Reconfigurations in sustainability transitions : a systematic and critical review

Two streams of literature have become especially prominent in understanding social change toward sustainability within the past decades: the research on socio-technical transitions and applications of social practice theory. The aim of this article is to contribute to efforts to create dialogue between these two approaches. We do this by focusing on the concept of reconfiguration, which has become a much-used, but poorly defined notion in the discussion on sustainability transitions. To understand what is defined as reconfiguration in systems and practices, and how the understanding of reconfiguration in regimes could benefit from insights about reconfiguration in practices, we conducted a …

User Involvement and Entrepreneurial Action

Involving users in the innovation process is a subject of much research, experimentation, and debate. Less attention has been given to the limits to user involvement that ensue from specific organizational characteristics. This article explores barriers to the utilization of users’ input in two small companies developing interactive digital applications. We contrast our findings to earlier research involving large companies to identify features of entrepreneurial sensemaking and action that influence the utilization of users’ input. We find that the small companies follow a distinct action rationality, leading to rapid implementation of some user inputs, and defensiveness toward others. Bot…

Guest Editors Introduction: Design-Use Relationships in Sociotechnical Change