Electric mobility analysis: contributions from sociology

Abstract

This paper discusses ways that the question of social acceptability of eco-innovation can usefully be addressed with sociological methodologies and theoretical frameworks contributions, both in the study and the management of innovation processes. It will first discuss the types of contributions that sociology can provide into innovation management, through a specific conception of users. The particularity of sociological contribution reposes on the vision of the users. It will secondly show how the sociological approach allows to observe and build up a picture of the interactions between the different types of economic actors involved in the innovation process. Our examples are drawn from a program implementing intelligent charging infrastructures for electric vehicles. We show how economic sociology of uses and consumption permits to define user positionality in the innovation network. The understanding of the interactional processes inside our socio-technical space permits us to identify institutional impediments that slow down social acceptability of an eco-innovation such as the electric vehicle.Biographical notes: Amélie Coulbaut-Lazzarini is a Researcher in social sciences at the University of Versailles Saint-Quentin en Yvelines. Her PhD was in Sports Sciences and about sport organisations, territories, identities and governance. Her current research focuses on uses of energy and electromobility, as daily practices of users and in a perspective of efficiency wanted by designers. She also works on the governance of collaborative projects in which these themes are developed. She combines approaches from sociology of organisations, of innovation and some other part of sociology, with ethnographic tools and some perspective from social geography.

Making supply chains more sustainable through customer and consumer engagement: The case of rare metals

“…From this perspective, the user or consumer can play a key role in sustainable product development and can be “an actor in the innovation process” (Coulbaut‐Lazzarini & Danteur, 2017, p. 59); indeed, Zimmerling et al (2017) point out that this can give companies a significant competitive advantage. In their study, Zimmerling et al (2017) explain that users were involved in the various phases of product creation, from the basic product strategy to market launch, and that they were truly “considered as user co‐developers” (Zimmerling et al, 2017, p. 6).…”