Memo+14-Emerging+Narratives

This memo should describe what you think is going on with the phenomena you are describing. I’ll post chapter 3 from Joe Maxwell’s book, “Conceptual Context: What You Think is Going on,” which includes a number of examples in diagram form. The “background and significance” section of the Fortun-Simmonds grant is also a good example. If you create a diagram, make sure there is enough associated explanation for others to understand it.

I tried a narrative format for a presentation talk at the upcoming MIT graduate student conference on this topic, it should work out nicely for this memo:

“Environmental Movements, Conflicts and Industry Change: The Case of Bioplastics” Talk paper for MIT Graduate Conference 2009  There is growing recognition of the important role of social movements in driving the “greening” of industry. In this paper, I argue that the relationship between social movements and industry change is complicated by environmental groups promoting contradictory goals. This paper examines the effect of such contradictions on the developing “bioplastics” industry in the United States. In this industry environmental advocates and entrepreneurs run into conflict as they promote their own visions of sustainability and innovation. This analysis is to forward the debate on the social construction of technology as well as social movement scholarship from sociology and anthropology. I discuss several instances of conflict that have occurred within the bioplastics field including waste processing of goods, consumption and consumers, and sources of the feedstocks for these polymers. I will show how the success of early environmental movements can create hurdles for subsequent movements and how the sociocultural backdrop influence the available pathways of innovation and intervention. The discussion develops the limitations in social movement and industry change research and how introducing notions of movement heterogeneity, institutionalization and temporality can improve the analysis of this scholarship. __Introduction__  For the second time in a less than century the scarcity and cost of petroleum has forced large numbers of individuals to reconsider how we fuel our technologies and create goods for consumption. In the 1970's there were calls for frugality and a burgeoning environmental movement that wanted to move away from oil [slide of people waiting in line for fuel]. Most recently the conversation has been about efficiency, innovation, and national security [slide of something from DARPA or otherwise]. In either case there have been enormous numbers of individuals that have concerned themselves with the issue of fuel for transportation, electricity, and heating. Of less concern has been those polymers that exist in our day to day existence that are just as subject to the petroleum shifts of these eras. Plastics is my concern at this point. I can go a day without driving a car [slide of me walking], but I find it difficult to fathom how to live without the bits that are the substrate of the laptop I am working with and the shoes that I walked into the room on [slide of me walking barefoot and then rapid screen shift to power outage 'blip']. With this in mind me newest obsession has been to look at alternatives to petro-plastics (or dino-plastics depending on your proclivities). Shockingly, to me at least, biobased polymers are not a novel innovation of this decade, but have been part of U.S. history since Henry Ford [slide transition with a picture of Model-T on left and then transition to similar/same car of bioplastic type]. In fact, Ford not only produced a bioplastic car that could run on biodiesel he also was a major proponent of using agriculture goods for industrial feedstocks, historically known as the chemurgy movement. Today there are several countries with several industries and research institutions each working on developing new characteristics and classes of bioplastics. __Frameworks of analysis and problematics__  I will be limiting myself to our contemporary case where I will focus on the activities of environmental movements as they have influenced the evolution and shaping of technologies and institutions surrounding the plastic industry and the newly forming bioplastic industry [slide have a list of 1. movements, 2. plastics, 3. bioplastics, highlight areas of particular focus, return to plastics for recycling comments and transition]. What I want to attempt is to bring together the work from the sociology of social movements and the anthropology of social movements together for the benefit of both fields. David Hess (2007) in American Anthropology has recently worked on reintroducing generalizations of themes and repertoires into anthropology of science. In this particular article he outlines the different traditions occurring in social movement studies and how anthropologists have refrained from developing new theoretical and conceptual models out of topical research. At the same time sociologists often miss the nuances occurring in the language games, diversity of actors, and cultural norms within and between movements and their objects of contention [slide show citation and relevant quotations]. In his book Alternative Pathways... he attempts a synthesis of both schools and succeeds to an extent through his conceptualizing of alternative pathway formation through the intervention of standard and not so standard social movement actors [same slide, new citation, potential quote]. While I have found his work useful in the examination of my own field of interest there are voids that seem to be present.  