Abstract
This chapter connects directly to the current state of research on innovation communities and discusses their institutional foundations, their implementation in the context of fields, as well as their practical implications in terms of agency and entrepreneurship. Against this background, I attempt to grasp innovation communities as a distinct type of meso-level order. Here, the general conflicts that shape the institutional foundations of collective innovation play out in the context of gradually settled fields, where community and business logics compete over the legitimate ways to shape the particular innovation at stake. Consequently, the resulting fields reflect an ambiguous institutional environment that affects not only the general conditions under which innovation communities create and develop potentially innovative artifacts (like 3D printers), but also the particular opportunities and struggles that accompany corresponding approaches for commercial exploitation. As the dilemma of entrepreneurship in open hardware usually refers to community members that develop entrepreneurial ambitions to commercialize community-based innovations, Chap. 3 also emphasizes the micro level of individual actors and their agentic capacities to relieve tensions within a complex and potentially contradictive institutional environment.
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Notes
- 1.
In the additional notes to the introductory chapter of “The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis”, DiMaggio and Powell specify their understandings on both, cognition and action as follows: “By cognition we refer to both reasoning and the preconscious grounds of reason: classifications, representations, scripts, schemas, production systems, and the like. […] We use the term action throughout to refer to social behavior, without any of the muscular, rational, or individual reductionist connotations that some have associated with this term.” (DiMaggio and Powell 1991, 35).
- 2.
As I have shown before and will elaborate further later (see Sect. 3.2), this traditional notion of community differs considerably from my understanding of communities as distinct contexts for innovation.
- 3.
In Weber’s theoretical corpus, Rationalization describes historical processes of systematization, in which ideas (containing certain values and worldviews) transform into relative persistent capacities which influence social action, or, as Swidler (1973) puts it, “the process by which ideas develop their own internal logic” (ibid. 36). Rationalization therefore rather resembles a general and processual pattern, which can occur in many different spheres of life without being restricted to any unique types of institutions or modes of social action: “There is, for example, rationalization of mystical contemplation, that is of an attitude which, viewed from other departments of life, is specifically irrational, just as much as there are rationalizations of economic life, of technique, of scientific research, of military training, of law and administration. Furthermore, each one of these fields may be rationalized in terms of very different ultimate values and ends, and what is rational from one point of view may well be irrational from another.” (Weber 2005, xxxvii–xxxix).
- 4.
Besides his notion of communism, Merton explicates three other imperatives—universalism, desinterestedness, and organized skepticism—in order to demarcate specific sets of institutionalized values and norms widely legitimized in scientific communities.
- 5.
Cohen and Levinthal first coined this approach in terms of “absorptive capacity”, defined as “the ability of a firm to recognize the value of new, external information, assimilate it, and apply it to commercial ends is critical to its innovative capabilities” (Cohen and Levinthal 1990, 128).
- 6.
It has to be mentioned that other interpretations assess the entanglement of capitalism and science consider related implications less critical. Especially authors like Etzkowitz acknowledge that “[academia] has become entrepreneurial” (Etzkowitz 2003, 109) emphasize the upside of these tendencies in terms of “a significant productive force of economy” (Etzkowitz 2003, 552).
- 7.
Although Thornton and Ocasio’s effort to expand the institutional logics framework often remains vague in terms of definitions, references and applications, they explicate pretty clear that “institutional logics do not emerge from organizational fields—they are locally instantiated and enacted in organizational fields” (Thornton et al. 2012, 119).
- 8.
Indeed, DiMaggio and Powell’s definition of organizational fields as consisting of “those organizations that, in the aggregate, constitute a recognized area of institutional life” resembles some of Bourdieu’s thoughts about fields and its boundaries: “The limits of the field are situated at the point where the effects of the field cease.” (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, 100).
- 9.
Bourdieu generally distinguishes between three “fundamental guises” (Bourdieu 2010 [1986], 82): economic capital like e.g. money or property rights, cultural capital like educational qualifications, and social capital acquired by formal titles or nobility.
- 10.
- 11.
In one of his more recent papers, Hoffman suggests that researches who address (organizational) fields should embrace questions on how collective rationalities emerge rather than asking what impacts collective rationality has on a given field: “[…] how it is developed, which field members contribute to its development, and maintenance, how it is transmitted to other actors, and how it changes over time” (Wooten and Hoffman 2008, 138).
- 12.
While this perspective generally suggests that any layer of meso-level order like e.g. organizations, social movements, or governmental systems are themselves made up of strategic action fields (see ibid. 9), constellations in which the relationship between nested fields resembles hierarchical traits resemble a system that looks like “a traditional Russian doll: with any number of smaller fields nested inside larger ones” (ibid.).
- 13.
Regarding the dimension of horizontal relationships, Fligstein and McAdam distinguish between two qualities of correlation. While proximity refers to the degree to which SAFs maintain recurring ties of mutual affection, the distinction between dependent and interdependent fields measures aspect of power as it captures the extent and direction of influence that characterizes the relationship between any two fields (Fligstein and McAdam 2012, 18). The authors believe that “[a]rmed with these distinctions, it is now easier to appreciate just how complicated and potentially consequential are the ties that link any given strategic action field to its broader field environment” (ibid. 19).
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Ferdinand, JP. (2018). Theorizing Innovation Communities. In: Entrepreneurship in Innovation Communities. Contributions to Management Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66842-0_3
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