The cultural swirl:

anthropological perspectives on innovation

GISELA WELZ

Abstract As the emergence of a globalized economy transforms the conditions under

which economic performance and productivity growth occur, the ability to innovate
has come to the fore as the key factor determining the competitive advantage of
national economies, entire industries and individual firms alike. Linking the economic
concern with the new products and services to more general questions of the social
organization of culture, this essay sets out to explore the contribution of anthropology
to an understanding of how innovation occurs. Against the backdrop of theories of
cultural change and the identification of parameters that define innovative environ-
ments, anthropology enquires into how historical contingency and social agency
make innovation possible. In-depth ethnographic studies emphasize that innovation is
much less dependent on the creative individual than on the interaction within social
milieux that create what anthropologist Ulf Hannerz calls a ‘cultural swirl’. Such
milieux appear to function best when they incorporate heterogeneous actors and are
not closed systems but exposed to serendipitous encounters and exchanges with others
actors and milieux.

How do new things enter the world? Who are the people who generate novel ways of
doing things, of looking at the world? When and where are such new ideas most
likely to emerge and take hold? And how does the world enter into new ideas? A
lively interest in these questions is evident in the work of Ulf Hannerz, underlying his
studies of cities and urban lives, his research on the social organization of diversity in
complex cultures, and his focus on the cultural dimension of transnational mobility
and communication. Enquiry into how historical contingency and social agency make
cultural innovation possible is one of the threads most consistently woven into the
fabric of his theoretical thought – perhaps a minor thread, but a persistent one in Ulf
Hannerz’s ongoing enterprise of developing a social theory of culture and a cultural
theory of emerging socialities. This theoretical endeavour encourages sociologists and
anthropologists alike to transcend the conventional boundaries of their disciplines. It
challenges sociology to transform itself into the study of the post-national and the
transnational, questioning the location and boundaries of that entity called ‘society’.
At the same time, it provides anthropology with the theoretical tools to analyse the
cultures of late modernity ‘at home’, from the inside out, as a subject in its own right.
For anthropologists taking their cue from the central cultural topics of late modern
societies, the concern, or one might even say, obsession with innovation might
provide a promising starting point for analysing contemporary cultural dynamics.

Global Networks 3, 3 (2003) 255–270. ISSN 1470–2266

© 2003 Blackwell Publishing Ltd & Global Networks Partnership 255
Gisela Welz

Innovation can be broadly conceived as the invention and implementation of new

things, knowledges and practices; innovations come about when unprecedented
solutions to either known or new problems are devised and then put to work. The
present-day concern with innovation that governments, supranational organizations
and economic actors alike are displaying is much more narrow, as it is primarily
focused on the ability to create new products and services, and to introduce them
successfully into increasingly globalized markets. The ability to innovate has come to
the fore as the key factor determining the competitive advantage of national econ-
omies, entire industries and individual firms alike, providing a supremely plausible
answer to the pressing question of ‘why do some social groups, economic institutions,
and nations advance and prosper?’ (Porter 1990: xi).
As the emergence of a globalized economy transforms the conditions under which
economic performance and productivity growth occur, the capacity for innovation
supplants factors that before appeared to guarantee competitive success in the
economic sphere, such as lower costs or access to natural resources, transportation
and markets, which today have ceased to promise high returns and investments in the
long run. And as the industrial societies of the West are reinventing themselves as
‘knowledge societies’ (Stehr 2000; Stehr and Ericson 1992), economic theory is
increasingly linking innovation to the ability to produce new knowledge and know-
how, and to set off learning processes in organizations. Because innovation has
become critical not merely for economic success, but quite often for economic
survival, national and transnational economic policies as well as the strategies of
firms and industries are increasingly geared towards creating optimum conditions for
innovation. A broad array of policies, institutions and procedures of ‘innovation
management’ have been invented to foster the ability to bring forth new knowledges,
products and services. These include such diverse strategies as economic development
programmes and incentives offered by transnational agencies and national govern-
ments in order to stimulate the innovativeness of national or regional economies, the
establishment of technology parks and so-called incubators by urban and regional
governments, increased investments in research institutions, teaching curricula and
training facilities, and new management techniques that reorganize communication
and the division of labour within corporations in order to allow firms to stimulate and
tap into the creativity of their employees more effectively. All these developments
that in and of themselves constitute important innovations in economy and society are
evidence of a ‘culture of innovation’ transforming late modern societies.