After reading the book I thought that the methodology and conceptual framework would be an ideal beginning for whatever technological subject matter I happened to want to make my object of study. ?(un)Fortunately? as I started working through this idea of bioplastics (as a not so subtle rhetorical framing trick I'm going to be calling bioplastics "plastic" and oil based plastics "petroplastic") I noticed that there were subtle, and not so subtle, differences in what I was seeing and the empirical explications within much of the literature on social movements and technological change. I'll use the Bourdieuan concept of fields since this concept is prevalent in Hess's works. Let's consider a contemporary case of alternative pathway development. BPA came out on the market decades ago as a plastic additive and protective coating on canned goods. Fast forward to now and BPA has become contentious enough that despite the best efforts of industry and regulators, our dominant networks, advocacy groups and consumers, non-dominant networks of actors, were able to shift the utilization of this product and potentially get it on a path of sunsetting. The parallel with my plastic scheme is that there are consumers, social movements, and dominant actors in play with alternative pathways and 'better' products extending from the field of contention. However, there are other networks that are not present in this situation that makes plastics much more complicated in that a breakdown in one dominant/non-dominant field does not mean automatic claims to success. __Bioplastics and iterative fields of contention__ [slide of image of recycling memo against bioplastics] The first instance that I encountered was when I began looking into post-consumer collection and waste management of these plastics. I realized that even as I was thinking about advocating for a particular vision of a plastic future the recycling bin that I had just taken out to the curb was going to get a great deal more complicated [slide of blue bin and Germany style of waste separation]. I'll give a quick introduction to how environmental movements helped change the culture of waste and the framing of "waste" in the United States in order to get some grounding in how plastics might upset a large number of groups that I appreciate [slide Time line of waste for burning discourse, moments of conflict, discourse changes, and groups of relevance].  So here I am kicking myself for my ignorance and hubris for unreflexively thinking that plastics are an automatic alternative pathway away from the troublesome petroplastic technology [maybe slide of quote on reflexivity, perhaps from Advocacy in Bhopal or Winner even more funny from a definition of STS]. And then the hits keep coming as the next instance of tension comes about when I begin to realize that large biotech companies are focusing on GM sources of polymers, most of the starches used in PLA (the most popular biopolymer) come from China and end up in Nebraska, and there are no existing composting culture in the U.S. or institution for these products to go to.  Stepping back I have begun to realize that it is the not the undone science or the technological artifact formation that I am concerned with. Alternatives to the worst products will occur through epistemic community formation, social movements, and expanding environmental awareness. The trouble with bioplastics is that it is impossible to understand how an sustainable pathway can exist when looking only at individual levels of analysis. It is not the feedstocks, product characteristics, ownership of production, consumption patterns or waste management that are individually important it is the industries, cultures and institutions that constrain innovation. The closure mechanisms and innovations in technoscience are not just a dynamic of user-product or movement-science dyad. Rather, for plastics to be the sustainable technology that advocates hope for my research has to expand beyond a focus on the initial linkages of networks surrounding this product and move through the chain of institutions that form around the product or must manage the existence of this new class of good as it appears. Each link in the chain produces a different conception of what a sustainable good is and new fields of contention and networks of actors. To fulfill a goal of epistemic modernization it is seems prudent to target each link in concert. To do otherwise limits the potentials of developing sustainable technological pathways out of product oriented change.  I am less concerned about the boundaries present in changing scientific communities or including consumers in technological decision making as I am in understanding what it takes to change a technological system from cradle to cradle [slide a) pods without connections of research institutions, industry, consumers, regulatory agencies etc. b) transition to commodity chain and relevant networking of farmers, processors, manufacturers, regulations, composters, recyclers, etc.]  Now, do I show a slide of what a research program would look like and potential outcomes?

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