Controversies in Healthcare Innovation by Thomas Hoholm Antonella La Rocca & Margunn Aanestad

Author:Thomas Hoholm, Antonella La Rocca & Margunn Aanestad
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK, London

8.2.1 SCOT: Controversies of ‘Interpretive Flexibility’

SCOT criticised the linear model of how technologies and innovations originated in science, failing to take into account the vast range of factors and circumstances that affected its development. Through a series of case studies, Pinch and Bijker (1987) presented the SCOT model, highlighting the multidirectional character of technological development. Through this development, an artefact can be interpreted in multiple ways – i.e. it has ‘interpretive flexibility’ – before ‘closing mechanisms’ stabilize it, and a dominant use and meaning emerge (Oudshoorn and Pinch 2003).

Interpretive flexibility suggests that technology has the potential to become many things, as it develops in an alternating process of variation and selection by what is called ‘relevant social groups’ where “members […] share the same set of meanings, attached to a specific artefact” (Pinch and Bijker 1987:30). A relevant social group can be an institution, organization or even an unorganized group of people.3 The meanings of social groups are often contrasting, thus revealing the controversies between them. A fitting example here relates to the ‘cyclists’ and ‘anticyclists’ in Bijker’s (1995) influential study.

The closure of an artefact means its stabilization and the ‘disappearance’ of its problems and interpretive flexibility (Oudshoorn and Pinch 2003), thus ending the controversy. Classical SCOT often focused on the early stages of technology development, sparking critique surrounding the premature shut-down of the technology, especially in terms of how users actively modify ‘stable technologies’ through, for example, repurposing or reinterpreting it in practice (La Rocca et al. 2016; Oudshoorn and Pinch 2003).

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