مدافعه از راه دور به عنوان مبنایی برای یک تحول افزایشی
Abstract
1- Introduction
2- Conceptual foundation
3- Methods and sources
4- Telework as strategic niche management in the multi-level perspective
5- Strategic niche management as groundwork for pathways
References
Abstract
This article presents telework advocacy in the United States as a case of strategic niche management that contributed to an incremental transformation of office work location practice in the United States. In its first decades, telework advocacy showed elements of strategic niche management including vision and expectations, learning processes, and social networks. Supported by environmental and economic landscape pressures, trip reduction and travel demand management policies opened up protected spaces at the local, state, or federal levels for the practice of telework, with public agencies as experimenters. Niche and incumbent actors shared a strategy of promoting telework in structured circumstances and spoke to organizational and employee benefit alongside societal benefits. Yet as landscape pressures lessened, incumbent actors took greater ownership of the innovations of telework, and shifted their vision to one that considers telecommuting as a function of human resources rather than a societal imperative.
Introduction
The questions of how societal practices change over time in relation to technology, and the extent to which policy can guide this change towards beneficial outcomes are fundamental to social science. The practice of strategic niche management (SNM) aims to use policy to guide sustainable innovations towards wider adoption (Kemp et al., 1998). Yet notions of a simple substitution of one technology for a more sustainable alternative belie the complexity of sociotechnical systems. The multi-level perspective (MLP) describes interactions in such complex systems across three levels—the landscape which contains broad trends and external structures, the regime level which contains established ways of operating, and the niche level from which new technologies emerge (Geels, 2002). Placing strategic niche management within this multi-level perspective draws attention to a limited role of SNM in enabling systemic change (Schot and Geels, 2008). Transition pathways rather attempt to describe how actors, technologies, and broader societal trends interact across multiple levels to bring about change within sociotechnical systems (Smith et al., 2005; Geels and Schot, 2007). Practitioners of strategic niche management would benefit from guidance that includes knowledge about how their efforts fit within wider transition pathways (Raven et al., 2010). However examples of this role have not yet been well documented by the literature with reference to particular pathways. This article draws a connection between these literatures through a case study of three decades of telework advocacy in the United States, asking: To what extent does this period represent a case of strategic niche management? How did this contribute to a particular transition pathway within a broader sociotechnical system? The notion of “telecommuting” emerged in the early 1970s, supported by federal research funding, as a strategy to confront societal problems related to the journey between home and workplace.