Citizen Activities in Energy Transition

User Innovation, New Communities, and the Shaping of a Sustainable Future

Sampsa Hyysalo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000393996
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Energy Industry
• Index: Business

This book addresses the rapidly changing citizen roles in innovation, technology adoption, intermediation, market creation, and legitimacy building for low-carbon solutions. It links research in innovation studies, sustainability transitions, and scienceand technology studies, and builds a new approach for the study of user contributions to innovation and sociotechnical change.

Citizen Activities in Energy Transition gives detailed and empirically grounded overall appraisal of citizens' active technological engagement in the current energy transition, in an era when Internet connectivity has given rise to important new forms of citizen communities and interactions. It elaborates a new way to study users in sociotechnical change through long-term ethnographic and historical research and reports its deployment in a major, decade-long line of investigation on user activities in small-scale renewables, addressing user contributions from the early years to the late proliferation stages of small-scale renewable energy technologies (S-RETs). It offers a much-needed empirical and theoretical understanding of the dynamics of the activities in which users are engagedover the course of sociotechnical change, including innovation, adoption, adjustment, intermediation, community building, digital communities, market creation, and legitimacy creation.

This work is a must-read for those seeking to understand the role of users in innovation, energy systems change and the significance of new digital communities in present and future sociotechnical change. Academics, policymakers, and managers are given a new resource to understand the "demand side" of sociotechnical change beyond the patterns of investment, adoption, and social acceptance that have traditionally occupied their attention.

1 Introduction

Citizens in energy innovation and sociotechnical change

DOI: 10.4324/9781003133919

1.1 The changing image of energy citizens in sociotechnical change

Decentralized energy production based on renewable sources is a key change toward fossil-free-energy systems. This change is well underway in many countries, and the replacement of fossil-fuel-based solutions is increasingly taking place in the arena of mainstream deployment and adoption of renewable energy technologies. This means the “demand side” of the market plays a key role in the financing of change as well as in accepting changed consumption patterns and new technologies (IEA, 2018; IPCC, 2018). To many, this sounds a lot to ask given that present energy consumption is among the most passive and routinized forms of consumption there is.

Yet people on the demand side have in many countries taken the initiative (e.g., Ornetzeder and Rohracher, 2013; DeWald and Truffer, 2012; Nielsen, 2016), and when they do so they can do much more than just adopt and finance new solutions. Demand-side activities related to technological innovation, adaptation, new practices, and market creation have been found to be key “enablers” for the proliferation, further development, and mass-market uptake of low-carbon technologies, particularly regarding small-scale renewables such as heat pumps, pellet-burning systems, solar PV, and solar heat, which we examine in this book (Rohracher, 2003; Caird and Roy, 2008; Heiskanen et al., 2010; Nielsen, Reisch, and Thøgersen, 2016; Nyborg and Røpke, 2015; Ornetzeder and Rohracher, 2006, 2013). These findings and their importance run contrary to the mainstream climate and energy policies that have primarily targeted the “supply side” through subsidies, regulation, and supply-end investments (IEA, 2018; IPCC, 2018) and have sought to overcome “consumer barriers” using campaigns, means, and measures intended to better diffuse industry-developed products and improve their use (Mignon and Bergek, 2016; Nye, Whitmarsh, and Foxon, 2010). Consequently, there is a strong and growing interest to better understand citizens, as users, consumers, and civil-society actors, in energy innovation and transition processes (see, e.g., Smith, 2012; Ornetzeder and Rohracher, 2013; Schot et al., 2016; Meelen et al., 2019; Rohracher and Köhler, 2019).

This shift toward active citizen contributions in sociotechnical change resonates with wider research on users and consumers outside sustainability-related fields. Users were long seen as unlikely agents of technological change (Oudshoorn and Pinch, 2003). For instance, von Hippel and his colleagues have fought a 40-year uphill battle to establish the extent, depth, and significance of user innovation against incredulity from the prevailing innovation studies and policy paradigms that assumed producers and research institutes to be the only significant driving force of innovation (von Hippel, 1988, 2005, 2016). A similar gradual revelation has happened across neighboring disciplines and related topics regarding user participation in design (e.g., Schuler and Namioka, 1993; Voss et al., 2009a, 2009b; Jensen, 2012; Hyysalo et al., 2016a, 2016b), the active consumption of goods (e.g., Appadurai, 1986; Miller and Slater, 2007), and user alterations and redesigns in IT systems (DeSanctis and Poole, 1994; McLaughlin et al., 1999; Kohtala et al., 2020) and their roles in affecting broader sociotechnical change (Fischer, 1992; Kline and Pinch, 1996; Oudshoorn and Pinch, 2003; Williams et al., 2005; Hyysalo et al., 2016a).

