Peter Lugosi and I had just presented our paper, “From Marketing to Market Practices: Assembling the Ruin Bars of Budapest” [PDF], at the Advances in Tourism Marketing Conference in Bournemouth yesterday morning, so it was a very pleasant surprise to find out at the end of the day that we won the Best Paper Award! And yes, the picture on the cover of the book is of lovely Bournemouth beach…

Update: In the meantime I also managed to dig out our original abstract for this paper, here it is:

In this paper we turn our attention to the classical marketing problems of product/service launch and development, by examining the emergence of the so-called ‘ruin bars’ in Budapest between 1999 and 2009. Traditionally the marketing discipline has been content with adopting the abstract notion of the market from neoclassical economics and restricting itself to operations that concern the marketing of products into that abstract space, such as segmentation, positioning and targeting. Heeding recent calls for a practice turn in marketing theory, we abandon the abstract notion of the market in favour of an empirical description that does not make an a priori distinction between marketing practices and market-making practices. Drawing on the social studies of markets in economic sociology, we deploy actor-network theory as a methodology for re-describing the emergence of Budapest’s ruin bars. The marketplace that emerges out of this description is a fragile arrangement of heterogeneous actors that is painstakingly assembled and maintained to allow for the development and survival of this new service. The ruin bar format itself defies prior categorisations of a hospitality service, as it evolves into a hybrid marketplace that combines a pub with a cultural institute in which the seemingly worthless is transformed into something worthy.

Our paper with Peter Lugosi, “From Marketing to Market Practices: Assembling the Ruin Bars of Budapest”, has now been published as Chapter 24 in Marketing Innovations for Sustainable Destinations. The individual chapter is also available directly from the publisher’s website (PDF). Here is an extract, by way of an abstract:

In a recent special issue of Marketing Theory, Araujo et al. (2008) call on the marketing discipline to embrace the insights of the social study of markets in economic sociology as a promising avenue for revitalising the classical concepts of marketing. Drawing on the research programme launched by Michel Callon’s 1998 volume, The Laws of the Markets, they suggest that one traditional disciplinary distinction be abandoned in particular: “Although convenient, a distinction between market-making practices – defined as activities that shape the overall market structure – and marketing practices – defined as firm-based activities aimed at developing an actor’s position within a structure – is misleading” (Araujo et al., 2008: 8).

In this paper, we take up Araujo et al.’s (2008) call to deploy such a constructivist economic sociology perspective in the study of an empirical case. The case study concerns the emergence of the so-called romkert (meaning ‘ruin garden’) or romkocsma (‘ruin pub’) phenomenon in Budapest between 1999 and 2008 (see Lugosi and Lugosi, 2008). A ruin or rom bar, terms we use interchangeably in this paper, is a hospitality venue that incorporates its ruinous surroundings (such as dilapidated courtyards and other distressed material goods) as part of its service concept and the consumer experience. We re-describe this case using the actor-network theory (ANT) perspective of Callon and colleagues.

References

Araujo L, Kjellberg H, Spencer R. 2008. “Market practices and forms: Introduction to the special issue.” Marketing Theory 8(1): 5-14.

Callon M. 1998. The Laws of the Markets. Oxford: Blackwell.

Lugosi P, Lugosi K. 2008. “Guerrilla hospitality: Urban decay, entrepreneurship and the ‘ruin’ bars of Budapest.” Hospitality Review 10 (2): 36-44.

On Wednesday 3rd June 2009 I will be presenting a paper summarising my research on e-commerce entrepreneurship at the Quadrangular Conference at the University of Cambridge. The paper is entitled “The Qualification of E-Commerce Services: A Case Study of Entrepreneurial Learning in the Technological Economy.” As I’m approaching the end of the field work phase, this is an attempt at articulating some emerging findings and situating them in relation to relevant debates.

My object of study can be described as the innovation called online retailing and which can be understood as part of the large-scale societal, political, economic and technological transformation referred to as the “information economy,” “knowledge-based economy,” or “service economy” in the United Kingdom of the first decade of the 21st century. At the same time, e-commerce technology adoption or e-commerce entrepreneurship, in each and every case, is also a very singular affair of a particular firm. The questions “How does e-commerce innovation take place in the knowledge-based economy?” and “How do e-commerce entrepreneurs acquire the technologies and the competence to build their online retail organisations?” are therefore two sides of the same coin.

