Epistemology first- undermining the assumptions behind innovation delegitimizes its policy solutions, epistemic closure produces structural violence

(Brice, Ideology, engine or regime. Styles of critique and theories of innovation.. Benoît Godin, Gérald Gaglio, Dominique Vinck. Handbook on Alternative Theories of Innovation 2021, Edward Elgar, pp.369-386, 2021. hal-03442298)

The vocabulary of religion can be seen as a convenient figure of speech, which provides telling metaphors and powerful illustrations of what critics of innovation aim to convey. That these metaphors flourish in magazines and blogs is a sign of the appeal of this register and its easy use in public debates. But the vocabulary of religion is also the characteristic of a style of critique that is associated with a particular understanding of what “innovation” is, and why it deserves critical attention. “Innovation”, here, designates a mode of action that is based on descriptive and analytical elements, which serve as the basis for prescriptions. “Critique”, then, is about the demonstration that the descriptive and analytical elements are mistaken. It is an epistemic critique, that of an “innovation-speak”3 that functions as a dominant public discourse aiming to provide diagnoses and corresponding solutions. The use of the religious vocabulary by innovation critics is then associated with an approach seeking to “debunk” what is presented as a fact, yet is nothing more than poorly ground belief. As modernist critics of religion sought to confront religious dogma with the reality of historical facts (Poulat 1962), these critics target innovation as an ideology, and contrast it with a discourse meant to be based on facts. When Jill Lepore speaks about the “gospel of disruption”, she targets management scholar Clayton Christiansen and his theory of “disruptive innovation”, which is based on empirical examples, and leads into prescriptions for companies to use. Lepore shows that the empirical elements that Christiansen used can easily be contested, which weakens the whole theory he has been defending, and turns it into nothing more than an ideology. The critique contrasting ideology with facts is also visible each time the language of the “myths” of innovation is used, in which case the target is not an individual author or a definite theory (as Christiansen’s disruptive innovation), but tacit hypothesis of current innovation discourses. The references to these “myths” are numerous in the academic and non-academic4 literature. For instance, Mariana Mazzucato argues in The entrepreneurial state: Debunking public v. private sector myths that the role of the state is crucial in economic dynamic, whereas the discourse of innovation often makes free markets and the unconstraint interventions of entrepreneurs the sole source of innovation (Mazzucato 2015). She can then argue that if there is a US model and if it is to be replicated, then all its components ought to be included in it. In the online piece I quoted above, Langdon Winner identifies a persistence of a certain technological determinism, which has been contested in a rich body of scholarly work. Pierre- Benoît Joly (2017) discusses the pervasiveness of the linear model, which describes innovation processes in successive phases, in spite of numerous theoretical works and innovation projects that have challenged this model. Challenging the ideology of innovation The language of the innovation “myths” points to a critical position that consists in uncovering a discourse by challenging the truth-value of the claims it is implicitly or explicitly based upon. This type of critique can be identified beyond the use of the religious vocabulary, each time scholars or practitioners characterize an overly simple, yet dominant version of innovation that ignores more sophisticated analysis and practices. In a recent volume, Benoît Godin and Dominique Vinck describe an “ideology” that sees innovation as “good a priori” and equates it with a simple vision of radical technological change for market purposes (Godin and Vinck 2017). This simple version of innovation sees it as the articulation between a dynamic of technological change connected to market extension, performed by particularly bright entrepreneurs, for outcomes that are seen as unquestionably positive. This simple version can then be the target of a critique that contests the robustness of the narrative it proposes. One can track back the challenges to this simple version of innovation to earlier scholarly discussions about the selective gaze that innovation (usually seen as the mechanical effect of radical technological change) pre-supposes. Consider for instance historian David Edgerton’s critique of the scholarly focus on innovation. Edgerton speaks of the ways in which “technological futurism has affected our historiography”, by which he means that historians and scholars of technology tend to “reproduce the innovation orientation, both in the choice of innovation as subject matter, and in confusing the innovation with the technology-in-use” (Edgerton 1999, p. 128). For Edgerton, innovation implies an empirical and theoretical focus that is simply too selective, as it ignores the reality of technology as it is designed, practiced, and maintained. In the wake of Edgerton’s piece, maintenance studies have insisted that the mundane functioning of “technologies in use” is as interesting (if not more) than innovation for anyone wishing to understand technology and its impacts in human lives. This body of work shows that the actual work of scientists and engineers has often little to do with the tenets of innovation-speak (Russel and Vinsel 2019). This set of works is particularly interesting for our reflection on the nature of critique, because it connects an objective of debunking the ideology of innovation using the truth of (social) scientific facts with the problem of exclusion, of individuals and public concerns. The occultation of maintenance has indeed consequences, in terms of public policy priorities, industrial strategy and allocation of costs and benefits in the functioning of technical systems, including at the level of workers’ rights. Thus, the case of maintenance is useful to illustrate a variation on the critique of the ideology of innovation, which contests not only the epistemic quality of the hypothesis on which it is based, but also their consequences in terms of who is included and who is excluded, what is taken into account and what is not. One can connect this perspective to a range of studies that show that who can act as innovators and be recognized as one is deeply skewed in favor of certain people, often at the expense of women and people of color (Cook 2019). Exclusion effects also manifest themselves when considering the “unintended consequences” of innovation, in domains as diverse as digital technologies (Matsumoto and Kawajiri 2012) or the financial sector (Sveiby et al. 2012; see also Sveiby 2017), which are obscured when the discourse of innovation unproblematically hypothesizes that “innovation is always good” (Soete 2013; Sveiby et al. 2012).