A root cause for the long neglect of citizens in innovation and the gradual realization of their importance lies in the invisibility of most citizen contributions to sociotechnical change. Much of this invisibility can be described in terms of being invisible work in three senses: not being recognized as happening or being of importance, not being recorded and thus gradually lost to memory, and not showing up using the typical research instruments used by people studying the area (Strauss, 1993; Strauss and Star, 1999; Verheig et al., 2016). These forms of invisibility have entailed a need to develop specific and often rather arduous research designs in order to make the contributions visible (Suchman, 1995; Szymanski and Whalen, 2011; De Jong et al., 2015; Verheig et al., 2016). But these more detailed studies, in turn, are subject to counter arguments regarding over generalizations made on the basis a few, potentially exceptional, cases and sites. As a consequence, a considerable space for assumptions remains in regard to users’ contributions and their importance to innovation and sociotechnical change. Given how hard it is to specifically identify the various forms of active citizen engagement in sociotechnical change, should the found instances be interpreted as being but the tip of the iceberg of a much more varied and plentiful contribution? Or is it more prudent and sounder to assume that the instances found may, in fact, be all there is?

The present book seeks to move research beyond making circles in this assumption space regarding citizens in energy innovation and transitions. As in many other fields, there are some exemplary works on particular citizen activities, such as on innovation (e.g., Rohracher, 2003; Ornetzeder and Rohracher, 2006, 2013; Truffer, 2003; Nielsen, 2016), on consumption (e.g., Nyborg, 2015; Juntunen, 2014a; Palm and Derby, 2014), on social movements (Smith et al., 2014; Hess, 2016; Kohtala, 2017), and on communities (e.g., Heiskanen, johnson et al., 2010, 2015; Smith et al., 2016b). Yet, to date, they have only been connected by summative literature reviews (Smith, 2012; Durrant, 2014; Schot et al., 2016) and arguments made via non-sustainability-related historical studies (Kanger and Schot, 2016; Kanger et al., 2018). The detailed evidence is also almost solely focused on the early phases of sociotechnical change and does not properly address the ongoing mass take-up.

The contribution of this book is thus to provide the first detailed, empirically grounded analyses of the activities that citizens engage in concerning sustainable energy innovation, community creation, and sustainability transitions and from the early stages of technological change to mainstream adoption. Methodologically, it elaborates the mid-range research design, the biography of practices and artifacts (BOAP) methodology, that can help achieve such analyses and further elaborate the import of the findings at a theoretical level through conceptualizing sociotechnical change as series of configurational movements that build on each other but change the character of technology and its userships while doing so.

1.2 Citizens in sustainable sociotechnical change—a short history of reconsiderations

The terms by which citizens’ involvement in sociotechnical change have been addressed vary in different disciplines between user, consumer, customer, and citizen. Marketing and management typically talk of consumers or customers to emphasize the financial relations involved (e.g., Marchand, 1998; Prahalad and Ramasvamy, 2004). Design and computer sciences as well as innovation studies address the topic with the register of “user” that emphasizes the realized use and immediate benefits gained with it (von Hippel, 2005; Hyysalo et al., 2016), while social and political sciences tend to talk of citizens and consumers (Smith, 2012; Voß and Amelung, 2016; Hyysalo et al., 2016). The common denominator in these terminologies is that they denote people whose orientation to technologies is that of first-hand benefit or harm, or who become otherwise directly impacted by them. This is the functional opposite to producers and professional designers who engage in technological change primarily for economic gains made through sales (von Hippel, 2005, 2016; Bjerkness, 1987; Prahalad and Ramasvamy, 2004). Because of this, the present book uses the terms user, citizen, and consumer as partial synonyms and follows the nomenclature used in the literature that is being discussed, most commonly the “user” (unless there is a specific reason to stress one of the other terms specifically, such as when opposing consumers to organizational users or when emphasizing citizenship rights against mere using).