I approach these research questions by way of a qualitative case study of an e-commerce community in the South of England between 2007 and 2009, and in particular by focusing on the entrepreneurial learning practices of three focal companies. “Entrepreneurial learning” is a concept that emerges out of both the literature on entrepreneurship and the actors’ own descriptions of what they understand to be engaged in. However, in contrast to the literatures on organisational learning, knowledge, competences and capabilities, which tend to focus on the cognitive activities of individuals or groups of individuals, I pursue an object-orientated description of these learning practices. Drawing on actor-network theory and in particular the work of Michel Callon and his colleagues in economic sociology (Callon, Méadel et al. 2002; Callon & Muniesa 2005; Callon & Millo et al. 2007), I trace the processes by which these e-commerce enterprises emerge as heterogeneous assemblages.

This pursuit of the assembling practices of e-commerce entrepreneurs had identified the acquisition of e-commerce services (services required to sustain an e-commerce firm as such) as a central matter of concern for these entrepreneurs. I argue that the various entrepreneurial learning groups and conferences that emerged locally to deal with this matter of concern can be understood as marketplaces for the qualification (Callon, Méadel et al. 2002) of e-commerce services. Qualification is the process by which products or services acquire their qualities and values as economic goods. My main claim is that the qualification of e-commerce services is simultaneously an “internal” firm process and an “external” market process, which connects not only the site of the firm and the site of the market, but also the micro-enterprises with the macro-actors that take part in the construction of these technological economy marketplaces. Entrepreneurial learning and qualification of services are thus one and the same thing in the technological economy (Barry & Slater 2005).

References

Barry, A. and D. Slater (2005). The Technological Economy. Abingdon; New York, Routledge.

Callon, M., C. Méadel, et al. (2002). “The Economy of Qualities.” Economy & Society 31(2): 194.

Callon, M., Y. Millo, et al. (2007). Market Devices. Oxford, Blackwell.

Callon, M. and F. Muniesa (2005). “Economic Markets as Calculative Collective Devices.” Organization Studies (after Jan 1, 2003) 26(8): 1229-50.

On Wednesday 22 April 2009, I will be speaking at the 5th Social Study of ICT Open Research Forum (SSIT-ORF), in Panel 2: “ICT Innovations and Organisations.” In my talk I will be reflecting on the relationship between ICT innovation and organising, by drawing on the case study of my doctoral research on the organising practices of small online retailers in the South of England. Using an actor-network theory approach, I will focus on describing how e-commerce enterprises are assembled out of e-commerce services, and how this process of assembly (and innovation) is inseparable from the market process of qualifying (Callon et al. 2002) these services. I will reflect on the role of ICT artefacts in these organising and qualifying processes, and on the basis of my preliminary findings (somewhat provocatively) I will argue against making a conceptual distinction between ICT innovation, organising practices, and market practices.

Reference:

Callon, M., C. Méadel, et al. (2002). “The Economy of Qualities.” Economy & Society 31(2): 194.

Just a quick announcement of my forthcoming talks in the next few weeks. On 10 February 2009 I’ll be giving my annual presentation at the IS554 research seminar at ISIG, Department of Management, LSE. The talk, entitled “Framing, Qualification, and Reflexivity: Reporting from the Field,” is an interim report about my field research. I will be drawing on economic sociology to describe the data I have so far collected on entrepreneurial learning in the online retail industry. Specifically I will be reflecting on the curious ‘double hermeneutic’ at work in my interpretation: Michel Callon et al.’s notions of framing and qualification and Daniel Beunza and David Stark’s notion of entrepreneurial reflexivity emerge as operative concepts that are apt not only for the characterisation of the empirical situation but also for the very nature of the research process itself.

On 25 February 2009 I’ll be presenting a collaborative paper with Peter Lugosi, based on his fascinating case study of the ruin bars of Budapest, at the Centre for Research in Management (CRiM), the Business School, Bournemouth University. “Ruin bars” are a unique category of hospitality spaces in Budapest that incorporate their dilapidated surroundings into their own service concept. Taking our cue from a recent special issue of Marketing Theory, we take up the call of Araujo, Kjellberg et al. (2008) to shift our attention from marketing to the practices and artefacts that take part in the making of markets. Our talk is entitled “From Marketing to Market Practices: Assembling the Ruin Bars of Budapest.”

