Consensus and conflict in innovation
A tale of three boundaries
Hello everyone,
Happy to be back here with another edition.
Let’s start with a truism. Technological change requires a reconfiguration of social relations. Now, reconfiguration means destabilization. Things become uncertain. We find new things to do - things we need to learn how to do. Since these kinds of changes are never going to be neutral, they will also involve quite a bit of contestation. Making them stick will requires new alliances, with new collaborators.
The science of transition is in many ways about understanding what happens in this sort of reconfiguration. “Boundary object” is a venerable term that proposes we understand reconfiguration through the perspective of the object that is (at) the interface of different groups of people who find themselves thrown into a joint endeavour. Does the object of their attention allow or frustrate ‘collaboration’, that is, mutual adjustment?
At the boundaries of science
For anyone who has at least dabbled in studies of science and technology, “boundary objects” will be familiar. It dates back to a 1989 article by Susan Leigh Star and James Giesemer, who tried to understand the shifting cooperation between amateur experts and disciplinarily trained scientists (and others I’m leaving out) in getting the research-oriented Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology properly set up (in 1908). A great idea, but the amateurs and the scientist had their own “social worlds”, with their own particular interests and (informal) playbooks. Unsurprisingly, therefore, Star & Giesemer found that the amateurs didn’t necessarily agree with the premises, questions and field methods that the scientists put forward. However, they also found – perhaps surprisingly – that nonetheless all parties found interest in cooperation, that each party’s interests could at least partially help fulfil the other party’s interests.
That observation obviously leads to today’s question: isn’t the energy transition really just one big Museum of Vertebrate Zoology in its early years? Or, if you prefer to phrase it in the lingo of the day: if the energy transition must be co-created, what does that actually mean? What is the nature of such “collective work” and mutual readjustment?
Let’s open up the book of social science.
If you enjoy reading this, why not share it with someone working at a boundary!
I have three studies for you, each with its own way of putting the concept to work. (In fact, it seems as though boundary objects might be the boundary object of a science of collaboration, but chasing that tail makes me dizzy just thinking about it, so I’m just going to move on.)
Meters at the interface
Old framings and ways of doing are shifting into new ones: mechanical energy meters are a longstanding, relatively stabilised technology in comparison to the digital meter, whose capabilities are still evolving. (p 257)
The most canonical use of the term comes from Heather Lovell and her colleagues (2017). They review introductions of digital meters in Australia and the UK. In Australia, the state of Victoria mandated a full rollout of ‘em (between 2009-13). A Glasgow estate got smart meters as part of a new district heating system. Finally, they review the “ambitious” UK wide program to replace all meters in homes and small businesses by 2020. In Victoria, it was a “system-centric” conception of the meter – it was going to solve problems for the grid. The use-case for householders hadn’t been established yet and the meter actually wound up costing them. In Glasgow, it was hoped the district heating would reduce their bills. However, the poorest residents had a working relationship with the old pre-paid meters: whenever the money was gone, the heating stopped. Now, there was a running bill, independently of whether they had the money for it or not.
In both cases, household residents hadn’t been meaningfully involved in the ‘collaboration’, which caused some conflict. Not enough conflict to halt the roll-out, but still enough to amend it. Because of protests in Victoria, other states held off on mandated (state-wide) rollouts. In Glasgow, an intermediary Energy Coach had to do repair work with the people adversely affected by the new system (with a new tariff structure tailored to their needs as a result).
In both cases, despite differences in expectation, the lack of ‘consensus’ didn’t stop the “collective work” of installing the meters. The authors muse that might also be an effect of power, so, in their last case, they show what is possible (acceptance!) if you cross through the mirror glass that is the boundary object, and figure out the interests and perceptions of end-user and take these to heart. Thus, the UK’s smart meter program made sure that it would not cost customers anything (upfront), that privacy issues were addressed, and that it would enable new routines that would be beneficial to the them. In addition, they made sure these benefits would be clearly communicated. As a result, they were doing pretty good in terms of public awareness and support of the program.
