Innovation by demand? An introduction

Abstract

The structure and regulation of consumption and demand have recently become of great interest to sociologists and economists alike, ‘consumption’ being the focus of sociological accounts, whilst ‘demand’ has been the preserve of economists’ analyses. At the same time, there is growing interest, especially among economists, in trying to understand the patterns and drivers of technological innovation. The connection between consumption/demand and innovation suggests a number of interesting questions. How do macrosocial shifts influence patterns of consumption? How do firms and other organisations structure markets and create demand? How do perceptions of demand influence the innovative activities of firms? How do consumers respond to the innovative offerings of firms? In 1999 the Centre for Research in Innovation and Competition (at Manchester University and UMIST) ran an international workshop to explore these themes. The primary aim of the workshop was to bring together sociologists and economists to look at how they study the role of demand and consumption in the innovation process. There have been few attempts to find points of contact between the diverse approaches. So the focus of the workshop was on identifying differences and complementarities in approach, with a view to finding possible common ground and new interdisciplinary research directions. This book presents some of the papers from the workshop and others of CRIC researchers that explore the same theme. The first two chapters set the scene for the whole volume. They offer broad conceptual overviews of ways that the sociological and economics literatures address issues of innovation, demand and consumption. Alan Warde, in Chapter 2, reviews the sociological literature on consumption, focusing in particular on research that offers alternative or complementary views to the concepts of ‘conspicuous consumption’ and individual choice, which has dominated much work in this area. From this, he proposes a research agenda for examining everyday consumption, that is, consumption that is unremarkable, bound by habit and routine, and which takes place in the context of social networks and institutions, by which it is also constrained. As he points 1 Innovation by demand? An introduction