On 9 March 2009 I’ll be giving a talk  on “Actor-Network Theory and the Technological Economy” at the Business and Society Research Group seminar series, CRASSH, University of Cambridge. I’ll be describing the ways in which I’m deploying actor-network theory in my research project. While I’m studying the relationship between entrepreneurial learning and the economisation and marketisation of e-commerce services for small firms, the practices and arrangements that emerge can be also understood as constitutive of what Barry and Slater describe as the “technological economy.” I will attempt to tease out the ways in which such an actor-network theory approach can allow us to talk about the “moral economy.”

Relevant references

• Araujo, L., H. Kjellberg, et al. (2008). “Market Practices and Forms: Introduction to the Special Issue.” Marketing Theory 8(1): 5-14.
• Barry, A. (2001). Political Machines : Governing a Technological Society. London, Athlone.
• Barry, A. and D. Slater (2005). The Technological Economy. Abingdon; New York, Routledge.
• Beunza, D. and D. Stark (2008). “Reflexive Modeling: The Social Calculus of the Arbitrageur,” SSRN.
• Boltanski, L. and L. Thévenot (2006). On Justification: Economies of Worth. Princeton, Princeton University Press.
• Callon, M. (1998). The Laws of the Markets. Oxford, Blackwell.
• Callon, M., C. Méadel, et al. (2002). “The Economy of Qualities.” Economy & Society 31(2): 194.
• Callon, M. and F. Muniesa (2005). “Economic Markets as Calculative Collective Devices.” Organization Studies (after Jan 1, 2003) 26(8): 1229-50.
• Stark, D. (Forthcoming). The Sense of Dissonance: Accounts of Worth in Economic Life. Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press.

My head is still spinning thanks to a superb workshop/conference I attended last week: the Goldsmiths Winter Workshop in Economic Sociology that took place between 13-15 January 2009.  It was organised by David Stark and Daniel Beunza from Columbia, and Will Davis, Allan Day and Joe Deville from Goldsmiths. The organisers struck a unique balance between a variety of tensions that characterise the research world and set the stage for some highly stimulating contributions and discussions. (See photos of the event here.)

First, there was balance in terms of the experience of the participants. Practically every stage of the academic research process was represented, from early stage doctoral students to post docs, junior researchers, all the way to internationally celebrated academics. It was invaluable to see the whole spectrum of research experience and the transformation of the nature of the research process over a research career. One interesting manifestation of this transformation was the emerging clarity and economy of words: the more advanced one was in the research process, the less words seemed to be necessary to describe increasingly complex ideas, and the more poignant the chosen empirical material was.

Another form of balance emerged between presentations that dealt with highly empirical situations (pretty much all of the doctoral presentations, as well as the talks by David Stark, Daniel Beunza, Koray Caliskan, Jean-Pascal Gond, and Peter Miller) and those that engaged with some very subtle (and even sublime) theoretical (Nigel Thrift, Laurent Thévenot) and political (Michael Power, Will Davies) issues. In addition, the two intensive days of doctoral presentations were cleverly separated by a conference on “Performance,” which again featured both leaders of the field (Thévenot, Power, Thrift, Stark) and the emerging generation of scholars (Caliskan, Gond, Davies).

Speaking of the field of economic sociology, there was similarly a good balance in the way both focus and scope were accommodated in the composition of the participants. The workshop/conference had a sufficiently narrow focus on three main inter-related traditions that enabled all the participants to relate to each others’ work. These three traditions were the following: (1) the research programme represented by Michel Callon (actor-network theory in economic sociology); (2) the French economics of convention school (especially the work of Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot); and (3) social network analysis (David Stark). At the same time, there was a great variety in terms of disciplinary affiliations and empirical objects studied, from sociology to management and organisation studies, from accounting to compliance, from vinyl record collectors to megachurches.

But what I found most remarkable was the curious correspondence between the theoretical and empirical content of the talks on the one hand, and the actual format and effect of the event as a whole, on the other. Three fundamental ideas dominated the discussions that cut across all three approaches mentioned above: (1) the idea that social and economic action is co-ordinated by way of complex heterogeneous devices; (2) that socio-economic arrangements are kept stable (justified) by way of repetitive tests or trials of strength; and (3) that conflict, friction, and dissonance are productive. Indeed, that’s what the whole workshop/ conference itself amounted to and accomplished: it served as a co-ordinating device for bringing all these people and ideas together, in order to allow for testing and justification (of research questions, interpretations, positionings etc.) and for serving as a platform for creative friction between adherents and synthesisers of the above three intellectual traditions.

