Breathing Life into Technology: Socio-cognitive Paths Towards Opening Up the Black Box

Abstract

Despite the burgeoning body of work on the dynamics of technological change, the research agenda for understanding the socio-cognitive antecedents to technological change, hence the title Breathing Life into Technology, demands our further attention. What accounts for such a delay in the relevant theory development, and how viable is the recent call for integrating multiple theories and perspectives, including institutional work, in opening up the black box of technology? Is the research moving in a more integrated direction now; or is it being absorbed into different theory camps, using different vocabularies in talking about the same technology? The goal of this symposium is to answer these questions by presenting a variety of new theoretical and empirical directions in the context of how the research agenda and its associated approaches have evolved over time. Each showcased paper is expected to provide a more systematic understanding of the genesis of a technology and its co-evolution with socio-cognitive constructs in industry emergence. As a set, these papers will help us identify points of convergence and divergence in the paths taken towards the field’s accumulated knowledge to date, and the suggested paths towards the promising areas of research going forward. Crippled by Kindness: The Design of Institutional Responses to Social Problems Presenter: Raghu Garud; Pennsylvania State U. Presenter: Thinley Tharchen; Pennsylvania State U. Perspectives on Recombination Presenter: Elizabeth G. Pontikes; The U. of Chicago A Process Model of Collective Frame Emergence: Shifting Patterns to Collective Identification Presenter: Sorah Seong; INSEAD Betwixt and Between: The Problematic Emergence and Bounding of the Nanotoxicology Field Presenter: Maria Paola Ometto; U. of Alberta School of Management Presenter: Michael Lounsbury; U. of Alberta Presenter: Joel Gehman; U. of Alberta