Innovation, Identities and Resistance: The Social Construction of An Innovation Network

This paper explores the process of diffusion of a socio‐technical innovation among workers of a large microelectronics firm. Actor–network theory (ANT), which draws on the sociology of science and technology, is applied to the analysis of socio‐technical innovation in order to understand the actions of creating and putting the actors’ arguments into action. Actors constructed and organized these arguments with the aim of diffusing innovation among workers whose support was essential to the project’s success. The authors of the innovation project wanted to change the state of relations between different actors. In the present study, the aligment of identities was established according to the criteria defined by the managers and engineers but the expected benefits of the innovation, in this case, technology and teamwork, were not automatically accepted. Network analysis reveals how persuasive arguments that repudiate the old reality and justify steps to create the new reality are constructed. This article will reveal how innovation is constituted and the form it takes by following the chain of arguments and the responses of the actors involved.