Ontologies, socio-technical transitions (to sustainability), and the multi-level perspective

Two qualitative studies in the U.K. health care sector trace eight purposefully selected innovations. Complex, contested, and nonlinear innovation careers emerged. Developing the nonlinear perspective on innovation spread further, we theorize that multi-professionalization shapes "nonspread." Social and cognitive boundaries between different professions retard spread, as individual professionals operate within unidisciplinary communities of practice. This new theory helps explain barriers to the spread of innovation in multiprofessional organizations in both health care and other settings.

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The Nonspread of Innovations: the Mediating Role of Professionals

This paper addresses the scope for more integrated general analysis of diversity in science, technology and society. It proposes a framework recognizing three necessary but individually insufficient properties of diversity. Based on 10 quality criteria, it suggests a general quantitative non-parametric diversity heuristic. This allows the systematic exploration of diversity under different perspectives, including divergent conceptions of relevant attributes and contrasting weightings on different diversity properties. It is shown how this heuristic may be used to explore different possible trade-offs between diversity and other aspects of interest, including portfolio interactions. The resulting approach offers a way to be more systematic and transparent in the treatment of scientific and technological diversity in a range of fields, including conservation management, research governance, energy policy and sustainable innovation.

A General Framework for Analysing Diversity in Science, Technology and Society

The innovative behaviour of tourism firms—Comparative studies of Denmark and Spain

This article aims to provide a reassessment of the processes of diffusion of innovations into organizations, based on new empirical data. The focus of the article is the latter stages of the diffusion process. The article draws on the results of two studies, which examined the diffusion of innovations in health care in the UK. These projects were a matched pair of qualitative studies, using purposeful selections of comparative case studies. The results demonstrate the ambiguous, contested nature of new scientific knowledge. The highly interactive nature of diffusion, with active adopters is illustrated. There is no evidence of a single adoption decision. The science is socially mediated. The features of context and of actors interlock to influence diffusion.

P. Laredo

Papers

The management and evaluation of technological programs and the dynamics of techno-economic networks: The case of the AFME