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Enhancing Socio-technical Governance: Targeting Inequality in Innovation Through Inclusivity Mainstreaming

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Abstract

Socio-technical governance has been of long-standing interest to science and technology studies and science policy studies. Recent calls for midstream modulation direct attention to a more complicated model of innovation, and a new place for social scientists to intervene in research, design and development. This paper develops and expands this earlier work to demonstrate how a suite of concepts from science and technology studies and innovation studies can be used as a heuristic tool to conduct real-time evaluation and reflection during the process of innovation – upstream, midstream, and downstream. The result of this new protocol is inclusivity mainstreaming: determining if and how marginalized peoples and perspectives are being maximally incorporated into the model of innovation, while highlighting common problems of inequality that need to be addressed.

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Acknowledgments

Logan Williams thanks NSF DDIG 1153308, the CAORC Multi-country Fellowship, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and Michigan State University for the funding that allowed her to collect the data about Aurolab and Tilganga-FHIOL from 2011-2012 and in 2017. Both authors thank David J. Hess, and two anonymous referees for their comments on an early draft.

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  1. Inclusive Research by Design SM Logan Williams Consultancy Services, LLC, P.O. Box 2374, Cumberland, MD, 21503, USA

    Logan D. A. Williams

  2. Technology and Society, Stony Brook University, 1412 Computer Science, Stony Brook, NY, 11794-4404, USA

    Thomas S. Woodson

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Williams, L.D.A., Woodson, T.S. Enhancing Socio-technical Governance: Targeting Inequality in Innovation Through Inclusivity Mainstreaming. Minerva 57, 453–477 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-019-09375-4

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