I was in the group of presenters chaired by Daniel Beunza, who has written a very nice reflection on the event at the socializing finance blog. I started the presentations with my talk entitled “The Qualification of e-Commerce Business Services for Small Firms,” in which I was drawing on the work of Michel Callon and colleagues to articulate the processes in which services appear to be articulated as goods in the regional e-commerce market that I am currently studying. I was followed by Laure Cabantous, who discussed her practice-orientated study of the manufacture of rationality in the decision-analysis industry, making the counter-intuitive observation that the application of decision-analysis methodologies in practice is anything but bureaucratic. If I remember correctly,  this work was done in collaboration with Jean-Pascal Gond, who also gave a very interesting talk during the Performance conference on the next day, on the social construction of the positive link between corporate social and financial performance.

Martin Giraudeau looked at business plans as part of an economy of virtuality, studying how the funding of the form leads to the founding of the firm, to cite his clever pun. It was interesting to consider the text of the business plan as the site of an entrepreneurial gathering, as the device that takes part in the co-ordination of Schumpeterian recombinations. Will Davis outlined his study of two rival modes of neo-liberal knowledge. I was particularly interested in his analysis of the discourse of competitiveness, which is so pervasive in much of contemporary EU and UK innovation and enterprise policy.

Benjamin Taupin spoke about the murky world of credit rating agencies and ways in which compromise is reached and broken in the course of market co-ordination and competition. Gábor Vályi took us on a journey into a similarly mysterious world of vinyl record collectors, illustrating vividly the ways in which worth is accomplished through building expertise over time. Jose Ossandon was dissecting some complex issues about the positioning of his research on private health insurance vis-a-vis a number of related controversies in social theory.

Jacques Olivier Charron focussed on the role of sell-side analysts in the qualification of information as it relates to prices of financial securities. Allan Day told us about his research into the complexities of distributed version control of open source software. Juliane Reinecke walked us through a highly nuanced study of what she called the “tightrope walk between transnational justice and market acceptance” in the making of the markets for Fairtrade products. Laura Centemeri’s presentation ended the workshop on a high note, with a sophisticated argument about the need for a reconsideration of the treatment of externalities in economic sociology.

As for the Performance conference presentations and the master classes, there were some extremely rich and challenging papers presented, so I can’t possibly do justice to them in a couple of paragraphs. As I was already familiar with some of the cases, papers or books that have been presented  (such as Peter Miller and Ted O’Leary’s important work on Moore’s Law or David Stark’s forthcoming book, The Sense of Dissonance: Accounts of Worth in Economic Life, a major reconceptualisation of the nature of entrepreneurship), let me focus here on the content that was new to me.

David Stark’s opening lecture about his collaborative work with Balázs Vedres (“Opening Closure: Intercohesion and Entrepreneurial Dynamics in Business Groups”) was the account of what seemed like a monumental effort to develop a historical network analysis of entrepreneurship, by way of tracing the evolution of group formation across time among Hungary’s top corporations.  Stark’s closing lecture couldn’t have been more different in terms of theme and method: a fascinating ethnographic account of the inner workings of American megachurches. Stark showed convincingly how these megachurches were not businesses masquerading as places of worship but quite the opposite: churches camouflaged as businesses (although I may have missed the punchline as I had to leave before the talk was over to catch my train).

Having just recently read Boltanski and Thévenot’s book On Justification (which left a profound impression on me), I was looking forward with great anticipation to Laurent Thévenot’s lecture. I found most interesting his conceptualisation of “capacity,” which he described as “personal ease” that comes with engaging with a familiar environment. Capacity emerged as something that is dispersed over a functionally arranged environment, where agents need to shift between different arrangements (orders of worth). Thévenot was also developing a complex notion of engagement, an interplay between quietude and inquietude in making moral judgements, which to some extent reminded me of Heidegger’s distinction between the ready-to-hand and present-at-hand.

Nigel Thrift cast his eyes “Towards a Political Economy of Propensity.” He defined propensity as ‘innate inclination,’ and used it as a guiding notion in his fusion of social theory with recent advances in neuroscience. It was an effort to develop a political economy that takes the body and emotions seriously, which in the context of the current financial and economic crisis (think fear and greed) looks very timely. But Thrift didn’t stop at the financial markets; he moved from a discussion of neuroeconomics to neuromarketing in order to show how capitalism has been tracking social theory (using the work of Gabriel Tarde as an example).

