ABSTRACT
The chapter zooms out from the detailed studies of S-RET innovation and adoption, and provides a longitudinal analysis of user activities in the proliferation of heat pumps in Finland. It does so through the biographies of artifacts and practices approach and presents a new type of analysis in transition studies. The ethnographically detailed and historically extended longitudinal investigation on heat pumps in Finland spans from the beginning of the transition to the late acceleration phase, a considerably longer span than the previously detailed analyses on users in transitions.
The analysis shows that users have been active in adaptation and adjustment, user innovation, championing projects, forming user communities, user-side intermediation, market formation, and legitimacy building. These user activities primarily feed into each other and spur on the diffusion of S-RET. While most of the user activities shape the expanding technological niche to some extent, in particular, the increased adoption rates also affect other actors in the expanding niche, as well as related regime actors and the broader heating system landscape in a particular country setting.
The analysis in Chapter 5 questions the theory- and literature-review-based assumptions about particular user activities being associated with specific transition phases. Most user activities take place from the early upscaling phase to the late acceleration phase. While intermediation, market creation, and legitimacy building intensify from the take-off and early acceleration phase of transition onwards, this is particularly thanks to the emergence of the internet communities discussed in Chapter 4. Asserting the relative importance or incidence of different user activities beyond this would not be warranted, particularly as the relative incidence, let alone importance, becomes next to impossible to study reliably.
The chapter further theorizes that the development and use of S-RET in each new country context should not be seen as a linear diffusion process or even a quasi-linear social-embedding process; it should be seen as an extended innofusion process, wherein technology, market, technology use, and governance characteristics evolve in tandem, typically riddled by an uneven pace of advancement and facing various hindrances. The importance of the innofusion view of transitions is underpinned by the fact that most transition to sustainable technologies in most countries and regions are, necessarily, early or later followers, and not taking place in globally early settings. Ironically, the dominant transition models are anchored to broad-stroke histories and detailed studies of globally early settings in sustainable change, which are in fact be rather poor “model organisms” for understanding how the majority of transitions play out on the ground in specific countries, areas, and locales. The analysis of the early-follower country context of Finnish heat pumps opens questions as to the adequacy of transition models for the logical majority of settings.