Policy integration in Stockholm
This establishment of a biogas consensus meant that biogas as an abstract object represented similar things to several actors within different systems. This made the linking of actors around biogas as a boundary object strong, and it was possible to develop the connection into collaborations between the actors. (p 190)
Linnea Hjalmarsson writes an account (2015) of the “social worlds” of municipal waste companies, municipalities and transport companies in and around Stockholm. Because of new environmental regulations as well as the promise of new business models they all became interested in the possibility of converting waste go biogas, especially for municipal buses. Within the space of a few years, they established a “biogas consensus”, which was the basis for a progressive dissolution of their policymaking boundaries with regards to municipal waste.
This is somewhat heterodox according to the letter of Star and Giesemer’s article, but certainly not in spirit. Star and Giesemer called boundary objects into life because they allowed precisely in the absence of (strong) consensus. Yet, Hjalmarsson takes the perspective of the object of interest in order to explain how collaboration is possible between otherwise disparate sectors. To mark the difference, she introduces “strong” boundary objects, which mean essentially the same to different parties and thus enable their cooperation and mutual adjustment.
Fracking the debate
Tamara Metze (2014) comes at boundary objects from the opposite end of the circle. Rather than starting from an object whose meaning needs to be stabilized (as with Lovell et al), or whose meaning needs to be institutionalized (Hjalmarsson), she starts with a then broadly accepted technique – fracking – and shows how NGOs, (local) activists and researchers (anno 2009 an onward) manage to turn it into a controversial topic by destabilizing its meaning. They rebrand it – or rather, re-frame it – from an essentially safe technique and potentially beneficial “transition fuel”, to an environmentally harmful technique and a nuisance to surrounding communities.
According to the letter, it’s a boundary object. Fracking gathers around it a set of people (coming from quite different “social worlds”) who assign different meaning to it. But the spirit of collaboration is absent. Instead Metze shows the creation of a new discursive space around uncertainty – a space its protagonists actually seek to destroy by imposing their definition of the object. Still, Metze fruitfully draws on the “boundary object” to capture specifically the fact that the meaning of a particular thing has become destabilized.
Consensus, dissensus, power
Innovation, renovation and – well, basically – change of any sort, but especially of the kind of fundamental, infrastructural kind in the energy transition, entail all sorts of social processes that ‘fracture’ (to take Metze’s analogy) existing boundaries and unsettle established meanings.
Can we draw any lessons from these three studies of fracturing processes? Star and Giesemer’s original suggestion is that you don’t need “consensus” in order to move forward. The evidence from these three studies is inconclusive, but are there any other suggestions we might deduce?
Thinking about conflict and collaboration in terms of boundary objects may allow an observer (whether academic or professional) to pinpoint and make visible to participants what it is they’re not agreeing on. That could open pragmatic paths forward, because it focuses and, likely, ‘shrinks’ dissensus (if there’s basic trust among participants, at least). In the case of meters, for example, if you recognize different interests – that an object needs to work for different social worlds –, then you plan for that. That could then be the basis of identifying some shared interests, whenever there are any.
So, seeing the face-off between different parties through the lens of boundary interfaces creates space for pragmatic collaboration. However, the elephant in the room where conflict and collaboration happen is power. Power to impose a definition of the situation (in Chicago sociological terms). (For other ways power is important for energy transitions, read here and here and here.)
This comes out very clearly in Metze. The struggle over fracking happened in part through the power to tell the story of fracking, to define what fracking is. Metze uses frames to analyse the structure of these competing narratives. We’ve covered frames before and it has a strong tradition in discourse and conversation analysis. Frame analysis can help in levelling the playing field somewhat in complex situations of ‘collective (meaning-making) work’, by taking away the players and allowing an examination of the ideas.
Alright, hope this was helpful, let me know if you want to follow up with any questions! If you know of any hands-on methodologies to guide dialogue and deliberation that make use of frames or something akin to boundary objects, let me know and I’ll share it next time! 🙏
Best wishes,
Marten
Sources
Hjalmarsson, Linnea. 2015. "Biogas as a boundary object for policy integration - the case of Stockholm". Journal of Cleaner Production. 98: 185-193. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2014.10.042
Metze, Tamara. 2014. "Fracking the Debate : Frame Shifts and Boundary Work in Dutch Decision Making on Shale Gas". Journal of Environmental Policy and Planning. 19 (1): 35-52. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1523908X.2014.941462
Lovell, Heather, Martin Pullinger, and Janette Webb. 2017. "How do meters mediate? Energy meters, boundary objects and household transitions in Australia and the United Kingdom". Energy Research & Social Science. 34: 252-259. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2017.07.001