Participation is an important but little understood concept in science and innovation. While participation promises the production of new knowledge, social justice, and economic growth, little research has been done on its contribution to innovation processes at the group level. The concept of imaginaries can provide a window into these processes. Adopting a micro-sociological perspective, we examined the interplay between imaginaries of participation and group development within a long-term ethnographic observation study of an initiative, Energy Avant-garde, as it pursued the development of a decentralized, self-contained, and entirely renewable energy system in one German region. We scaled down the macrolevel concept of imaginaries to the group level. We found that group imaginaries are a resource for bringing order to a group and that a group is a resource for creating, operationalizing, revising, and sustaining imaginaries. We describe a “failure-through-success” story: while imaginaries initially promoted group cohesion, creativity, and productivity, in later stages, these effects were impeded by group dynamics. We therefore distinguish between process imaginaries and outcome imaginaries and conclude that, inherently, participation must be managed and employed at the appropriate stages to make valuable contributions.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

DAS PHÄNOMEN: DIE DOPPELTE MISSION DER SOZIOLOGIE "Finally, with the light shed by social dynamics on the spontaneous modification of social structures and the consequent progress of society in the past, and further guided by the established law of social uniformitarianism, which enables us to judge the future by the past, sociology has now begun, not only in some degree to forecast the future of society, but to venture suggestions at least as to how the established principles of the science may be applied to the future advantageous modification of existing social structures. In other words, sociology, established as a pure science, is now entering upon its applied stage, which is the great practical object for which it exists." (Ward, 1907, S. 587, Hervorhebung der Autorin) Lester Ward, einer der großen US-Soziologen der ersten Stunde (Calhoun, 2007), 1 ließ es sich nicht nehmen, in seiner Antrittsrede als erster Präsident der American Sociological Society im Jahr 1907 feierlich zu verkünden, dass die Soziologie nun endlich ihr angewandtes Stadium und damit auch den Sinn ihres Daseins erreicht habe. 2 Ob die Soziologie jedoch die Mission hat, sich in den 1 Zu Werk und Wirken von Lester Ward sowie zur frühen amerikanischen Soziologie siehe auch Calhoun (2007) und Turner/Turner (1990). 2 Er geht in seiner Rede sogar so weit, die Soziologie als eine Wissenschaft zu beschreiben, die der Physik in ihren Prinzipien nicht nur in nichts nachsteht, sondern ihr zudem überlegen ist: "[Sociology] has not only discovered the laws of society; it has discovered the principles according to which social operations take place. It has gone farther even than physics, which has thus far only discovered the law of gravitation, but has not yet discovered its cause or principle. Sociology has not only established