Unpacking the selection environment

Directionality shaped by emerging valuation ecosystems

Abstract

Arguing against techno-determinism remains one of the cornerstones of innovation studies. Scholars have relentlessly shown how social conditions and strategic choices determine the pace and direction of technological development, supporting the idea that innovation can be steered towards societal goals such as economic competitiveness, employment or sustainability. Most scholarly attention, however, focused on the processes that generate new varieties of products and technologies, while the selection environment determining their direction is left largely unspecified. In this paper, we draw on insights from economic sociology to propose a conceptual framework for unpacking key structures and mechanisms of the selection environment through which societal values act upon technology development during periods of normative contestation. Central to our approach is the concept of valuation devices, understood as the organizational forms and material infrastructures embedded in institutional arrangements through which values are attributed to technologies and products. Beyond identifying these devices as strategic vehicles for actors to steer technology development, we show how they conjointly constitute a valuation ecosystem that shapes the directionality of a field. This framework is applied to the European food packaging sector, where proliferating health and environmental concerns have spurred a range of technological trajectories characterised by diverging strategies and goals. We retrace how actors advance distinct valuation devices to address evolving concerns about food packaging, and how the emerging valuation ecosystem shapes directionality by structuring corridors of legitimate innovation pathways. The paper concludes that deeper conceptual engagement with the selection environment opens promising new research perspectives for innovation studies.