Thinking about individual actor-level perspectives in sociotechnical transitions: A comment on the transitions research agenda

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Highlights

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    Individual actor-related factors are obscured in high level sociotechnical transitions concepts.

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    Two ways of connecting macro and micro processes and conceptions are proposed.

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    These are the use of socially inclusive psychological concepts and multi-stage research designs.

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    Insights from organisational psychology are relevant to transition management and strategic innovation programmes.

Abstract

The 2019 STRN research agenda identifies connecting the different 'levels' of transitions processes as a worthwhile line of work. Individual actor-level processes are an example of those at the 'micro' level that are lost through the aggregation involved in high level sociotechnical transitions concepts. This short commentary discusses ways of connecting individual actor level processes to transitions concepts, where 'individual' refers to individual human actors. For this purpose, the commentary draws on social psychology and shows how this particular discipline is relevant to more than simply consumption and technology acceptance. The commentary also identifies more general strategies relevant to the bridging of levels, beyond psychology, namely: (i) the use of concepts that inherently bridge the individual and the social; and (ii) the use of multi-stage, sequenced studies that track the influence of different types of processes through particular sociotechnical systems.

Section snippets

Introduction: background and rationale

The relevance of individual and collective actors has long been recognised as important in the diffusion of technological innovations, particularly in relation to user acceptance and adoption. Models and frameworks applied in innovation diffusion contexts include, among others: the Technology Acceptance Model (Davis, 1985); the Theory of Planned Behaviour (Ajzen, 1991); Diffusion of Innovation theory (Rogers, 1995); and motivational models (Davis et al., 1992; Taherdoost, 2018). Similarly,

General options for a social psychology of socio-technical transitions

Upham et al. (2019a) make an extended case for making more use of the wealth of social psychological research, theory and concepts available, when considering the roles of (human) actors in transitions. As this is not referred to in the agenda developed by Köhler et al. (2109), here we summarise three general options for a social psychology of socio-technical transitions, also following Bögel and Upham (2018); Upham et al. (2019b); and Bögel et al. (2019a):

  • (i)

    Make use of the more social of social

Multi-scale research designs and the choice of social psychological theories

The two options of multi-scale research designs and using the more social of social psychological concepts are linked, in that they offer related but partly substitutable routes to bridging scales of analysis involving individuals. Dealing first with multi-scale research design, one option is to adopt a critical realist ontology that explicitly recognises that qualitatively different types of process are (often simultaneously) involved in particular transitions contexts (Svensson and Nikoleris,

Individuals in collective units: organizational behaviour and collaboration

The 2019 STRN research agenda highlights a research gap specifically in terms of connections between businesses and industries and wider transitions processes (Köhler et al., 2019). With this in mind, here we consider the relevance of just two, exemplar, interrelated social psychological aspects of organizational behaviour, namely those of collaboration and participation, highlighting the various challenges to this at intra- and intergroup levels (Dovidio and Banfield, 2015). These aspects

Conclusion

Apparently, more than 20,000 peer reviewed papers make some reference to transitions (Köhler et al., 2019); yet to our knowledge few explicitly seek to bridge scale and epistemic differences. This is understandable, but understanding and modeling past, present and future transitions in depth does require bridging scales. Here we have proposed three main options for this that draw on psychology, but there are relevant concepts from other disciplines that can also be brought to bear to both

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