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Problematizing 'Innovation'
as a Critical Project
Lucy Suchman & Libby Bishop
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To cite this article: Lucy Suchman & Libby Bishop (2000): Problematizing
'Innovation' as a Critical Project, Technology Analysis & Strategic Management,
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Technology Analysis & Strategic Management, Vol. 12, No. 3, 2000
Problematizing ‘Innovation’ as a Critical Project
LUCY SUCHMAN & LIBBY BISHOP
A BSTRACT Based on research experience within US corporations, this paper examines the rhetoric
and practices of organizational and technological ‘innovation’. Our aim is to identify discourses of
innovation as a site for critical studies. Two cases are used to illustrate ways in which initiatives
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launched in the name of change are based in traditional cultural frames that work in practice to conserve
existing institutional orders. We close with some observations on alternative, indigenous sources of
innovation and the conditions required to sustain them.
Introduction
At the end of the millennium we seem to go on recreating our past . . . the
expectation of clear transitions and dramatic transformations—moving upward and
onward—and the feeling that we must be living in a time of major social progress
is slow to leave us.1
In this paper we focus on discourses and associated practices of ‘innovation’ as a site
for critical studies. Our primary starting place is empirical, based in our experience as
researchers working inside large corporations. As researchers we have been among
various constituencies charged with delivering relevant knowledge, methodologies and
technologies to those designated as agents of organizational change. Our interest here is
to re ect on initiatives in which we have been enrolled and what we have learned about
the production of ‘innovation’ as an imperative in late 20th century organizational life.
One line of continuity in studies of work, organizations and management has been a
focus on relations between technology and labor. We maintain that focus in what follows,
tracing out the rhetorical and practical traÝ c that ows across initiatives in new product
development, work redesign and organizational change. Our interest is in developing the
proposition that valuation of innovation and the ‘new’ comprises the extension of a
deeply traditional frame in western, particularly American, culture. This frame operates,
moreover, within a cultural imaginary2 that places the individual actor over against a
naturalized environment—a competitive eld of action—that necessitates a certain order
of response. This holds equally for corporate actors, for whom innovation is characterized
as essential for ‘survival’ in a changing competitive environment, and for workers, for
whom change involves sloughing oÚ obsolete skills and acquiring new ones as a
prerequisite for continued employment. There are no heroes and villains in our story,
albeit that the bene ts and costs of innovation initiatives are distributed unevenly across
the various actors involved. Construed as individual actors, corporations and workers are
Lucy Suchman is at Lancaster University and Libby Bishop is at WestEd, San Francisco. Address correspondence to:
Lucy Suchman, 55 Borden Street, Toronto, Ontario, M5S 2M8 Canada.
ISSN 0953-732 5 print; 1465-399 0 online/00/010327-07 © 2000 Taylor & Francis Ltd
328 L. Suchman & L. Bishop
equally entrained in a frame of change-as-necessity. Within this frame the burden of
change falls to the individual—whether corporation or worker—who must ‘get with the
program’ or be left behind.
Producing Images: Acme Black Box
For corporations engaged in the production of technologies it is an accepted premise that
innovation in ever-shorter time frames and continual expansion into new markets are the
twin requirements for success. This premise underwrites the operations of Acme Black
Box Co., a large producer of document-related technologies.3 Formed in the early 1950s,
Acme for many years dominated the market for light lens photocopiers and the business
referred to within Acme as ‘putting marks on paper’. In the 1970s, Acme began to
reposition itself in the emerging market for computer-based, ‘digital’ artifacts. Over the
next two decades this initiative remained largely in R&D, while the primary revenue
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source for the company continued to be its light lens copier products, with their associated
supplies and maintenance services.
A growing preoccupation for Acme Black Box over the past decade has been the
question of how to move the company from being a producer of stand-alone, hardware-
based products to a producer of networked, software technologies as well as, more
recently, associated consulting services. Framed by senior management as a question of
wholesale transformation, this eÚ ort is seen to require thoroughgoing changes not only
in the company’s technology oÚ erings but in its workforce as well. These elements—new
products, a redirected workforce, and market repositioning—comprise the pieces from
which a new corporate identity is to be constructed.
Reinventing Identity
The rst wave in Acme’s reinvention of itself from a light lens copier manufacturer to a
producer of digital systems began in the early 1990s, when the company launched a new
‘corporate identity program’.4 This process involved the adoption of a secondary
descriptor, ‘The Document Company’ following the company name. This descriptor was
intended, among other things, to de ne a territory for the company’s products more
open-ended than that suggested by the traditional copier product line. The company
name ensured recognition, while the descriptor ‘The Document Company’ aÚ orded a
strategic ambiguity amenable to expansion across new document forms and media.