Anthropology’s contribution to studying innovation in the economic arena

This essay sets out to explore the contribution of anthropology to an understanding of
these phenomena and to sketch out the potential input of the discipline into the
solution of problems associated with the processes mentioned above. Even though the
work of Ulf Hannerz as well as of numerous other anthropologists provides not only a
good starting point but an important resource to think anthropologically about the role
of innovation in late modern societies, anthropology on the whole has been fairly
reluctant systematically to address issues connected with the innovation potential and
the economic competitiveness of societies, regions and economic actors. This may
seem surprising against the backdrop of the increasing attention that economists and

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economic geographers are paying to the cultural endowment of social groups or

whole societies when it comes to explaining differences in economic performance or
the relative success or failure of regional specializations in industries. Many recent
studies in these fields, enquiring into the emergence of regional systems of innovation
that are based on localized processes of learning and communication, consider culture
– in the sense of historically generated and socially embedded knowledges, values,
and practices – as an important asset that explains the competitive advantage of
geographical agglomerations of specialized industries.
Why has anthropology so far for the most part refrained from participating in this
new research agenda? For sure, improvisation, invention and innovation are com-
paratively new topics for a discipline that throughout much of its history devoted
itself to the representation and interpretation of tradition, convention and persistence.
Contemporary anthropology still carries with it some relics of the heritage of earlier
ethnological concerns that attributed stable unchanging cultures to those groups and
societies beyond the margins of what was first considered civilized and later modern.
Both so-called primitive cultures outside Europe and peasant societies within Europe
were regarded not just as peoples without history but also as cultures impervious to
change. The ability and willingness to transform oneself was considered a mark of
modernity alone, a notion that to some extent required unchanging and static ‘other’
cultures as a foil and contrast. Whenever change was observed to occur in so-called
primitive cultures, it was not attributed to an internal impetus, but rather explained as
a reaction to changed external conditions, be it as a consequence of environmental
shifts or because of group migration, or as the adoption of cultural elements from
other groups – often thought to be the outcome of subordination to dominant foreign
cultures, as in the more conventional varieties of acculturation theories.
In the second half of the twentieth century and most decisively in the past two
decades, however, anthropology has freed itself from this problematic legacy, so the
reasons for a certain reluctance in anthropology may well lie elsewhere when it comes
to addressing a topic such as company strategies, government policies and national
agendas aimed at increasing the innovation capacity of firms, industries, regions and
countries. For one thing, the notion that innovation can and indeed should be induced
intentionally to increase the competitive advantage of the actors involved, which is
widespread in the economy and the political arena, is at odds with some anthro-
pological core assumptions. Anthropologists tend to be suspicious of strategies that
claim to capture the elusive quality of creativity and to harness what philosophers
have defined as the process of emergence. Emergence means the appearance of new
and unprecedented qualities or synergetic effects as a consequence of the meeting of
discrete and previously unrelated elements. Innovation policies in the economy simu-
late the conditions under which newness otherwise comes about accidentally. They
attempt to make processes that are unpredictable – both in how they evolve and in
what their end result may be – calculable as to their results and also sustainable over
long periods of time. To many anthropologists this type of approach to human
creativity smacks of social engineering, or, at least, of a naive disregard of the open-
ended and context-dependent character of social systems. Anthropology is deeply
engaged with the contingencies of social life, convinced that there ‘will always be an
ineradicable indeterminacy in what the action of (or in) a social system is about and
where it leads’ (Strathern 2000: 286). On the other hand, the evident success of

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strategies of innovation management in the corporate world also calls on the dis-
cipline to question some of its assumptions.
The contribution of anthropology to enquiries into how and why innovation can
bring competitive advantages to economic actors, then, for the most part does not
stem from in-depth ethnographic studies of modern economic structures and actors,
even though there is a steadily growing body of such works both in economic
anthropology and in the ethnography of organizations.1 Rather, what anthropology
brings to these questions, against the backdrop of an extensive body of cross-
culturally comparative work, is an understanding of what makes a social group able to
devise new solutions to problems and to integrate those solutions into already existent
practices and institutions. In what follows, this essay is an attempt to tease out some
anthropological theories and research findings that have the potential to engage
productively with concerns voiced by other disciplines that are interested in gauging
economic growth and decline. Three lines of enquiry that anthropology has been
working on appear especially pertinent in this context.

• Is any cultural innovation really new in the sense that it has no precedents? Or,
conversely, how much cultural innovation is the outcome of evolutionary pro-
cesses of refining what was there before, of transformation by way of reproduc-
tion? These questions engage the anthropological perspective on cultural change.
• Why are some places and times more likely to produce creative individuals and
innovative social groups? Is it possible to define an ‘innovative environment’
anthropologically? With these enquiries, anthropology is challenged to identify
those social settings in which innovation is more likely to occur than in others.
• What makes social actors and groups creative? Can following certain procedures
and routines stimulate ‘cultural innovation or preparedness for innovation’
(Hannerz 1992: 136)? Anthropology clearly is sceptical of the assumptions
underlying corporate strategies of innovation management. Ethnographic studies
of situations in which researchers and developers create and implement new
solutions to problems give important insights into the social processes of
innovation.

