Abstract
Abstract Since the beginning of the New Millennium, increasingly widespread availability of the Internet and digitally enabled tools have made production processes more accessible to private individuals, introducing new opportunities for personal fabrication and social manufacturing. Yet scant sustainability research has been conducted on this important sector. We argue that research barriers, particularly relating to confusing terminology and lack of individual-centric analytical tools, are largely responsible for this void. The objective of this study is to overcome these barriers by (1) providing an integrating framework that can improve transferability, to other conceptual analyses, of the results of sustainability research conducted from a particular conceptual viewpoint, and (2) suggesting how some firm-centric analytical tools can be modified for effective use in studies of individual-level phenomena. We base our framework on the emerging concept of social manufacturing, first eliciting its main aspects and dimensions with a conceptual literature study, and then discovering its central properties with an empirical case study. We conclude by using the new social manufacturing framework to suggest modifications of three common sustainability analysis tools to make them more applicable to research on individual-level production. By making future investigation in this area more accessible our work contributes to both sustainability research and to the emerging field of research on social manufacturing.
Highlights
Since the beginning of the New Millennium, the increasingly widespread availability of the Internet and digitally enabled tools have made production processes more accessible to private individuals (Rayna and Striukova, 2016)
We analyze the cases first on a gross level by explicating individual participation within each of them, on a more refined level by using the constant comparative method to elicit the main properties of social manufacturing as exemplified by these cases
Including expansive prosumption as one of the properties adds the important time aspect to the framework, emphasizing that the level of sustainability reached at any one point in time may soon change to something else. Combining these three empirically discovered basic properties with the two aspects that we elicited conceptually from the literature review, we suggest the following definition for a social manufacturing framework: Social manufacturing is a form of physical production in which one or more individuals contribute to the process in any of the phases of ideation, design and fabrication
Summary
Since the beginning of the New Millennium, the increasingly widespread availability of the Internet and digitally enabled tools have made production processes more accessible to private individuals (Rayna and Striukova, 2016). Major examples are the enhanced affordability of rapid manufacturing technologies, such as 3D printing (Ford and Despeisse, 2016; Rayna et al, 2015) and direct digital manufacturing more generally (Chen et al, 2015; Holmstro€m et al, 2017), as well as new Internet-supported business models such as open innovation (Huizingh, 2011), which make company boundaries more permeable and allow individuals outside a company to connect to its innovation processes These changes have introduced important new opportunities for personal fabrication (Burns and Howison, 2001; Dougherty, 2012; Gershenfeld, 2008) and social manufacturing (Cao and Jiang, 2012; Markillie, 2012). We believe that the multiplicity of partially overlapping concepts relating to personal fabrication and to distributed production in general (Kohtala, 2015) have been a significant barrier to systematic study of this increasingly important field
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