In the mid-1990s the new corporate identity initiative entered a second phase, marked
by engagement of a public relations rm that delivered to Acme a comprehensive
‘identity program’ and prescriptions for its implementation. Three central elements of
the program were a new color, a new logo and, most intriguingly, an inversion of the
company name. Now, instead of occupying the position of descriptor, ‘The Document
Company’ became the leading signature, with Acme as a secondary clause.
Through this process, social identity, in the form of a corporate image, was cast as
something to be designed and implemented like the new technologies that are the
company’s products. The projects of innovation in identity and products went hand in
hand, insofar as the new image was deemed necessary to successful marketing of a new
product line. In this sense image followed product, directed by the needs and desires of
participation in new markets. At the same time, the creation of a new corporate identity
led the production of new technologies, insofar as it worked as a kind of directive to
organization members in how their own work should proceed. In this sense technologies
‘Innovation’ as a Critical Project 329
and identities are self-referential, as digital technologies de ne a new entrepreneurial
terrain into which the company and its products must be placed.
Repositioning Products
In order to succeed within the territory de ned by the new terrain, Acme must not only
reinvent its identity but also oÚ er products identi able as digital. The Document Systems
announced in the mid-1990s represented the rst of what promised to be a lineage of
digital products. Management wisdom within the company assigns central responsibility
for the success or failure of these products to sales personnel, speci cally their willingness
and ability to grasp the implications of the new digital product line and convey it
eÚ ectively to customers. Instructions for how to sell the product were provided in the
form of ‘The Knowledge Kit,’ a collection of scripts packaged in three-ring binders with
accompanying video, CD ROM, and diskette of Powerpoint slides. The key message of
the kit was that the Document Systems are unlike previous company oÚ erings: that they
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are ‘a totally new category’ of machine.
One aspect of the Knowledge Kit that interests us here is the extent to which the
marketing of these products is oriented to the problem not of their functionality (though
of course that is part of what sales people need to learn), but of their identities. In
particular, the products must be presented to the customer as ‘new’, as qualitatively
diÚ erent from either the company’s previous products or the oÚ ering of the competition.
To this end, the kit presents all of the materials needed to conduct a Document Systems
‘Awareness Workshop’. The workshop is implemented in ten modules, including scripts
(each of which takes the form of a text to be spoken and instructions for which of
the accompanying Powerpoint slides should be presented). A note on the title page
explains that:
The goal of the [Awareness] workshop is to enable participants with the skills and
knowledge to successfully manage the Document System selling process. (Facilitator’s
Guide, p. 2)
The phrasing ‘to enable participants with skills and knowledge’ suggests that the sales
representatives themselves are a technology in need of upgrading, requiring additional
features or capabilities. Like the corporate identity package, the sales training kit has
become a kind of technology—an assemblage of artifacts and techniques for image
management, treated in turn as a central aspect of the positioning of new products
(including their positioning as new). Through these practices identity creation is rendered
as a kind of new technology to be implemented and technologies are assigned new
identities in the social world.
Remaking Labor: Midwest Insurance
While the traditional objects of innovation projects have been technologies, the case of
Acme points toward the blurring of boundaries between discourses of technological and
human development. New products require associated innovations in those who would
produce and sell them. To consider the project of innovation in the available workforce
more closely, we draw on a four-year research project in a large, multi-line insurance
company that we will call here Midwest Insurance. In response to competition in the
nancial services industry, the company is ‘innovating’ by rede ning its corporate
direction away from a primary reliance on auto and casualty lines, and toward broader
nancial products, e.g. life, health, and long-term care insurance. For Midwest, the
330 L. Suchman & L. Bishop
rhetoric does not so sharply characterize these innovations as ‘new,’ but rather a fair
amount of work is put in at Midwest to making connections between the old and new
ways. This might be explained at least in part by industry diÚ erences: a privately held
insurance company may be less pressured than a publicly owned technology company to
be ‘innovative’ and more inclined to maintain ‘tradition’. Yet like Acme, innovation at
Midwest is concerned with expansion, through new products, into new markets.