Safeguarding continuity by transformation: anthropology and cultural change

The history of anthropology reveals a constant irritation over the problem of cultural
change. Today, anthropology has largely abandoned notions that define cultural
changeability as the privilege of modern societies. This also means that traditional
cultures are no longer considered to have experienced no change prior to their contact
with modern civilization. Even in the most tradition-bound social situations, indi-
vidual human action is never completely coterminous with the way things have been
done before or with the way in which things should be done. According to contem-
porary anthropological perspectives, social actors are neither culturally programmed
to do what they do nor do they enjoy total freedom in their actions (Bourdieu 1977).
The theory of cultural change in anthropology engages the relation between individual
actions and cultural order, between agency and structure, at the same time as it
addresses how the reproduction and production of culture are inextricably linked.
Anthropology confronts the paradox of how the demand for cultural stability

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precludes change and how, at the same time, culture sustains itself by innovation.
Indeed, anthropology locates its subject between the conflicting demands of keeping
things unchanging culturally and moving on to new cultural solutions. This tension
between safeguarding existing ‘best practices’ and constantly casting out for even
better ways of doing things points to a predicament. Cultural entities can only survive
over long stretches of time by immunizing themselves against change, but at the same
time cultures are threatened to deteriorate into mere fossils unless they manage to
transcend what they are and transform themselves into something new. The relation of
invention to convention and vice versa is critical here. ‘Invention [differentiates] acts
and events from the conventional. … Invention changes things, and convention
resolves those changes into a recognizable world. … The necessity of invention is
given by cultural convention, and the necessity of cultural convention is given by
innovation’ (Wagner 1975: 52).
Marshall Sahlins (1981) asserts that all structural transformation involves struc-
tural reproduction and vice versa. Indeed, his study of the calamitous encounter
between Captain Cook’s expedition and Hawaiian society in the late eighteenth
century is a beautifully wrought account of how the attempt of indigenous elites to
maintain the traditional cultural order opens the door wide to innovation. The tale told
by the anthropologist-turned-historian describes how the English fleet commanded by
Captain Cook landed on the main island of Hawaii in January 1779. This was the first
contact both for the island’s population and the English. The fact that this encounter
was conducted peacefully and indeed greeted with much enthusiasm on the part of the
indigenous people is explained by Sahlins as the outcome of the Hawaiians explaining
the events according to their own mythology. The native population saw Cook as the
personification of a peaceful god with whose annually recurrent reign the arrival of
Cook’s fleet coincided. The interaction with the fleet’s crew created multiple oppor-
tunities for various groups within the indigenous population to try out new social
practices that were, however, contained within the limits of the mythological reading
of the course of events. Cook’s fleet stayed within the boundaries of the indigenous
cultural interpretation by inadvertently timing their departure in accordance with the
prescribed leave-taking of the god at the end of a 23-day period. However, a broken
mast and the need for repairs on the main ship forced them return to the island. The
plot of the indigenous myth then no longer covered this unexpected turn of events and
the returning fleet was not greeted enthusiastically. Increasingly, the islanders’ hostile
reactions and the fleet’s equally aggressive responses culminated in altercations in the
course of which Captain Cook was killed. According to the reading of the events
Sahlins offered, the commander was murdered to restore the established cultural
order. While the first stay of the fleet had stabilized the cultural order by the English
unwittingly complying with local expectations so that the peaceful exchange was in
effect the paradoxical result of a serious cultural misunderstanding, their uncalled-for
return constituted a radical rupture of the system of belief, and the resulting dialectical
process between established cultural beliefs and the unexpected event set in motion
cultural transformation in which ultimately the indigenous culture reconfigured itself
in accordance with the new conditions it encountered. The important point that
Sahlins is making is that culture change results precisely from the effort to maintain
and perpetuate established cultural constructions of reality in the face of an unprece-
dented situation.

