ABSTRACT

In this chapter, methodology rests on extensive archival research, complemented by in-depth interviews (Foddy 1993; Rubin and Rubin 1995; Denzin and Lincoln 2000; Wengraf 2001). Archival research included regulatory archives and media archives, as well as industrial archives and the archives of the ETC Group. In their discussion about structuration and institutionalization, Barley and Tolbert (1997) stressed that the investigation of how patterns of interactions lead to the emergence of a new institution was a difficult task and that to account for the links between actions and the emergence of new institutions, it was important to have a dynamic model rendering structuration through time. In my study, the interviews were conducted over a period of four years, between 2003 and 2007. I met Pat Mooney, the head of the ETC Group, several times, and combined the information coming from these interviews with interviews of key stakeholders in the nanotechnology debate: researchers, entrepreneurs, journalists, and nanotechnology officials of various national and intergovernmental institutions. The interviews took place in Belgium, Canada, France, the UK, and the U.S. (see appendix for a chronology of nanotechnology involvement by the ETC Group). A template for the analysis was drawn from DiMaggio’s statement asserting that institutional changes “arise when organized actors with sufficient resources (the institutional entrepreneurs) see in them an opportunity to realize an interest that they value highly” (DiMaggio 1988, 14). So I began my study of the ETC Group as an institutional entrepreneur by identifying the actors and looking at how they were organized. Then I looked at what resources they used and how they mobilized them and, finally, I analyzed how they “realized an interest that they value highly.”