Elena Simakova

Marketing mobile futures: assembling constituencies and creating compelling stories for an emerging technology

This paper engages with the marketing of an emerging technology: Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID). It is based on a lengthy ethnographic field study with a marketing team in a hi-tech corporation. We argue that building market relations for this emerging technology involves three closely intertwined activities: the identification of relevant people and things which can form a constituency into which the product can be launched; the narration of a tellable story which articulates and renders accountable relations of people and things; and the development of a compelling version of this story to provide a basis for ongoing engagement of the putative constituency. Identifying potential members for the constituency, convincing them of the compelling nature of the mobility based story, managing access to the constituency and maintaining internal relations between the marketing team and the rest of the corporate organization are all ongoing aspects of this market building activity. The paper forms a contribution to marketing theory by bringing ideas of constituencies, tellable and compelling stories from science and technology studies research together with insights from the literature on marketing.

Making Nano Matter An Inquiry into the Discourses of Governable Science

The article examines science-policy conversations mediated by social science in attempts to govern, or set up terms for, scientific research. The production of social science research accounts about science faces challenges in the domains of emerging technosciences, such as nano. Constructing notions of success and failure, participants in science actively engage in the interpretation of policy notions, such as the societal relevance of their research. Industrial engagement is one of the prominent themes both in policy renditions of governable science, and in the participants’ attempts to achieve societally relevant research, often oriented into the future. How do we, as researchers, go about collecting, recording, and analyzing such future stories? I examine a series of recent interviews conducted in a number of US universities, and in particular at a university campus on the West Coast of the United States. The research engages participants through interviews, which can be understood as occasions for testing the interpretive flexibility of nano as “good” scientific practice and of what counts as societal relevance, under what circumstances and in view of what kind of audiences.

Managing Electronic Waste: A Study of Market Failure

This paper analyses market based initiatives as solutions to techno-scientific problems. It focuses on electronic waste to argue that market- based initiatives are key locations in which techno-scientific work takes place. Such work is explored through recent ideas inspired by Actor-Network Theory and the concept of performativity.

Framing responsible innovation in synthetic biology: the need for a critical discourse analysis approach

Various framings of responsible innovation, some specific to synthetic biology and others more general, have emerged, evoking notions of responsibility in science and innovation. They are represented by a set of narratives that are far from stabilised, being subject to the ongoing debate and contestation. We aim to understand the emergence of discourses of responsible (research and) innovation and dynamics influencing them. This article proposes a critical discourse analysis approach to gain such understanding.

Collaboration Talk: The Folk Theories of Nano Research

The nano initiative in the US and elsewhere encourages and promotes various forms of multi-stakeholder activities, such as industrial collaborations. Forming part of the discourse of expectations around emerging technologies, collaboration is an important resource holding together different practices of knowledge production. In the conversations between policy and science, collaboration becomes a measurable entity and a measure in itself, figuring in the evaluations of the performance of individual faculty and research centres; however, the policy metaphor of ‘collaboration’ stands for a variety of different forms and shapes of interactions between university and industry. From a discourse analysis perspective, ‘folk theories’ of nano collaboration help to explore the dynamics of the university/industry boundary in the scientific organisational discourse as in a recent series of interactions with scientists, university officials and technology transfer officers in a number of US universities. What does the introduction of the new entity (nano) mean for scientists, and for university practices of technology transfer and commercialisation, in terms of trying to accommodate individual ‘nano’ cases into university regulations and procedures? How are these practices and experiences discussed in terms of collaboration? Assessments of value of collaboration ranged between polarised views, raising questions about occasions, audiences and communities of assessors invoked in the construction of acceptable accounts of nano collaboration. Metaphors and analogies were used to mobilise specific meanings in the discourses of the innovative potential of emerging fields. As such, assessments of the potential of terms pertinent to the emerging discourses, such as collaboration, would be better based on the assumption of shared meanings, not fixed and given, but actively achieved.