2,2 mio kr i projektstøtte

Forskningsrådet for Samfund og Erhverv har bevilget 2,2 mio kr som støtte til projektet:

Markets as Emergent Transaction Spaces - Towards a Sociology of Agency, Technology and Markets

som ledes af professor Peter Karnøe, Institut for Organisation og Arbejdssociologi.

Bevillingen gælder for perioden 1. januar 2006 - 31. december 2008.

This project addresses with the question ‘How Markets emerge?’ by studying the construction of markets for sustainable technologies, specifically renewable energy technologies. The project attends to the details of what makes market transactions possible or impossible and challenges the widespread notion of ‘natural markets’. Using renewable energy technologies as a case the project shows how these technologies are commodified as goods and how is it that various economic actors can come to decide and choose between technologies. This question of how markets are constructed is not something that economic theory or traditional economic sociology consider in great detail. Usually, this is cast as a matter of technological opportunities and market selection without going into the details of how the properties of such technologies are qualified and quantified. However, if one focuses on the conflicts and negotiations involved in the construction of markets for ‘sustainable energy technologies’, particularly whether or they can compete without ‘subsidies’ against conventional ‘market-based’ energy technologies it becomes clear that this depends on how the technologies are framed and how the overflows are taken into consideration, i.e. who it is that bears the costs of the pollution associated with these technologies or if extra costs are internalized in the cost structures of conventional energy.This project studies how techno-science instruments, institutions and economic theories provide inputs to the negotiations defining what is to be counted in or out when the cost-qualities of technologies are defined in order to create a market for them.