The primary ambition of this work is to construct medium range theories about industrial and economic change and about stabilization and lock-in of new industrial and economic shapes and orders, from the application of the actor-network approach to a single case study.
Essentially based on the actor-network methodology, the research approach will be to investigate into the making of the new market system by following entrepreneurial collectives associated with the electricity sector through their controversies, rivalries and projects in order to obtain an account of why and how the change came about. Given the existence of an ordered historical system, one could indeed ask: Why make a market system where it apparently does not fit into the prevailing order of things? How come someone got the idea, got it through and actually made it work? And, how was it possible to radically change a sector of the economy which could be characterized as institutionally as well as technologically locked-in and stable? Is it possible to extract elements to a process of change theory from the Norwegian electricity reform case which hold both explanatory and instrumental value?
The approach implies to investigate into the controversies within or associated with the sector as well as the framing-, concept-making- and networking activities from where “the market reform entrepreneurial collectives” emerged. Which where these controversies? What were the characteristics of the approaches and the concepts of understanding which had governed the shaping of the prevailing order of the electricity sector, and which alternatives where mobilizing for change at the time? These questions implies to investigate into the content of the reform approach, into its controversies with existing practices and the content of rival approaches.
Next, there is a need to study what went into the making of the new system.
Which projects where launched to support it, to expand it, to persuade opponents, to create alliances or to turn it into reality? Figure 1.1 below illustrates the phenomenon under investigation:
Figure 1.1. Model of research approach
Past Present Future
Time
Vision
Pathway to realization
Single arrows indicate sequence of events. Double arrows indicate controversy/
rivalry between collectives with different visions/scenarios of the future. Dotted lines indicate that some element may play different roles in rival collectives.
The entrepreneurial collective at the heart of our story is one which is centered around economics as a scientific discipline. I will accordingly use the Norwegian electricity reform case to investigate further into what Michel Callon has denoted “the embeddedness of modern market economies in economics” (Callon, 1998). The core idea is that economics as a scientific discipline in a broad sense plays a particularly important causal and formative role in the making of new market economies by framing and re-performing established economies, industries, organizations and behaviors.
On the basis of conceptual re-framing and theorizing, it is found to engage in shaping new trade systems, developing new regulation and control systems, re-configuring industrial and organizational structures and transforming economic agencies and agents. Through large scale reform projects guided by economic programs that are in essence derived from developments within economic theory, we apparently witness industries, economies as well as economic behaviors being re-shaped to the extent that the emerging
Entrepreneurs Vision or scenario
economy can be said to be embedded in economics itself. How can this capacity be explained, and why is it that once stabilized, the new economic system seems to exert such a powerful influence on even those who would rather see it abolished?
While developments within economics may be found to constitute a major source behind the powerful transformation of industries and economies during the last couple of decades, the success of individual transformation projects guided by such developments appears by no means inevitable. My thesis is that such projects are basically constructed attempts at overthrowing locked in trajectories based on specific historical, technological and political/ideological logic, and do not represent the fulfillment of a pre-given objective “drive towards economic efficiency optimality”, as argued by evolutionary and neo-institutional economic theory. Neither does it follow from any other development implicitly pre-given in the order of things.
These projects are essentially open ended and innovative, tied onto local initiatives and circumstances where they might break down for a great number of reasons or break off into different directions – despite their possibly superior efficiency characteristics in theory. A successful stabilization of a new market system, accordingly follows as the outcome of the market-making activities shaped and performed by those engaged - if they succeed in providing and maintaining such a stabilization. Important
“points of entrance” and mediators of both change and stabilization in between economics and industries, economies and behaviors, seem to be such things as state economic regulators, economic regulation and control models, accounting systems and economic ideologies or paradigms.
A crucial question which emerge from this reasoning is: What then, may be said to be the role of economic efficiency in the making of new economic systems, if economic efficiency in itself cannot explain the outcome?
A possible successful breakthrough for and stabilization of a new economic system seems to be dependent on complex social processes guided by unique applications of economic theory to the specifics of the historical, technical and economic system at hand. This change-making activity contains such things as concept formation, strategy formation, construction of-, association with- and mobilization of power, capturing and re-formatting of major commanding heights, and complex mediations with political and industrial actors. A stabilization of the new system also appears to be dependent on the availability of a large number of “delegates” on whom the expansion out of
the local constraints of the reform initiators can be based, and on appropriate political strategy and project-managerial skills17.
Through a complex molding of a historical economic system by economists and economic theory, a new economic system might eventually be shaped which is both formatted in accordance with core principles, techniques and measurement technologies in modern economics and unique in its actual configuration of major conceptual components.
The analytical focus on economics demands that economics will be treated as an empirical and historical phenomenon in this inquiry. What I will present, is a sequence of industrial transformation in which important elements of the history of related economic thought will be aligned with a specific historical change process. Traditionally, these two issues have been presented as separated histories; a history of economic thought which is structured according to its own internal conceptual logic, and another history of the political economy in concrete descriptive terms. It is my position that combining the two offers quite a few lessons to be learned. For a start, it will demonstrate that economic theory has also played an important role in shaping non-market organized electricity systems. Economists have not always been engaged in the making of markets, but also for instance in the making of cooperative structures, state hierarchies and comprehensive state regulatory economic systems. We may therefor talk about rival historical economics-networks which have been engaged in shaping economic systems in accordance with quite different core concepts.