How deep is incumbency? A ‘configuring fields’ approach to redistributing and reorienting power in socio-material change
Section snippets
Introduction: the political importance of socio-material incumbency
Long used to refer to the occupation of a position of authority [1,2], the term ‘incumbency’ increasingly also applies to more general concentrations of influence, privilege and power [[3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8], [9], [10]]. With many traditionally sanguine voices in global science [11,12] and governance [[13], [14], [15]] expressing growing concerns about a series of serious and intractable worldwide ‘grand challenges’ [[16], [17], [18]], the salience of incumbency is coming further to the
The ontological scope of socio-material incumbency
Some processes and relations that are widely seen to help constitute socio-material incumbency are at least partly intentional in deliberate human terms. Examples might include aspects of interlinked and mutually reinforcing feedback phenomena [172] variously referred to with specialist words like ‘entrapment’ [173], ‘coercion’ [174], ‘dominant prototyping’ [175], ‘path creation’ [176], ‘alignment’ [177], ‘social shaping’ [41], ‘momentum’ [100], ‘routines’ [178], ‘regime resistance’ [179],
Ideal-typical ‘eagle-eye’ and ‘worm-eye’ views
Discussion in the last section was based on seminal findings in the analysis of ‘structuration’, which themselves relate to foundational insights across a large sweep of historical and contemporary social theory [201,190,251,252]. Acting in particular concrete settings, but extending across a multiplicity of dimensions in social and technological phenomena, a large array of more-or-less human-intentional or material-emergent positive feedback phenomena were identified as helping to shape
Summary and lessons for methodology
Drawing on a wide body of theory in social science – especially processual and relational understandings of structuration and power – this paper has developed an approach to socio-material incumbency built around a novel heuristic concept of ‘configuring fields’. A broad axis of contrast has been proposed between two ideal-typical patterns in such fields, with ‘eagle-eye’ and ‘worm-eye’ views, respectively portraying incumbency in the form of relatively ‘closed’ and ‘open’ topologies. Following
Declaration of Competing Interest
The author declares that he has no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgements
The author gratefully acknowledges funding for this work from the UK Economic and Social Research Council under grants for the STEPS Centre and the Belmont Forum ‘Governance of Sustainable Transformations (GOST)’ project. The many individuals to whom various kinds of debt are owed in this work are detailed (alongside more expansive argumentation and further references) in the SPRU working paper posted here: https://www.sussex.ac.uk/webteam/gateway/file.php?name=2018-23-swps-stirling.pdf&site=25.
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