The main research question is: How do such socially and culturally formed structures affect the emergence of new ideas, which deviate from established forms of doing and thinking and, in turn, have economic effects? The research contributes to theoretical discussions in economic sociology and network analysis by adding insights from a sociology of culture. At the same time, the project also contributes to current methodological debates on processual, dynamic analyses of particular social contexts, in which several actors interact simultaneously.

Data collection consists of a compilation of ethnographical notes, qualitative interviews, and documentary analyses. In a first step, I analyze the stories of attributed evaluations to obtain explanatory descriptions and to indicate certain patterns (e.g. consolidations, ruptures) over time. In a second step, I apply network and sequence analytic methods to some of my qualitatively gathered data, in order to formally model the obeserved structured culture.

A first empirical case examines the emergence of new ideas in a telecommunications company. This ethnographically based field study will investigate different phases of exploration up to the transfer of a new idea to the project management. Constellations of different actors within the company come together in these phases, consult with experts and users from outside the company, and go through different states of tension involved in the emergence of newness. The second empirical case is an historical one and traces the attribution of a particular artistic style from its origins to its consolidation: i.e. the Ulmer Moderne (“Ulm modernism”) as it developed across teachers and students at the Hochschule für Gestaltung (HfG Ulm, Ulm School of Design) from 1953 to 1968. The third empirical case looks at a social formation, which holds together by cognitive relations (observations) instead of direct interactions: the market for innovative breast cancer therapy research. This market does not yet have any marketable products in the usual sense; instead, on this market actors trade expectations about the future. Biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies, financial analysts as well as scientists provide economic narratives and evaluations in their press statements and reports about research strategies and thus collaboratively offer insights into their expectations. Initial findings on this social grouping show that the involved actors mobilize necessary financial resources through the narration of expectations about the future. With such collaboratively developed stories on successes, failures, and future expectations, the involved actors shape deviations from established ideas, which in turn allow for innovations and shape the market’s structure.

Contact:  Sophie Mützel
E-Mail: muetzel@wzb.eu

Three promising development paths have emerged in this field of innovation: the hydrogen combustion engine, the electric fuel-cell engine, and the electric battery-powered engine. We hypothesise that cultural configurations play a key role in the development and use of technical innovations. The “Valorization Alliances and Agencies” project aims to contribute to the identification and analysis of these cultural configurations and to specify problem-solving capacities that have received little or no attention up to now.

The three new types of engines represent radical innovations that will lead to fundamental changes in the modular area (engine) and/or at the systemic level (infrastructure). The project will study how such innovations arise or, indeed, fail to arise from various innovation-theory perspectives, and it will draw in particular on the culturalist perspective offered by Boris Groys. This permits the analysis of the three innovative engines as valorization processes, ie. the processes by which technical discoveries and inventions come to be considered valuable in society

Using a case study approach, this project examines how a valorization alliance succeeds in creating valorization agencies which facilitate, promote, and bundle technical innovation for a new type of engine. The case study is situated in a spatially and temporally defined empirical field, namely Germany in the period 1990-2010. Germany has many years of research and production tradition in all three technological fields, and is among the global leaders in research and development of alternative engine technologies, The period 1990-2010 has been chosen because it constitutes an exceptionally dynamic and contradictory development stage, in which the valorization processes and their effects feature particularly prominently.

Our initial studies indicate that valorization alliances play an important role in the valorization processes taking place in the development and establishment of alternative engines. A distinctive feature of the way in which these alliances work is the flexible combination of opening and closing processes .Furthermore, the alliances constantly create and institutionalize new valorization agencies through their varied networks, which perceptibly influence valorization processes in business, politics, science and the public realm. Our studies to date suggest that a distinctive feature of the different valorization agencies is a valorization management which has two complementary directions of effect: “revaluation-promoting“ and “devaluation-blocking”. “Revaluation-blocking” is aimed at promoting the technical innovation processes through the creation of suitable forms of coordination, financing, and popularization. “Devaluation-blocking” aims to limit the power of the opponents of innovation and their alliances.

The aim of this project is to formulate plausible and robust hypotheses on the emergence and functioning of valorization alliances and valorization agencies that can also be tested empirically in other technical and social innovation fields.

Contact:  Lutz Marz 
E-Mail: lutz@wzb.eu

Based on international comparison, the project analyzes the causes and consequences of these transformations in the production of political knowledge. It focuses on two countries which could not be more different in terms of policy advice and expertise. Germany is characterized by a relatively large range of experts and expert councils from publicly funded research institutions, political foundations, and partly non-profit, partly commercial research organizations. As opposed to this, the Dutch institution of "planning offices” enjoys a knowledge monopoly in the area of economic, social, environmental, and regional policy that is unique in Europe. The aim of the project is to compare the transformation processes under way in both countries in terms of convergences and divergences and to identify the relevant mechanisms of change at work. Of particular interest is the role of European expert communities and networks in the creation and diffusion of new instruments and modes of knowledge production. Conceptually, the project is based on discursive institutionalism. It is assumed that transnational expert networks and communities have the potential to delegitimize the established "meta rules" of political knowledge production (knowledge orders) and to stimulate the institutionalization of alternative coordination arrangements.

The project is being carried out in cooperation with the Virtual Knowledge Studio of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. At the same time it serves as a preliminary study for two projects on the transformation of knowledge orders, for which applications have been submitted to the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation) and the Volkswagen Foundation.

Contact: Holger Straßheim
E-Mail: strassheim@wzb.eu