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Even though the dramatis personae of the historical events recounted by Sahlins
are identifiable, and indeed too well known to remain anonymous, this is not a story
about how individual acts make a difference. What unifies the diverse definitions of
culture in anthropology is that culture is a collective phenomenon, a ‘tool kit’ of
strategies (Hannerz 1971) developed by social groups or entire societies in order to
cope with both the routine demands and the exceptional challenges of life. As such,
cultures are solutions to problems, and often quite stable and long-term ones respond-
ing to recurrent problems. Such tool kits and the ensembles of practices, institutions,
discourses and artefacts that go with them are distinct to individual groups or
societies. The infinite diversity of cultures, solving problems more or less common to
all mankind but doing so in very different ways, cannot simply be explained by
historical accident or as the outcome of responding to different sets of external con-
ditions. Rather, it attests to the impressive creativity of cultural collectives and the
high degree of changeability of cultural strategies. Creativity is a term with strong
references to the contemporary notion of innovation. However, anthropologists do not
view culture as the product of a distinct act of creation. Identifiable social actors do
not usually invent cultures, as is the case with technological inventions or works of art
in modern societies, nor do cultures spring into existence at an instant. Because they
are collective endeavours, the contributions of many people go into them and because
they emerge in the course of processes that unfold over long periods of time,
anthropologists have sometimes claimed that cultures live themselves into new forms
(Greverus 1978). These processes are often imperceptible to the individuals caught up
in these transformations. The agents of cultural change may well remain unaware of
what it is they are doing because, as often as not, cultural transformation is the incon-
spicuous and unintended side effect of social life as it is lived, with small-scale
diversions and experiments coalescing into bigger cultural trends that may eventually
envelop entire societies. Anthropology, then, is concerned with how ‘individual
creativity interact[s] with existing cultural patterns to create culture’ or with how indi-
vidual solutions to problems are picked up by larger social groups and, in this process,
emerge as cultural innovations. Richard Fox, who identifies the connection between
the singular and the structural as the key to the dynamic of cultural change, proposes
to ‘trace how human actors originate ideas about their society out of cultural mean-
ings already constituted, and then how they experiment with these ideas’ (Fox 1991:
108).
One of the recurrent themes of Ulf Hannerz’s book Cultural complexity (1992) is
the question of how new cultural forms come into the world, why people suddenly go
ahead to produce new meanings different from those that served them well for a long
time, and how innovation is organized socially, especially in complex cultures. He
claims that what people do about culture – ‘inventing culture or maintaining it,
reflecting on it, experimenting with it, remembering it or forgetting it, arguing about
it, and passing it on’ (Hannerz 1992: 17) – is seldom a purposive activity.

Innovative environments: the cultural swirl of big cities

Newness engages with what went before within some framework of what can be
anticipated or thought possible. Yet, this is more likely to occur when routines are
unsettled and formerly stable procedures ruptured. In the case study presented by

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Sahlins, innovation is an accident, the unexpected fall-out from a cultural clash.

German sociologist Hans Joas (1992), who claims that all human social behaviour is
not merely reproductive but productive and ultimately creative, proposes that it is
exactly when established routines of action fail because they encounter resistance
from the social or physical world that an increased capacity for inventiveness and
creativity can be observed. What then are the social conditions under which cultural
innovation is possible? When can such crises be productive so that new culture
emerges from the breakdown of order? Not surprisingly, anthropology highlights
instances of contact between different cultures as opportunities for innovation. How-
ever, the potential for innovation is inherent in the social organization of complex
cultures as well. Routine modes of action and common-sense notions of the world that
undergird them tend towards inertia; as Ulf Hannerz has pointed out, ‘common sense
is ... cultural “business as usual”; standard operating procedure’ (Hannerz 1992: 127).
In modern societies, however, common sense is constantly threatened by breakdowns
and has to cope with irritations and problems. In a sense, also, it is not correct to
speak of a single unified common sense when it comes to complex cultures. Here,
what Anthony Giddens (1984) calls ‘practical consciousness’ – the skill to navigate
everyday life without having to think about it – takes many shapes and forms in
complex cultures. From this, ‘perspectival clashes’ (Hannerz 1992: 130) result that, in
complex societies, are a source of new culture.
Also, the need for distinction in the social arena constantly eggs on social actors to
invent new styles, practices, attitudes and artefacts in order to compete successfully.
So, cultural innovation in modern societies is to some extent a result of the need of
individuals and groups to profile themselves on the various marketplaces of society,
not all of them economic. The production and management of cultural meanings in
modern societies is subject to a division of labour that has created specialists –
academics and artists, intelligentsia and intellectuals – charged with pushing out
further and further beyond the boundaries of what previously was thought to be
possible, knowable or doable. In addition, as Hannerz (1992: 26) points out, media are
functioning as ‘machineries of meaning’ that do not only store and transmit meanings
but also constantly expand the cultural reach of individuals and societies. Especially
the electronic media have becomes ‘forces … that seem to impel (and sometimes
compel) the work of the imagination’ (Appadurai 1996: 4). These assessments voiced
by Appadurai and Hannerz in tandem are not to be misunderstood as simply assenting
to the self-image of modernity that claims superiority over all other types of social
organization because of its ability to innovate. Rather, they are trying to define the
cultural preconditions for innovation and to pinpoint the cultural parameters of such
social situations that are more likely than others to foster new ideas and practices.
While the networks of perspectives that one finds in complex societies, and their
unavoidable confrontations with each other, in themselves constitute a source of
potential newness, ‘in some places and at some times, however, much of this seems to
happen faster and with greater intensity than elsewhere’ (Hannerz 1992: 169). Some
locations, obviously, are more innovative than others. This at first sight commonplace
observation that the capacity for innovation, and the competitive advantage linked to
it, are distributed unequally among countries and regions throughout the world has
strongly motivated comparative research and theory building in economics, finding
that ‘differences in national economic structures, values, cultures, institutions and

