26th International Association for Management of Technology Conference - IAMOT 2017

The ever-increasing pressure to fulfil the promise of sustainable development, the ever-moving target of sustainability, and the ever-changing definition of ‘sustainable futures’ calls for continuous, radical and fundamental research into our ability to understand the complex interactions between societal and technological elements in socio-technical systems. This paper presents the contributions that a socio-technical transitions perspective can make to the concept of technology management in order to ultimately contribute towards sustainable futures. This paper thus explores the topic of technology management through the lens of socio-technical transitions. The increasing need to transition from unsustainable socio-technical systems to sustainable socio-technical systems is continuously creating new challenges and opportunities, and managing technology in a way as to effectively bring about such transitions to sustainability need to be captured in technology management approaches, and converted into value through effective and dynamic management of technology towards sustainability. This requires a new way of understanding technology management and socio-technical transitions that captures the adequate level of integration between these two fields of research. Technology management theories and approaches are primarily concerned with engineering and technology management, and the level of analysis is on the firm level. Theories concerned with socio-technical transitions primarily stems from social sciences and evolutionary economics, with the level of analysis being on the socio-technical systems level. This is highly relevant when considering the level of integration that is required between technology management and socio-technical transitions with the aim of managing technology towards socio-technical change. This research inquiry thus evaluates and compares the approaches, theories and concepts of technology management and socio-technical transitions with the aim of highlighting the contributions that the approaches, theories and concepts concerned with socio-technical can make to technology management. An approach is then developed that explains how a combination of technology management approaches and approaches to study (and foster) socio-technical transitions can strengthen abilities to foster sustainable futures. The proposed integration of socio-technical transition theories and approaches with the concept of technology management positions technology management activities relative to the concept of socio-technical transitions, and aims to highlight the importance of integration of approaches focussing on technology management and socio-technical transitions respectively. A framework is presented that supports such integration and emphasises the importance of the development and integration of frameworks that support sustainable development from both a social and technical perspective on an on-going base.