Abstract
In the past fifty years, long-range commercial airliners have changed only incrementally from the paradigmatic design – a tube fuselage with swept wings and mostly-aluminium construction. Reducing the environmental impact of airliners may require radical innovations and a new paradigm, but the transition to a new paradigm is fraught with risks. This paper analyses how key risks have shaped and limited efforts to transition toward three types of radical innovations that would signifi cantly improve airliner fuel effi ciency. We use these three cases to reassess the dominant framework for analysing sociotechnical transitions – the multi-level perspective (MLP) – in light of methods and theoretical perspectives drawn from Science and Technology Studies (STS). We argue that if the MLP is to provide a robust framework for analysing sociotechnical transitions, it must be refi ned in three ways. First, it must ‘open the black box’ to account for the ways that technologically-specific risks shape the transition process. Second, rather than predefi ning particular innovations as radical or conservative, ‘mature’ or ‘immature,’ it should attend to how actors conceive of such terms; an innovation which appears ‘mature’ to one group may appear ‘immature’ to another. Third, the MLP would be strengthened by additional case studies such as ours, which examine incomplete or failed transitions.
Highlights
At the beginning of the 21st century, amid growing concerns about anthropogenic climate change, an authoritative study concluded that two innovations – laminar flow control (LFC) and a ‘flying wing’ aircraft design – offer “the greatest aerodynamic potential for reducing the contribution of air travel to climate change” (Greener by Design, 2003: 9)
We argue that achieving an appropriate balance between agency and structure requires analysts to not predefine particular innovations as radical or immature, but rather to study how different actors themselves conceptualize these terms with respect to specific technologies and their dimensions of novelty
To explain this non-transition, we show how specific social groups – airlines, and passengers – framed propfans as too revolutionary and immature for operational use, despite the fact that they represented a kind of incremental innovation
Summary
In the past fifty years, long-range commercial airliners have changed only incrementally from the paradigmatic design – a tube fuselage with swept wings and mostly-aluminium construction. This paper analyses how key risks have shaped and limited efforts to transition toward three types of radical innovations that would significantly improve airliner fuel efficiency. We use these three cases to reassess the dominant framework for analysing sociotechnical transitions – the multi-level perspective (MLP) – in light of methods and theoretical perspectives drawn from Science and Technology Studies (STS). We argue that if the MLP is to provide a robust framework for analysing sociotechnical transitions, it must be refined in three ways It must ‘open the black box’ to account for the ways that technologically-specific risks shape the transition process. The MLP would be strengthened by additional case studies such as ours, which examine incomplete or failed transitions
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