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histories contribute profoundly to competitive success’ (Porter 1990: 19). During the
past decade economic geographers have become particularly attentive to the role of
spatial concentration in the economy and have begun to point out the competitive
advantages of regional clusters.2 Such specialized networks of complementary indus-
tries and rival firms in one place are also considered to function as regional inno-
vation systems; the assets they command are not just effects of national economic
policies and so-called institutional endowment but also have much to do with his-
torically generated economic specializations and social capital that is available at a
specific location. It is also pointed out that dense spatial agglomerations of economic
actors afford effortless communication and others transactions, resulting in learning
processes that are regional in origin and effect. With this, anthropological expertise on
cultural propensities and on the role of traditions, norms, long-term build-up of social
networks and their role for collective processes of learning and knowledge production
comes within the purview of economic analyses that attempt to gauge the present and
future competitive potential of specific geographic locations.
Cities have come to be regarded as privileged sites for processes of economic
innovation and as sources of cultural creativity alike. Recent shifts effected by the
globalization of the economy and the emergence of so-called world cities or global
cities (Sassen 2001) also focus increased attention on the innovative potential of
urban environments (Amin and Thrift 2002), with case studies such as Allen J. Scott’s
comparative analysis of cultural and ‘image-producing’ industries in American and
European cities illustrating how specialized industrial agglomerations have roots ‘that
extend deeply into the fabric of some of the world’s major cities’ and at the same time
constitute ‘a wellspring of cultural memories and resources’ that impacts on the city
as a whole (Scott 2000: 205). At the same time, urban anthropology, which has grown
into a vibrant sub-field of the discipline since the 1960s, has abandoned its narrow
ethnographic focus on the small social worlds of minority groups and marginal com-
munities and has started to address the urban cultural process as a whole. Again, in
this, the work of Ulf Hannerz is pivotal. He argues that cities are most prone to be
culturally productive in periods of social transformations – transformations that bring
together within one place social actors and groups from a variety of origins, some far-
flung and widely separated, resulting in ‘the coexistence of nearly isolated social
worlds’ (Hannerz 1992: 205). His examples include Vienna at the fading of the
Habsburg monarchy3 and San Francisco at the time of the Beat Generation in the
1950s. The third case, much less widely known in the West, is the city of Calcutta that
in the nineteenth century was the wellspring of a literary and intellectual movement,
the Bengal Renaissance.
It is perhaps a weakness of this particular elaboration of the cultural creativity
inherent in big cities that it mostly emphasizes the ability of these geographical
locations and historical periods in terms of functioning as fertile ground for artistic
innovations and intellectual productivity. The creation of new everyday cultures that
transgress and transcend the ethnic, religious and class milieux that before appeared
neatly to demarcate and contain social life has been more explicitly tackled in his
urban anthropological work. Yet, the cultural parameters identified by Ulf Hannerz
that make such a process of innovation possible apply to culture both in its more
narrowly artistic or aesthetic and in its broader quotidian dimension. What emerges in
his analysis is that the privileged locations and epochs of cultural innovations are

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those that enable cultures to mix and people of various backgrounds to mingle and
freely communicate with each other. Yet, the cultural ferment does not depend on the
spatial concentration of people of different origins alone:

Cultural diversity in itself is hardly enough to turn cities into machineries for
more or less continuously innovative cultural production. Another kind of
openness seems to help here; the concentration of people in a limited space is
important to cultural process not only because it provides critical masses for
varied developments, but also because it offers forever new occasions for
serendipity: you find things without specifically looking for them, because
they are around you all the time.
(Hannerz 1992: 203)

In such a city, ‘the manifestations of other perspectives are not at a distant horizon, or
beyond it, but reasonably close at hand. Thus, whatever innovations occur in one field
can be seized upon, with approval or critically, to stimulate work in another’ (Hannerz
1992: 211). World cities achieve an influential role as producers of ‘new culture’,
often extending into the transnational sphere, when they combine the qualities of
openness to the world and openness within, making social and cultural boundaries
permeable for the exchange of ideas and artefacts (see Hannerz 1996).
The assertion that cultural creativity depends on a constellation of factors and
actors that may only be present at a certain point in time, and indeed are something of
a historical accident, implies the anthropologist’s caution against the expectation that
such innovative environments could be planned and purposefully built. At the same
time, Hannerz adds another important component to our understanding of why some
cities are culturally productive and others are not by pointing out that it is not just the
existence of a certain mix of assets and actors, but rather, the ways in which social
interaction between various groups is socially organized that makes the difference.
German media sociologist Manfred Faßler (2001) calls such environments ‘co-
actional’ – they imply the potential for interaction that may or may not be realized.
What is important is that this refers to an interaction between social actors who do not
wish to be or to become alike, and neither does their association require this. In the
urban situations mentioned, co-actionality resides in the actual co-presence of people
in time and space, and their accessibility to each other. Ulf Hannerz has coined a term
to capture this potential – he calls it ‘the cultural swirl’, a metaphor playing on the
centrifugal force of a vortex, drawing in and throwing together all that is within reach,
leaving no cultural segment and strand in isolation. In a sense, though, his theory of
the urban process also implies the opposite, the centripetal movement of these new
ideas, practices and artefacts that make up a cultural flow reaching out from these
urban sources, often achieving transnational, sometimes global, spheres of influence.

