Innovation by demand

This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. The structure and regulation of consumption and demand has recently become of great interest to sociologists and economists alike, and at the same time there is growing interest in trying to understand the patterns and drivers of technological innovation. This book brings together a range of sociologists and economists to study the role of demand and consumption in the innovative process.
The book starts with a broad conceptual overview of ways that the sociological and economics literatures address issues of innovation, demand and consumption. It goes on to offer different approaches to the economics of demand and innovation through an evolutionary framework, before reviewing how consumption fits into evolutionary models of economic development. Food consumption is then looked at as an example of innovation by demand, including an examination of the dynamic nature of socially-constituted consumption routines.
The book includes a number of illuminating case studies, including an analysis of how black Americans use consumption to express collective identity, and a number of demand-innovation relationships within matrices or chains of producers and users or other actors, including service industries such as security, and the environmental performance of companies. The involvement of consumers in innovation is looked at, including an analysis of how consumer needs may be incorporated in the design of high-tech products. The final chapter argues for the need to build an economic sociology of demand that goes from micro-individual through to macro-structural features.

Andrew McMeekin is Research Fellow at the Centre for Research on Innovation and Competitionat the University of Manchester

1. Innovation by demand? An introduction2. Social mechanisms generating demand: a review and manifesto - Alan Warde3. There's more to the economics of consumption than (almost) unconstrained utility maximisation - G. M. Peter Swann4. Variety, growth and demand - Pier Paolo Saviotti5. Preferences and novelty - a multidisciplinary perspective - Wilhelm Ruprecht6. Social routines and the consumption of food - Mark Tomlinson & Andrew McMeekin7. Social categorization and group identification: How African-Americans shape their collective identity through consumption - Virág Molnár & Michéle Lamont8. Hyperembedded demand and uneven innovation: female labour in a male-dominated service industry - Bonnie H. Erickson9. Greening organisations: Purchasing, consumption and innovation - Ken Green, Barbara Morton & Steve New10. Information and communication technologies and the role of consumers in innovation - Leslie Haddon11. The incorporation of user needs in telecom product design - Vivien Walsh, Carole Cohen & Albert Richards12. Markets, supermarkets and the macro-social shaping of demand. An instituted economic process approach - Mark Harvey