Elsevier

Research Policy

Volume 48, Issue 9, November 2019, 103830
Research Policy

Socio-cultural framing during the emergence of a technological field: Creating cultural resonance for solar technology

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2019.103830Get rights and content
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Highlights

  • The study depicts the process of socio-cultural framing during the emergence of technological fields.

  • Meaning is assigned to technologies as a complex process where strategic activities interact with socio-cultural factors.

  • Protagonists need to understand this socio-cultural complexity or they risk contributing to adverse meanings on the field.

  • Our study offers cautions to the use of future-oriented frames and identifies temporal framing as particularly challenging.

  • We show how cultural resonance is created under three master frames: Temporal, Geographical, and Societal proximity.

Abstract

This paper depicts how cultural resonance for novel technologies is constructed as a gradual, interactive process. We adopt a cultural framing perspective and strive to understand how actors assign meaning to the novel technology and determine its appropriateness for the local context. Existing research has largely focused on the strategic and political aspects of field framing processes through depicting conscious framing struggles between protagonist and antagonist actors. In addition to such strategic framing activities, we examine how other socio-cultural factors, such as changes in actor positions, interaction between framing activities, and the cultural “repertoire” of frames interact in producing cultural resonance. For our empirical case study, we followed the emerging technological field of solar energy during an intensive period of change. Our study contributes to the growing number of studies that draw attention to the creation of cultural resonance as an interactive multi-actor process by offering in-depth understanding of the multifaceted interactions that constitute the meaning-making process for an emerging field.

Keywords

Framing
Field emergence
Socio-technical transitions
Technological innovation
Solar energy

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