Can innovation be stimulated or even induced?

In corporate culture, there is much talk of how to ‘mobilize the creative potential of
employees’, how to ‘facilitate flows of communication’ within and beyond organiz-
ations, and to ‘encourage a spirit of experimentation’ in the workplace.4 With the
advent of innovation management, a new organizational model has been developed to

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meet this challenge. Organizations are restructured to foster an ‘innovation climate’

conducive to creativity and to profit from ‘innovation pressures’ triggered by close
competition. Innovation management proceeds from the assumption that creativity
can be induced intentionally. It is based on the conviction that new products and ser-
vices will be invented more easily when prescribed measures such as the systematic
catchment and storage of new ideas are taken. These management techniques have
developed into a set of procedures readily adopted by the economy and the public
sector. To anthropologists, such step-by-step advice for fostering innovation can be
read as cultural documents that reveal how innovation is constructed socially and
ideologically in late modern societies.5
In an important way, however, management procedures and organizational struc-
tures invented to foster the creativity of individuals and teams alike also point to
changes in the way that innovation, and more broadly knowledge production, is
conceptualized today. It has moved away to a significant degree from attributions of
genius to prominent individuals and instead locates the preconditions for innovations
in organizations and their access to knowledge. ‘Genius is 1 per cent inspiration and
99 per cent perspiration’ was an aphorism attributed to Thomas Edison. The Ameri-
can public of the nineteenth century was disinclined to believe him and was
convinced that the opposite was true: technology development, for them, depended
exclusively on the genius inherent in the inventor’s personality, his talent and
proclivity for inspiration. This popular mystique that for many still surrounds the
process of invention effectively hides the degree to which the historical moment at
which it occurs and the interplay of various social, economic and political factors
contributes to its success. Robert Friedel, a historian of technology development,
traces the intellectual history of the concept of ‘genius’ to its roots in the Enlighten-
ment. He claims that today modern societies adhere to a different interpretation of
what makes accomplishments in science and technology possible. ‘In the twentieth
century, by contrast, we have come to look for new technology from institutions and
individuals who are characterized not by their creativity, imagination, and brilliance
but by their ability to marshal “expertise”, specialized knowledge beyond the grasp
and understanding of the common person but essential to scientific and technical
progress’ (Friedel 1992: 12).
The notion that innovation is not a matter of personalized genius and individual
inventiveness, but rather can be attributed to institutions and organizations that are
structured in such a way as to foster innovation is also prevalent in the strategies of
innovation management sketched out briefly above. According to this view, it is not
the individual that counts but the access to scientific knowledge that organizations
command. This implies a rather linear concept of how the innovation process
proceeds by implementing the results of basic research. However, German social
scientists Meinolf Dierkes and Ute Hoffmann reject ‘the conventional notion of
innovation as an essentially linear process in which technological development is seen
as a succession of steps from the birth of an idea, usually associated with advances in
scientific knowledge, to its commercialization’ (Dierkes and Hoffmann 1992: 12).
While conventional models of technology development would view the process of
innovation as purely science-based, admitting the influence of social factors and
cultural logics only at the moment of the implementation of new products in society,
more recent approaches in the social studies of science and technology assert that,

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indeed, innovation is always socially constructed and critically depends on inter-

actions between networks of actors. By deconstructing the notion of science and
technology as a ‘culture of no culture’ (Traweek 1988: 162), anthropology brings
technology development into the domain of cultural practices that can be subjected to
ethnographic scrutiny. Numerous ethnographies classed under the heading of labora-
tory studies in anthropology have since been generated, shedding light on the cultural
basis of knowledge production and technological progress. 6 According to these
studies, it is neither the inspiration granted to the gifted individual nor the capacity of
an institution to apply scientific findings to a technological problem that makes the
difference, but the key to successful innovation lies in how communication between
social actors is organized in the everyday life of a setting devoted to the generation of
new ideas and products.
Innovation often emerges in the interactive routines and tacit knowledge that are
created in a work setting by actors who are cooperating on a daily basis. A recent
anthropological study on software designers attests to this. Sean Ó Riain (2000)
combined ethnographic research with working as a computer scientist in the Irish
software development laboratory of an American computer technology firm. For the
Silicon Valley-based company, outsourcing certain segments of software develop-
ment to designers working in Dublin meant taking advantage of the considerably
lower labour costs in a semi-peripheral country. According to Ó Riain’s ethnography,
the Dublin laboratory developed a close-knit culture of communication, sharing local
knowledge and producing a team tied to each other by solidarity and tacit under-
standings. It is this face-to-face culture of the workplace that is critical for its capacity
to create innovative solutions to problems quickly and efficiently. Indeed, as Ó Riain
argues, the global production of computer technologies depends on the innovative
capacity of localized work teams: ‘efficient production and constant innovation
require the construction of shared physical spaces where workers can interact and
communicate on a face-to-face basis and where shared goals and meanings can be
created and maintained’ (Ó Riain 2000: 178). The sheer quantity of details to be
attended to and the high degree of interdependence between the development steps
conducted by individual designers contributing to the collective innovation process
require close-knit and flexible modes of communication between all members of the
team.7
Much of what makes for the innovative productivity of this particular work setting
closely resembles what Ulf Hannerz has designated as the ‘subcultural process’. This
process generates new cultural forms out of the ‘effective interaction’ among a group
of individuals who tackle the same problem and produce a solution where no previous
pattern of adequate action existed before. This happens when individual attempts to
invent something new are tested and acknowledged by other members of this milieu
and finally ‘cumulatively stabilized and amplified by the back-and-forth flow of
meaning among them’ (Hannerz 1992: 70). This type of social setting is especially
conducive to the production of new technologies and post-industrial products such as
multimedia applications (see Lash and Wittel 2002).
Technology development in more conventional industrial fields in the past could
rely to a greater degree on stable knowledge and routine procedures. Here, a more
formalized development process could also be expected to bring forth innovative
solutions. Using the history of aerospace engineering in the United States as a case in

