An institutional study of a government-led green technology innovation scheme
type: CreativeWork
description: Climate change has emerged as a critical challenge and is now recognized as a central part of a government’s sustainable development goals. Governments around the world have attempted to address the challenge of climate change by diffusing a range of green technology innovations. Such green technology innovation diffusions, however, are not without controversy. This thesis focuses on one controversial government-led green technology innovation scheme which was comparatively small but nonetheless produced much larger institutional waves. The scheme led to a large-scale public inquiry and a collapse of a devolved government administration. This thesis argues that in green scheme diffusion processes, people matter and are the products of institutional interactions. The institutional literature shows a range of ways in which social actors are instituted and how their reasoning and emotions impact discursive processes. There is however a gap in the exploration of emotive roles in processes of institutionalization, which pertain to the intersections between technology, the environment and society. Theoretically, this thesis adopts an ‘inhabited institutional’ approach to guide and advance the research. It does so by developing distinct but inter-related arguments within three different articles (in the form of three chapters). These articles are brought together in this thesis through an integrated qualitative research design and investigation, showcasing an emerging institutional conceptualization of a green scheme. The first article (Chapter 3) in this thesis focuses on the role of emotion work used in institutional disruption and maintenance. A process analysis of the government-led scheme shows the circulation and multiple entanglements of emotion work, demarcating between antagonists which disrupt the instituting of the scheme, and protagonists maintaining their institution, addressing a research gap. Using semantic network mapping, this article develops a model of t…
abstract: Climate change has emerged as a critical challenge and is now recognized as a central part of a government’s sustainable development goals. Governments around the world have attempted to address the challenge of climate change by diffusing a range of green technology innovations. Such green technology innovation diffusions, however, are not without controversy. This thesis focuses on one controversial government-led green technology innovation scheme which was comparatively small but nonetheless produced much larger institutional waves. The scheme led to a large-scale public inquiry and a collapse of a devolved government administration. This thesis argues that in green scheme diffusion processes, people matter and are the products of institutional interactions. The institutional literature shows a range of ways in which social actors are instituted and how their reasoning and emotions impact discursive processes. There is however a gap in the exploration of emotive roles in processes of institutionalization, which pertain to the intersections between technology, the environment and society. Theoretically, this thesis adopts an ‘inhabited institutional’ approach to guide and advance the research. It does so by developing distinct but inter-related arguments within three different articles (in the form of three chapters). These articles are brought together in this thesis through an integrated qualitative research design and investigation, showcasing an emerging institutional conceptualization of a green scheme. The first article (Chapter 3) in this thesis focuses on the role of emotion work used in institutional disruption and maintenance. A process analysis of the government-led scheme shows the circulation and multiple entanglements of emotion work, demarcating between antagonists which disrupt the instituting of the scheme, and protagonists maintaining their institution, addressing a research gap. Using semantic network mapping, this article develops a model of t…
author: Gharib, Amani
language: eng
keywords: Institutional work, innovation, green, renewable energy source, emotions, legitimacy, governance, institutional theory, technology, diffusion of innovation theory, diffusion, adoption, responses, qualitative case study
date published: 2022-7
date modified: 2026-07-24T03:56:18Z
provider: Queen's University Belfast
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: Queen's University Belfast