‘Acceptance of Change’ as a Strategic Category
Detailed, performance-based labels have always existed for sales agents at Midwest,
usually derived from the company reward system. So, for example, ‘travelers’ refers to
agents who regularly sell enough to participate in annual bonus vacation trips. During
more than four years working with the company, however, we observed the emergence
and use of new categories for labeling sales agents constructed speci cally around their
response to the company’s innovation initiatives. In particular, we traced the emergence
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of a new, dichotomous system of categorization that contrasted agents accepting of the
general thrust of innovative business directions to those agents who were said by their
managers not to ‘embrace change’. The key diÚ erentiating feature had to do with
whether agents ‘bought into’ the new company direction. While this distinction was
sometimes characterized as a diÚ erence between so-called ‘new’ and ‘old’ agents, the
diÚ erence did not appear to be organized around age or tenure per se, except insofar as
older, more experienced agents often were also more skeptical of the new corporate
directions. Labels for the ‘resistant’ agents included agents who have ‘plateaued’, ‘ at-
liners’, ‘pond scum’, ‘slugs’, ‘men of extinction’ or ‘sleepers and squeakers’. This kind of
labeling, which forces a population of workers into two opposing camps, is consistent
with many previous divisions (manual/mental, blue/white collar, union/nonunion) that
have segmented the labor force in the past.5 In this sense ‘innovation’ in the work force,
rather than creating something new, eÚ ectively perpetuates an old, ‘divide and conquer’,
managerial strategy.6
Easing the EÚects of ‘Innovation’ on Customers
During our period of research at Midwest we had occasion to observe an experimental
training program oÚ ered to Midwest agents in one region. The program was geared
toward motivating—or more accurately re-motivating— mid-career, ‘plateaued’ agents.
Consistent with the larger agenda of the company, this training experiment was intended
to encourage agents to ‘accept’ corporate-initiated innovations. The class oÚ ered ways
by which agents could maintain the older tradition of warm, friendly, customer service,
yet still develop ‘more professional’ customer relations. An upper-level manager claimed
that there need not be any con ict between these old and new ways. ‘You will have to
be an agent who cares enough about policy holders to have a business relationship with
them’, he explained. Beneath a surface of innovation, companies like Midwest seek ways
to buÚ er their customers from the rougher edges of competition and rationalization (for
example, voice mail replacing a helpful human voice). Very often, particularly in service
industries, it is employees who are asked to ll the gap between old and new, taking up
the emotional labor of ‘service with a smile’, or ‘total customer satisfaction’.7
‘Innovative Employees’: Make or Buy?
Midwest has a long history and tradition of personalized internal development of its
agents. An emerging practice is a shift, at the strategic level, toward ‘competency-based
‘Innovation’ as a Critical Project 331
human resource planning’ in which consultants determine the ‘competencies’ required to
become a top-performing agent. The intention is to use the pro le to develop and assess
current agents, and to recruit and screen new applicants. Consistent with the individualist
frame that underwrites the culture of competition and the imperative of continuous
improvement, assessment is based on an individual psychological analysis of ‘competence’.
The shift in personnel practices from internal development to the creation of pro les
for recruitment echoes the technology decision of ‘make or buy’. Applied to workers, the
decision is reminiscent of the long-standing nature/nurture debate. If managers believe
that skills, attitudes, values, and the like are malleable and shaped through interactions
within the company, they commit to developing, training, and socializing their workers.
Alternatively, if it is assumed that people cannot change (or will not change, or not
quickly enough), then it is better for the company to devote resources to highly rigorous
screening in hopes of getting the right people from the start. When the nature argument
dominates, the emphasis shifts away from development toward a model of inherent
attitudes and traits.
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Across these changes in employment policies we nd a consistent pattern of rhetoric
and practices that reinforce constructs of individualism. The emphasis on the individual’s
responsibility to acquire relevant skills and bring them to the job market is a growing
trend in human resources policy, increasingly reinforced by the rhetoric of a ‘free agent’
economy. More concretely, policies putting workers ‘in charge’ of their own careers,
bene ts and pension plans all reinforce the large-scale shift in responsibility and account-
ability from the corporation to the individual worker. By de ning inherent traits as
dominant over systemic or socially constructed realities, initiatives framed in terms of
new attitudes and skills perpetuate a tradition of laissez-faire , competitive individualism.
‘Innovation’ as a Conservative Project
Our observations of new technology, work redesign and organizational change initiatives
indicate that ‘innovation’ in these contexts requires analysis not simply as a process that
takes place (or does not), but as a highly politicized construct taken up by speci c actors
and made to work in particular ways. At least within the US, and to some extent within
Western economies more generally, innovation is accepted without question to be a
positive good. In a semiotics of bipolarized, diÚ erently valued opposites, ‘innovation’ is
the preferred alternative to ‘stagnation’ or ‘resistance to change’. This means that framing
agendas under the rubric of innovation and change is inevitably a strategic move,
appropriating the positive value of the term for whatever the agenda to be pursued in its
name might comprise.