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point, historian Wendy Faulkner asserts that in this technological field ‘the level of
uncertainty surrounding design declined dramatically because acts of communicable
skill increasingly reduced reliance on acts of insight’ (Faulkner 1994: 425). In new
fields like the development of financial instruments or software design, however,
skills required for solving problems have to be invented anew alongside the solutions
to the problems posed. Also, even in more established areas of scientific research and
technology development, the conventional method of generating and testing new
ideas, the laboratory experiment, is increasingly displaced by simulation and model-
building. As sociologists of science point out, new modes of knowledge production
no longer proceed in two clearly differentiated – and differentially institutionalized –
stages, first basic research located at academic institutions and then the practical
application of findings outside the domain of pure science. Rather, knowledge is
increasingly being created in the process of application in networks of diverse actors
traversing both academic and non-academic settings. In many fields, then, innovation
ceases to be the outcome of basic research feeding into applied research, followed by
application and market introduction (Gibbons et al. 1994).

Conclusion: innovation and the cultural swirl

In a sense, then, innovation in the fields of science and technology increasingly seems
to create and rely on a cultural swirl of its own. Anthropological findings suggest that
social milieux can indeed be creative when their internal interaction is quite intense
and generates shared cultural assumptions and practices. Such milieux seem to
function best when they join heterogeneous social actors and are not closed systems
but exposed to serendipitous encounters and exchanges with other outside actors and
milieux. More recent formulae in economic development policy such as the establish-
ment of ‘incubators’ that offer incentives for new firms to establish themselves in
close spatial proximity to knowledge producers such as universities or research
laboratories as well as to corporate and consumer markets can be read as attempts to
replicate those historically generated regional ‘clusters’ that economic geographers
attribute with the potential to give certain areas and certain industries a special com-
petitive advantage. Corporate strategies of innovation management have also to some
extent moved beyond the notion that all it takes is to identify especially creative
individuals, give them access to knowledge bases and make sure that none of their
new ideas are lost. Yet, even newer models of innovative management more in tune
with the social bases of innovation do have shortcomings. Here, in-depth ethno-
graphic studies can show that new ideas and innovative procedures not only spring
from the communicative field and collective memory of a social milieu, but are
embedded in it and not always easily separated from it to be implemented elsewhere.
In addition, it has been pointed out that, within firms, innovation management
measures often do not work unless they are coupled with incentive schemes. Issues of
trust in competitive environments also come to the fore here. For instance, in times of
economic downturn, employees can be expected to be reluctant to part with their
personal or collective innovative ideas when they fear to fall victim to corporate
downsizing.
Anthropology has the potential to offer important insights into why and when
strategies to implement change in economic settings work or do not work. This

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potential stems both from the meticulous attention to quotidian practices in work
settings that ethnographic fieldwork studies afford, and from anthropological theoriz-
ing of how and why cultural change occurs in certain places and at specific historical
times. While being able to trace how the outlines of a new culture may emerge this
way, anthropological analyses remain, of course, descriptive rather than aspiring to
being prescriptive. Anthropology, then, is perhaps not particularly useful for designers
of corporate culture who are seeking blueprints on which to base their organizational
strategies. Rather, the contingency and open-endedness of all cultural practice is
acknowledged by anthropology as a caution against any attempts to engineer human
behaviour and make it produce desired ends, however legitimate they may seem.
However, there is confidence in anthropology, too, in the ability of human beings to
reconfigure their own terms of existence and to do so most successfully when they are
not acting in isolation but in ‘effective communication’ with each other, not in an
ordered and preordained setting, but in a cultural swirl, bouncing ideas and actions
back and forth among them and generating newness in the process. Ultimately,
cultural knowledge on how to create and sustain the ‘co-actional’ quality of certain
kinds of social settings will emerge from this.