As for the empirically driven discussions, two presentations stand out as particularly memorable. Koray Caliskan gave an inspiring and entertaining talk about performance and performativity in market theory, using some captivating examples from his fieldwork at the Izmir cotton exchange in Turkey. Daniel Beunza’s presentation (based on Beunza, D. and D. Stark (2008). “Reflexive Modeling: The Social Calculus of the Arbitrageur.”) took us to a rather different but equally exotic context, a merger arbitrage trading desk on Wall Street. Beunza discussed in vivid ethnographic detail the fascinating story of a single day and a single merger transaction, in order to develop a sophisticated argument about social devices of dissonance in the calculative practices of these traders.

On Wednesday 29 October I was listening to AC/DC and thinking about innovation. No, I’m not talking about the new album just released last week by the legendary Australian rock band. I was at the launch of the AC/DC model of innovation at NESTA in London. AC/DC stands for “Absorptive Capacity/Development Capacity,” and it forms the heart of a new innovation system model that is aimed at capturing the simultaneously local and global aspects of innovation. It is an interesting and sophisticated model that is decidedly geographic, in the sense that it measures various types of connectedness that are geographically specific. I haven’t had a chance to read and ‘absorb’ the whole report yet, but it certainly looks intriguing.

The report is called “Innovation by Adoption: Measuring and mapping absorptive capacity in UK nations and regions” [PDF, 12.3MB]. It was in fact released alongside another complementary research report, entitled “UK Global Innovation: Engaging with new countries, regions and people” [PDF, 2.8MB]. The latter focuses on the relationship between the UK and some emerging innovative places outside the UK, while the former maps UK nations and regions in terms of their AC/DC. The 29 October launch event for these two reports was video-recorded and the presentations and panel discussions can be viewed on the NESTA website.

While I wished that I had a chance to read the reports prior to the event, a number of interesting ideas have emerged from the discussions still. First, the speakers painted a picture of innovation that was thoroughly complex and heterogeneous (in terms of flows), locally specific, yet globally distributed. Given the context of the current financial crisis, the main threat to innovation (or rather to the system of innovation as a global phenomenon) appeared to stem from the protectionist actions of territorial nation states.

At the same time it also became apparent that the very definition of innovation continues to be a major issue, in the way it underlies particular opinions, research approaches, and policy decisions. The various contributors, whether in the panel or in the audience, used a variety of terms as synonyms to innovation, such as ‘research,’ ‘R&D,’ ’science,’ or even ‘knowledge.’ While it is understandable that when one discusses innovation at the scale of nation states and the global economy it may be necessary to use such shorthand, it also made me wonder what gets lost in such aggregation. Certainly not all research or knowledge is equally innovative: in some (if not most?) cases the outcome of scientific or academic research may very well be keeping things stable, as opposed to radically changing them. Such re-productive knowledge then could be contrasted with innovation that results in a major rearrangement of the world.

Indeed, the last speaker, Nigel Thrift, started his contribution by implying a definition of innovation along these lines, as something that makes a difference in the world, especially in relation to global problems such as climate change. Although he was also quick to point out that he considers innovation as something that arises incrementally out of tinkering and messing around, rather than as a result of planned activity by entrepreneurial heros. Thrift defined globalisation as ‘inter-connectedness,’ and he provided an illuminating assessment of the role of universities in innovation as a global phenomenon. Watch the video recording of his talk here.

Last week I touched upon the notion of explicitation in relation to the current financial crisis. Wal-Mart’s announcement yesterday of its intention to make it more explicit how the products on its shelves originating from China have been produced appears to be yet another example of such explicitation. Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott admitted that in the past the retailer was approaching the sourcing of its products in China with some detachment: “We have traditionally purchased in a very transactional manner” (22 October 2008, FT.com). The priority was not the conditions under which a given product had been produced but the price of that product.

An inevitable part of such a policy would be the frequent switching between suppliers, to encourage competition and drive down the prices of supplies. Such switching of course makes the traceability of a product’s origins more difficult, not to mention the pressure it might exert on suppliers to cut corners in order to cut costs. The policy change signals that making the way things have been produced explicit is worth some money and that Wal-Mart is willing to absorb the cost of making the relations traceable behind its Chinese-made products. In Mr Scott’s words: “We need deeper, longer-term relationships with suppliers so it is not based on the last penny” (22 October 2008, FT.com). As part of this traceability Chinese suppliers would be required to disclose the names and addresses of every manufacturer involved in the production of a given product.