In contrast to this received semiotics of innovation, our experience suggests that
change agendas may actually be directed at least as much at the reproduction of existing
organizational and economic orders as at their transformation. This is the case insofar
as corporate innovation initiatives are aimed in practice at the intensication of ongoing
activities within an existing market with the object of increasing returns on the conduct
of business-as-usual. Alternatively, innovation projects are often concerned with the
extension of existing activities into additional, and/or diÚ erent markets. In both cases,
‘innovation’ can be understood as a construct activated in the service of what is, on closer
inspection, a fundamentally conservative (in the sense of the reproduction of existing
orders) project.
At the same time, our experience and observations point toward some alternate
understandings of change and innovation in the workplace. This alternate view rests on
four basic premises:
332 L. Suchman & L. Bishop
(1) Innovation and change are indigenous aspects of technologies-in-use, work practice
and organizational life. Even to keep things going on ‘in the same way’ in practice
requires continuous, mundane forms of active appropriation and adaptation of
available resources—discursive and material—to the circumstances at hand. This
stands in contrast to the view of organization members as intrinsically conservative,
simply reproducing the status quo until some professional designer or organizational
change agent comes along to insist that things be diÚ erent.
(2) Sustainable innovations are dependent upon substantial investments of time and
resources in infrastructure development. By ‘infrastructure’ in this context we mean
to include a range of social relations and material arrangements. Social relations
develop only with time, and material arrangements require human labor to put them
in place and keep them going. This means that innovation and change are inevitably
costly undertakings, and require associated commitments to their ongoing, long-term
development.
(3) Innovation is less a question of singular inventions or wholesale transformations than
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a matter of what we have described elsewhere as artful integrations.8 The premium
placed on discrete, discontinuous change events, and the generally negative value
attributed to processes of ‘incremental’ change are part of a form of wishful thinking
that aims to bring about desired transformations without the associated costs in time
and human eÚ ort. In contrast, a frame of artful integration emphasizes the ways in
which new things are made up out of recon gurations and extensions to familiar
environments and forms of action. While less available for ownership by individual
‘change agents’, innovation of this latter kind, we would suggest, has deeper roots
and is more likely to produce change of lasting value.
(4) Large, highly visible change agendas may actually create incentives to keep local
innovations hidden. Insofar as the latter are dependent on particular social relations
and ways of working, their appropriation into global initiatives runs the risk of
destroying the very conditions that make the local innovations possible.
Resistance to change is commonly cited as a characteristic of organization members,
arising from their (largely irrational) attachment to the status quo. In contrast, we might
view the term ‘change’ as one useful tool for an agenda concerned with ensuring that,
under changing conditions, distributions of symbolic and material reward remain the
same. We are then left to nd alternative readings of ‘resistance’ and ‘change’, understood
as reasonable responses to actual shifts in the technological and organizational landscape.
One implication of the alternate view that we have outlined above is that resistance to
change, in the sense of resistance to the premises and consequences of agendas initiated
under that banner, may in fact be a requirement for long-term, substantive innovation.
Notes and References
1. ‘Editorial introduction’, Special issue of Organization , 2 (3/4), 1995, p. 371.
2. The word ‘imaginary’ is a term of art in recent cultural studies where it is used to reference the ways
in which how we imagine the world is shaped not only by our individual experiences but also by the
speci c cultural and historical resources that are available to us. See G. Marcus, Technoscientic
Imaginaries (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 4.
3. We adopt this felicitous pseudonym following S. Newman, ‘Here, There, and Nowhere at All:
Distribution, Negotiation, and Virtuality in Postmodern Ethnography and Engineering’, in: S.
Gorenstein (Ed.), Knowledge and Society: Researches in Science and Technology, Vol. 11, Knowledge Systems
(Stamford, CT, JAI Press, 1998), pp. 235–267. Our purpose in using a pseudonym is less to disguise
the organization discussed than to mark the possibility that the story we tell is not idiosyncratic to
‘Innovation’ as a Critical Project 333
this organization, but rather is emblematic of a more general direction in relations between the
management of products and of corporate identities.
4. More accurately, perhaps, this eÚ ort began in 1970 with the founding of Acme’s premiere computer
research center. It was not until the 1990s, however, that Acme made a concerted eÚ ort to reposition
its core product oÚ erings around networked, digital technologies.
5. H. Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital (New York, Monthly Review Press, 1974).
6. D. Gordon, R. Edwards & M. Reich, Segmented Work, Divided Workers (Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press, 1982).
7. R. Steinberg & D. Fighart, ‘Emotional Labor Since the Managed Heart’, The Annals of the American
Academy of Political and Social Science, 561, 1999, pp. 8–26.
8. L. Suchman, ‘Working Relations of Technology Production and Use’, Computer Supported Cooperative
Work (CSCW), 2, 1994, pp. 21–39.
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