ABSTRACT
The concluding chapter spells out the overall import of the analyses to the three theory traditions motivating the book, namely innovation studies, transition studies, and science and technology studies (S&TS). The importance of users in sociotechnical change is not limited to just providing technological solution variety in the onset of sociotechnical change, to then be exploited or discarded by the market as a selection environment. Instead, we see continued user innovation and peer assistance that goes into tailoring the technology to new settings in which it becomes gradually adopted. The influence of users reaches beyond inventions into competence building and peer-to-peer interaction, providing wide support for adoption and adaptation and othe r user intermediation, legitimacy building, and market creation.
Internet communities allow for the plurality of user orientations to come together and feed into each other. They provide a wide reach that is independent of physical locality and access-time coordination: it is these capacities that render them effective new energy community forms. This stands in contrast to community energy and innovation communities that are unlikely to grow into substantial forces for multifaceted sociotechnical change unless they grow into diverse and trans-local coordinated movements. Their limitations for doing so have to do with the confines set by space and uniformity of orientations and competencies with respect to “serving” tens of thousands of diverse peers.
Overall the import of users in sociotechnical change is best theorized as being comprised of a series of configurational movements that gradually congeal sociotechnical relations into increasingly stable objects and market relations. Such an extended innofusion process provides an alternative account of sociotechnical change to that of social-embedding and generic-transition models that have assumed relatively stable technology characteristics and adopter identities after the early pre-development phase.
The concluding chapter further elaborates what it would mean to move to more user-driven energy business and energy policy. The present actions energy companies and energy technology companies flag as “customer-centered” and “user-driven” mostly just tune their offerings for the customers in a manner that has long been regarded as business-as-usual in most other sectors such as ICT. Deeper user orientation would follow from business and policy geared to work in partnership with consumers in realizing more ambitious low-carbon solutions and yet deeper user-driven orientation would depart from the actions already taken by consumers to develop radical business and policy actions.
