Between knowledge and policy making. Innovation studies in the perspective of constructivist model of epistemology

Abstract

The genesis of the development of reflection about innovation is history entangled in the game played by international organizations in order to maintain the dominant position of economically and politically privileged groups. The aim of the article is to prove that the concept of innovation studies was designed as the tool for the legitimization of the neo-liberal economic and science policy in developed and developing countries after the Second World War. The analysis consists of two stages: an attempt to reconstruct the mode of thinking about innovation and the identification of the basic thought constraint mechanisms functioning in the field of innovation studies. The article is therefore an attempt to answer the questions of why and how certain groups of researchers are able to construct knowledge perceived by the society as objective and what role the institutions of power play in these processes. Thus, the reconstruction of the object of scientific knowledge is not only the reproduction of a reflective epistemological process, but to understand the scientific fact it is necessary to try to identify what actually constitutes science despite representing an area external to it.