Historically, all the way up to the 1980s, users were largely seen as insignificant actors in technological change, and findings related to their contributions to innovation, design, and consumption were mostly regarded as idiosyncratic exceptions (e.g., von Hippel, 1976; Rosenberg, 1982; Bjerkness, 1987; Schwartz-Cowan, 1983). Research on technological change and innovation has since acknowledged the role of users but only gradually duly addressed it and discovered the range and extent it may have. This has taken place in several parallel disciplinary streams (for overviews, see Williams et al., 2005; von Hippel, 2016; Hyysalo et al., 2016b), which have also gradually found their way into the studies of sustainable innovation and sustainable change.

By the 1990s, innovation scholars and sociologists of technology had recognized the importance of users (von Hippel, 1988; Klein and Rosenberg, 1986; Bieker et al., 1987), yet asserted that if users and other stakeholders have an impact on technology, they must have it before the form and meaning of the technology stabilize (Bijker, 1995; Noble, 1984). Once the technology’s design and related infrastructure became locked in place, users’ choices appeared to narrow down to adoption or non-adoption (Russell and Williams, 2002). Even within such constraints, users were observed to be active in several important ways, which can be characterized as users having importance in early-stage innovation and shaping of technology, often through civil-society activism and local communities:

1. Users are the sources of inventive new technologies in areas where the available products do not cater to their specific needs. Even though further development often takes place in R&D companies, the lead-user designs spur on new product lines and improve earlier ones (von Hippel, 1976, 1988). In renewable energy, this has been found to be the case in wind turbines (Karnøe and Garud, 2012; Nielsen, 2016) and solar collectors (Ornetzeder and Rohracher, 2006).
2. Users have been a vital source of information for developing new design versions as respondents to marketing research ever since the 1930s (Marchand, 1998). In sustainable energy this has been the case with passive houses (Rohracher, 2003; Ornetzeder and Rohracher, 2013).
3. Users can act as design partners, as experts on their own work, and as design decision makers regarding the conditions of their everyday life (Bjerkness, 1987; Bødger et al., 2004). In small-scale renewable energy technology (S-RET), some evidence of this can be found in grassroots innovation (Smith et al., 2016a, 2016b; De Vries et al., 2016).
4. Users also improve early designs through learning-by-using, both locally and through feedback to producers (Rosenberg, 1979, 1982; Lundvall, 1988; Lundvall and Vinding, 2005). In sustainable energy innovation this has been the case with solar heaters and woodchip burners (Ornetzeder and Rohracher, 2006).
5. Early adopters have a strong influence on what direction uses of new technologies and social organization around them take, as well as on the norms governing them. This can affect potential alternative technologies and technology-related citizen activism as well as early phases of mainstream technologies (see, e.g., Bijker, 1995; Fleck, 1993a, 1993b; Flichy, 2007; Akera, 2001; Schwartz-Cowan, 1983; Fisher, 1992). In renewable energy such influence can be observed in the community energy movement as an alternative technological discourse (Hargrieves et al., 2013; Smith et al., 2016b), as well as in how user experiments gradually led to the mainstreaming of wind turbines in Denmark (Ornetzeder and Rohracher, 2013; Nielsen, 2016).
6. Users can also actively oppose or passively reject new technologies, or they can undermine their intended effects by failing to use them according to expectations (Akrich, 1992; DeSanctis and Poole, 1994). In S-RET this has been observed with added heating and cooling to passive house concepts in many countries (Ornetzeder and Rohracher, 2003; Palm and Derby, 2014).
   The next set of reconsiderations emerged over the course of the 1990s, when the emergence of more flexible home and workplace information technologies made researchers realize that users alter and adjust technology-in-use more than had been assumed. The emerging more open and flexible development processes did not result in a similarly “closed” technology, as had been the case in the earlier mass-manufacturing era. The most important findings can be characterized as recognizing the commonness of the active shaping of technology-in-use and cyclical development of technology:
   
