Failure through Success: Co-construction Processes of Imaginaries (of Participation) and Group Development

Abstract

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.

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“…• the gap between different classes of society is widening [Greenwood, Hinings, 1993;Hanushek et al, 2019] • climate change will exacerbate various stresses among the inhabitants, nations, and companies [Staffell, Pfenninger, 2018;Curtis et al, 2017] • new menaces, among them cyber risks, terrorism, plagues, and influence [Duarte, 2020] • technological changes impact the general profiles of employment [Franken, Wattenberg, 2019] • new ways of life more or less linked to ecology begin to appear [Loiseau et al, 2016] • confidence in political decision makers decreases [LeVeck, Narang, 2017] • co-construction of local projects are increasingly necessary [Froese, Mevissen, 2020] • a new form of competition develops between regions (even in the same state) and even city centers are opposed to the peripheries [Hauswedell et al, 2019;Hassink et al, 2019]. In this context, we believe that Competitive and Strategic Intelligence cannot be absent from this environment and if we want to enlarge its impact upon society, new forms of action are necessary.…”

Dialectic narratives, hostile actors, and Earth’s resources in Saskatchewan, Canada

“…In 1991, 70% of power production was coal. Although this figure has reduced to only 28%, the future pathway to net zero emissions in Saskatchewan’s power production is not clear and at the current time future options are limited, so that it is increasingly pressing to build an imaginary, or a constructed version of the future (Frose and Mevissen 2020 ).…”