Critique turns the case- failure to attend to the gendered nature of innovation discourse causes useless or destructive innovations

(Scout, Informatics@DonaldBren, Gendered Narratives of Innovation Through Competition: Lessons From Science and Technology Studies J. of Education for Library and Information Science, Vol. 54, No. 1—(Winter) January 2013)

The demographic composition of these high-status, high-stakes fields matters deeply, particularly in regard to the issue of problem identification. Historians and philosophers of science like Sandra Harding (1991) argue that one reason why representation of women and people of color in the sciences is so crucial is because question setting happens and research agendas are formed from the standpoints of those doing science. This poses at least two problems for the question of competition and innovation in library science. The first problem is about the kinds of questions that will be amenable to solving through competition. Competition requires measures and endpoints at which to measure. Problems that cannot be conceptualized in this way, or which involve holistic, qualitative solutions, will be at a disadvantage for selection. If competition is the motor of innovation, then competitive work risks being about novel ways to turn a profit or increase market efficiencies rather than novel solutions to actual social problems. When competition and innovation are linked, then profit-generating solutions to social problems will be the ones that “win” whether they are best or not. For example, though malaria has long killed far more people than AIDS, it hasn’t been given very much attention, because the people who are at risk are unable to pay for vaccines or cures. Malaria has been a third world problem. Only since one of the world’s richest entrepreneurs, Bill Gates, decided to fund research has this dire issue been given due attention. So when we use competition as a tool to produce innovation, we must ask: what kinds of problems are likely to attract the attention of people who thrive in competitive environments? And what kinds of solutions will be considered acceptable and successful? The second problem for library science is the perspective from which problems are identified and solutions generated. The presumption is that problems identified through competition and tested in markets are of universal interest and common good. Yet power differentiated groups are less able to participate in the measurement of their success (i.e., in the marketplace). And the research questions selected on behalf of marginalized groups may not be problems they would choose to study were they to design the research program. This leaves crucial questions: What kinds of innovation can we expect to emerge from competitive environments, given the kinds of actors who are drawn to them and who succeed in them? What problems will be selected for research and development, given that competitiveness valorizes certain values and points of view while excising others? For example, Cowan (1983) shows that the development of new household technologies did not free women from the domestic sphere. Rather, it allowed women to enter the paid labor force while leaving the gendered division of labor in the home untouched. Domestic technologies developed by those who do not use them, as Cowan shows, actually entailed new levels and expectations of work, paradoxically extending women’s work inside the home. In her study of early electrical communication, Marvin (1998) argues that “men . . . wanted control of all communication conducted through the technology that belonged to them. Rules of expertise that invested the knowledgeable with power over the less knowledgeable transformed stories of women’s electrical ineptitude into homilies that justified men’s control of women’s communication” (p. 24). Nevertheless, Martin (1991) notes that women’s use of the phone did not align with the male designers’ intentions for it (p. 146). Co-opting it for their own purposes, women shaped the conventions for use of this early technology (p. 141). This is instructive to a techno-centric field that often seems to believe that women are afraid of technology, its own history to the contrary