paper approaches this question through two empirical vignettes drawn from prior Responsible Innovation case studies. In an Ethics-by-Design (EbD) collaboration, a dominant 'ethics toolbox' narrative framed ethical considerations as ready-made tools to be applied, fabricating the illusion of hard constraints while foreclosing more transformative engagements. In a chemistry lab, the phrase "there is no business case for this" operated as a seemingly hard constraint, closing off entire research directions while presenting an economic limit as a quasi-factual given.

These vignettes raise a broader theoretical question: is every constraint equally malleable? This paper proposes to think through the continuity and difference between soft constraints, such as EbD and SSbD frameworks that offer language and framing, harder yet constructed constraints, such as "there is no business case for this", and material constraints, such as planetary boundaries. What lends the latter a resistance that softer constraints seem to lack? And does that resistance make them more generative?

Yet STS has long taught us that hardness is not given but constructed and implemented. What then makes a constraint hard in practice, and what kinds of narrative work does that hardness enable or foreclose? Building on ongoing empirical and theoretical work on narrative infrastructure, this paper develops an initial theorization of how constraints of different registers enter the laboratory, contributing to STS debates on how limits might be inhabited as conditions of possibility rather than mere obstacles.