Abstract
Mientras la sociología ha analizado habitualmente la innovación desde la perspectiva de las capacidades de la empresa, este artículo ofrece una visión más relacional sobre la innovación derivada de la sociología relacional de Norbert Elias. Tomando el ejemplo de una red alemana de reciclaje de basura electrónica y de escoriales de minería, entendida aquí como una eco-innovación, el artículo intenta re-integrar conceptualmente la innovación en contextos socio-históricos. Esta re-incorporación también incluye examinar el rol de los valores durante los procesos de creación de innovación, lo cual ha sido tratado con gran ambigüedad en la literatura de eco-innovación. A pesar de mostrar que los valores ecológicos desempeñan un papel menor en el proceso de eco-innovación, el artículo señala que la eco-innovación está profundamente relacionada con desarrollos históricos complejos que comprenden la creación de conocimiento científico.
Highlights
The literature mainly addresses the phenomenon of eco-innovation from the perspective of how capacities, expertise, and scientific knowledge related to resource-efficient innovations are created and pooled by regional business clusters (Schiederig et al, 2012; Karakaya et al, 2014; Hojnik and Ruzzier, 2016), while the socio-historical embedding of eco-innovation is an under-addressed topic
Our analysis shows that scientific capacities, and values of given eco-innovations are linked to developments of the past
The framework we stressed demonstrated that ecoinnovations are relational in terms of their sociohistorical embedding with regard to historically derived practices, expertise and scientific knowledge
Summary
Eco-innovations aim to replace environmentally harmful services, processes, or products (Kemp and Pearson, 2007; Reid and Miedzinski, 2008; Schiederig et al, 2012) and have become an important issue for EU environmental policy making (EcoAP, 2011). The literature mainly addresses the phenomenon of eco-innovation from the perspective of how capacities, expertise, and scientific knowledge related to resource-efficient innovations are created and pooled by regional business clusters (Schiederig et al, 2012; Karakaya et al, 2014; Hojnik and Ruzzier, 2016), while the socio-historical embedding of eco-innovation is an under-addressed topic This area of investigation concerns the role of values in the creation of innovations in general. This article aims to achieve a deeper understanding of the associated production of academic knowledge and seeks to determine the relationship between those processes and values This approach differs from innovation sociology literature, which asks for whom an innovation is new within a social network While mainly confirming our understanding of the organizational context of knowledge production and aspects of detachment, the interviews especially shed light on aspects of involvement regarding values and environmental issues related to the regional mining tradition and the network’s activities. The world’s earliest advanced mining watering system was developed and used in the Upper Harz mining area in the 16th century
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