Cultural Enthusiasm, Resistance and the Societal Embedding of New Technologies: Psychotropic Drugs in the 20th Century

Abstract

The societal embedding of new (medical) technologies involves not only market success, but also regulation and public acceptance. Cultural enthusiasm about their benefits and social concerns about their risks and dangers are in this respect important. Conceptualizing interactions between product championing, cultural enthusiasm and resistance, the article analyses three patterns of societal embedding: (1) hype-cycle, (2) contested embedding, and (3) controversy and stalemate. A fourth pattern of waves of enthusiasm and concern is proposed for technologies with unexpected side effects. This pattern is explored and elaborated with a longitudinal case study of the introduction of a particular form of medical technology: psychotropic drugs such as Veronal and Valium in the period 1900-2000.

Comparing technological hype cycles: Towards a theory

“…Particularly on the field level, it is likely that a setting that combines research domains with the business opportunities of one or more industrial sectors will positively influence the options to reorient expectations after disappointment. Indeed, according to Geels et al, diverse and rich environments enable actors in the innovation process to redefine expectations and thus cope with disappointment constructively [21]. A related aspect has been explored by Brown and Michael that distinguish between emerging technologies that affect established actor networks, and those that give raise to completely new networks [14].…”

“…For instance, Borup et al [1] as well as Brown and Michael [14] indicate that the specificity of a technology's envisioned application plays a significant role in determining how pronounced hype cycles will occur. Moreover, environmental factors, such as the funding and actors structure of a field [4,7], the existence or absence of product champions [20], or the complexity of the regulatory, business and wider societal setting in general [21], have been claimed to influence hype patterns.…”

Making the right connections: biological networks in the light of evolution

“…The application of network approaches to biological systems has gone through something of a hype cycle,99 where the ‘peak of inflated expectations’ corresponded to the widespread excitement, now passed, about scale-free networks and purely topology-based network approaches more generally, but a ‘plateau of productivity’ has not yet been reached. Part of the excess hype comprised the over-zealous application of ideas across very different fields, when the hypothesis (power-law degree distributions) was both weak and in many cases incorrect 16.…”

How stakeholder shape innovation in controversial industries: the biotechnology industry in Germany

“…We take our starting point from the structural analysis of an industry (Porter 1980(Porter , 2008 in order to analyse the biotechnology industry in Germany. This "primarily industry driven" analysis of the five competitive forces (Spanos and Lioukas 2001, p. 910) is complemented by the PESTEL analysis as new technologies need not only to be integrated within the industry and the market but technology analysis must further consider the social-political integration of these technologies (Geels et al 2007). …”