7. Studies of home consumption revealed that instead of being passive adopters, ordinary consumers were active in adapting the configuration and meaning of the technologies to make them work (Silverstone et al., 1992; Lie and Sørensen, 1996). They were, by default, domesticating technology into the moral economy of the household and contributing to the long-term taming of new types of technology. Further research has since shown this to take place beyond ICTs (Miller and Slater, 2007; Berger et al., 2006). There is some evidence of the active domestication of sustainable energy solutions and even “domestication pathways” from one S-RET to another (Palm and Derby, 2014; Juntunen, 2014; Nyborg, 2015).
8. Studies of workplace information systems showed that selective appropriation, integration into other devices, the co-evolution of practices and new technology, add-on solutions, new uses, (re-)inventions, and efforts to market the technology were, in fact, very common (see, e.g., DeSanctis and Poole, 1994; Alter, 2006; Szymanski and Whalen, 2011; McLaughlin et al., 1999). In sustainable energy such adaptation has been documented to some extent prior to the present line of study (Heiskanen et al., 2015; Raven et al., 2008; see Chapters 3 and 4).
9. Home multimedia and workplace ICTs showed how more advanced peers, “warm experts,” were central in educating other users (Bakardjieva, 2005), as were semi-professional “local experts” who seconded their help in addition to their main jobs (Stewart, 2007; Voss et al., 2009), becoming “user-side innovation intermediaries” (Stewart and Hyysalo, 2008). In sustainable energy, user-side intermediation has been documented but seldom conceptualized thoroughly (Heiskanen, johnson, et al., 2010; Raven et al., 2008, 2015; deVries et al., 2016; Meelen et al., 2019).
10. It was further realized that many new technologies did not follow linear patterns where the design becomes “closed” before it starts to diffuse (Fleck, 1993a; Williams et al., 2005) but involved innofusion, that is, iterative loops between design and use, often lasting as long as several product generations (Pollock and Williams, 2008; Hyysalo, 2010). Users’ domestication and alterations can thus shape the technology, both at local adopter sites and through entering the many feedback loops that circle between suppliers and users. In sustainable innovation this has been discussed by Heiskanen et al. (2014) and under the headings of learning-by-using (Ornetzeder and Rohracher, 2013) and user assemblages (Nielsen, 2016).
    The third and most recent reconfiguration in the understanding of the role of users in technological change has resulted in the rapid proliferation and sophistication of digital-sharing platforms throughout the 2000s and 2010s. The ensuing changes can be characterized as user contributions becoming boosted through new digitally connected peer communities:
    
11. Previously unconnected users have formed communities of interest on the web that share and iterate designs. Such user-innovation communities have proliferated far beyond open-source software and are designing many products without suppliers (Tapscot and Williams, 2008; Jeppesen and Molin, 2003; von Hippel, 2016). In sustainable energy this has not been documented prior to the present line of study (see Chapter 4), but after our research others have identified it as well (Meelen et al., 2019).
12. Manufacturers, in turn, are busy setting up their own user-innovation community efforts (Jeppesen and Fredriksen, 2006; Fuller, 2006; Pollock and Hyysalo, 2014). Living labs, web-based innovation areas, and user groups mark some of the widespread practices through which users are actively connected to each other and to producers in order to facilitate company research and development activities (Johnson et al., 2014; Leminen, 2015; Hyysalo and Hakkarainen, 2014; Mozaffar, 2016). This has not been reported in sustainable energy innovation to date, but is likely to emerge.
13. User-configurable content and derivative designs have become more commonplace, particularly in social media applications, games, and mass-customized products (Benkler, 2006; Tapscot and Williams, 2008; Botero et al., 2010). In sustainable energy this has not been documented prior to the present line of study (see Chapter 3).
14. Internet user forums, blogs, and discussion platforms have allowed users to pool their experiences and reveal their designs to other users. This has led to a “do-it-yourself renaissance,” in which self-created and collectively created artifacts are gaining new impetus (see, e.g., Kuznezov and Paulos, 2010; Grabher and Ibert, 2014; Kohtala, 2017; Kohtala et al. 2020). In sustainable energy this has not been documented prior to the present line of study (see Chapter 3), but since then, it has also been recognized elsewhere (Meelen et al., 2019).

Taken together, these active roles by users underline that they can be a major contributing force, as well as an inhibiting force, for a given innovation and in long-term sociotechnical change. As can be obser...