UTFacultiesBMSDept TPSSTEPSEventsSTEPS Colloquium with Zahar Koretsky

STEPS Colloquium with Zahar Koretsky How are technologies abandoned? Review, conceptual framework and case of cloud seeding

abstract

A lot of attention has been paid on supporting new technologies than on abandoning well-established but undesirable technologies. Clearly, abandoning, or phasing out, technologies is not a self-evident reversal of innovation processes, but brings along many empirical, theoretical and practical questions about particular society and technology dynamics. Phase-outs vary: nuclear power plants are decommissioned, ozone-depleting aerosols were banned, Betamax was outcompeted, while bowler hats are simply out of fashion. Some technologies were phased out in a structured way, whereas for other the process was much messier and incomplete. We need to know how to start, steer and finalise a phase-out to be more certain of its consequences, and we need to understand both the variability between phase-outs and the underlying mechanisms. This need has been long acknowledged, but not met, in innovation studies and STS literature.

I will present preliminary results of a systematic review of literature that addresses the problem of how to abandon technologies. I will present how social practice theory is fruitful to explain technology phase-outs, and illustrate this with a case of cloud seeding. I will discuss the differences between phase-outs as differences between technologies, and, from this perspective, the conditions under which well-embedded technologies might be phased out.

Zahar Koretsky, Maastricht University