Gisela Welz is Professor of Cultural Anthropology and European Ethnology

at Johann Wolgang Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main, Germany.

Notes
1. There is a plethora of studies in economic anthropology as well as organization
ethnographies in business settings. In recent years, as economic anthropologists have
increasingly started to address phenomena in Western societies, the capitalist system as an
‘arena in which assumptions of a common sense above and beyond culture have been most
prevalent’ (Herzfeld 2001: 91) has been called into question. See particularly Herzfeld
(2001: 90–117).
2. The term ‘clustering’ is mostly attributed to the work of Porter (1990) who enquires into
how national economies achieve a competitive advantage in the global arena. Subsequently,
much research in economic geography focused on smaller spatial agglomerations below the
level of nation states, namely regions or metropolitan areas, as well (see for instance
Holmén and Jacobsson 1998; Maskell et al. 1998). More recently, proponents of the
regional innovation systems approach have begun to call into question existing research
into the clustering phenomenon for its undue emphasis on spatial agglomeration as the sole
factor for competitiveness. A revised clustering hypothesis (Malmberg and Maskell 2002)
looks at geographical concentrations of specialized industries and firms from a learning
perspective, attributing their ability to produce new knowledge to a combination of
localized learning and trans-local, often global linkages.
3. Vienna at that historical period is an example that has fascinated many other cultural critics
and urbanists as well (see for instance Schorske 1980).
4. Quotations here are translated from a free journal, widely distributed in Germany, aimed at
popular audiences and promoting public understanding of science. For more treatments of
innovation in current management theory, see for instance Peters (1997).
5. There is also a somewhat unnerving certainty evident in the business management
literature, training courses and organizational procedures about what constitutes an
innovation. Notwithstanding the distinctions between categories of innovations made here,

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in the market framework, responses to this question will most likely refer either to the
profits incurred by developing new products or the losses for their failure to launch any.
What counts as innovative, then, is a product of social construction, even though this is
made invisible by the very process that defines innovations in the economic context.
Obviously, not everything that is new is regarded as an innovation in society. And not
every innovation is pervasive enough to supplant what went before. Crucial are the
historical moment of emergence and the social context that any new thing encounters: they
determine which ideas, practices and artefacts are acknowledged as innovations and which
ones simply disappear again unnoticed. It is generally thought that in the field of tech-
nology the most efficient, cheapest and most robust solution to a problem will prevail.
However, this is a myth easily dispelled by historians of technology (see Latour 1988;
MacKenzie and Wajcman 1999) who assert that innovations get selected from a plethora of
parallel though often unconnected attempts to meet the same or similar demands. A variety
of factors – some material, such as infrastructures and the backing of economic interests,
some social, such as media coverage and political support, some symbolic and discursive,
such as attributions of genius – come into play here. In the end, what prevails may not
always be the best possible solution from a technological point of view. Yet, the explan-
atory models constructed by historians only work after the fact. At the very moment when
teams in various research and development departments and laboratories all over the world
are inventing new substances, mechanisms or procedures in tandem with each other, it is
often extremely difficult to predict which one of these inventions will make it and which
will disappear in some drawer to be forgotten. For an overview of studies of technology
development in sociology and anthropology, see Beck (1997).
6. To find out more about the conditions under which innovative professional milieux emerge,
operate and are sustained, it is useful to turn to sociological and anthropological studies on
technology development in modern industrial societies. Quite a number of cultural
anthropologists in recent years have worked as participant observers in research labora-
tories and technology development facilities, both in the private and public sectors. Some
of these ethnographers crossed the line and became co-inventors of new technological
solutions and co-producers of scientific knowledge. Their ethnographies offer rich and
detailed accounts of what it takes to solve technological or scientific problems and how
new knowledge is socially produced in laboratory situations. See, for instance, Knorr-
Cetina (2002), Latour and Woolgar (1986) and Traweek (1988).
7. To make innovation possible it is obvious that technologically mediated communication
between geographically distant people also needs to contain some of the quality of ‘co-
actionality’ suggested by Faßler (2001). Certainly, a growing number of innovations –
technological, economic as well as cultural – are created in a manner that joins non-local
dispersed ‘presences’ with specific locations. This is most evident in inventive processes
that span the globe when various research and development laboratories scattered in a
number of locations, sometimes continents away, are working on the same project com-
municating by electronic mail and telephone. In the case discussed by Ó Riain, a ‘global
workspace’ was constructed that connected the local Dublin development unit with the
company‘s California headquarters. For management, ‘the local character of their work
team is essential to their efficiency but also poses a problem of regulating such localized
relations from a distance’ (Ó Riain 2000: 178).

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