Whatever the causes and the motivation behind this policy change (concerns for product safety, the environment, social responsibility might be some), it suggests that there is a shift away from dealing with products as detached objects and towards tracing them as things produced in and by a web of relations that matter. These relationships matter in two ways. First, they matter quite literally as the relations that take part in the production of the product as an object. But they also matter politically. No doubt the various governmental and non-governmental organisations that have invested time and effort in tracing the less palatable relations and actors (think melamine) in the production of certain products have an important role to play in convincing corporations to make things more explicit.

The breakdown or malfunctioning of products also exposes the relations that produced them, and there was no shortage of these in recent years (from toys to milk to financial products). How come this relationality seems more obvious now than in the past? The globalisation of mass media may have something to do with it, as the tracing of relations has become much easier with the proliferation of information and communication technologies. A lot more people and organisations can do the tracing than ever before and it becomes easier to judge the qualities of these traces. How things are made is no longer a minority interest but possibly the most important concern there is.

References

“Wal-Mart in China standards drive.” The Financial Times. 22 October 2008

[Update] P.S. I better make my own sources more explicit then as well… This is obviously a reading that draws on Bruno Latour’s work and his references to Peter Sloterdijk as well as on Martin Heidegger’s writings on the distinction between objects and things. Most recently Latour discussed Sloterdijk here (PDF) and here (PDF). As for Heidegger, his essay “The Thing” is a good place to start, available in Heidegger, M. (1975). Poetry, Language, Thought. New York, Harper & Row (pp. 163-184). Another relevant volume is Latour, B. and P. Weibel (2005). Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy. Cambridge, Mass. [Karlsruhe, Germany], MIT Press; ZKM/Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe.

Procter & Gamble’s tentative steps towards selling its products directly to consumers over the internet suggest the unfolding of an interesting new dynamic in the retail industry. While we have got accustomed to powerful retailers expanding into the e-commerce arena (such as Tesco), or the emergence of new online retailers altogether (think Amazon), the increasing number of FMCG and other manufacturers going direct may give these retailers something to think about. Apparently Wal-Mart is already busy hiring a strategy executive just to focus on this phenomenon. What are the implications of all this for supermarkets and consumers?

According to the Financial Times this is really a response by the likes of P&G to the threat from retailers’ private label brands. In a sense the big retailers were asking for it, when they gradually encroached on the turf of branded manufacturers. On the other hand this could also indicate that the way consumers are shopping might be changing or is expected to change. Perhaps it will become less and less cumbersome to source a variety of consumables from several different sources, if technology helps to consolidate the various tasks. One could certainly imagine an intermediary solution that could not only automate recurrent shopping from a variety of sources but also compare and calculate on an ongoing basis the prices and shipping costs of the products involved. Could this mark the beginning of the end of supermarket supremacy?

While flipping through the channels last night I accidentally stumbled upon Oliver Hodge’s documentary Garbage Warrior on More4 and I couldn’t help but watch the whole thing. It is an interesting film for a number of reasons but to me it was most of all a fascinating case study of innovation, in both the narrowest and broadest sense of the word. The film tells the story of architect Michael Reynolds and the experimental sustainable community he built over the last 30 years in Taos, New Mexico, mostly out of garbage. (Watch the trailer below for a summary of the storyline.)

The story contains all the usual elements of an innovation case study, such as the visionary leader battling against all odds, experimentation with unlikely materials (plastic bottles and tyres instead of bricks), ongoing improvement of the prototype, experiences of failure upon failure, the gradual build-up of a base of supporters over time, and the arrival of recognition at last. But what the film particularly excels at is the vivid portrayal of the multi-layered nature of innovation and the epic scale of the conflict between the crushing forces of identity and the playful but fragile manifestations of difference.

What first seems like a few hippies mucking about (quite literally) in the middle of nowhere suddenly becomes a threat to the State. Standards and regulations are found to be broken, licenses are revoked, armed men of the law descend. Free experimentation has to give way to conformity, as the now outcast architect tries to follow all the regulations by implementing the grid that the law demands. Those familiar with Heidegger’s notion of Enframing (Gestell) will not fail to see the awesome force of a technology of standardisation imprinting itself on the landscape as our architect tries to knock out identical dwellings suburbia style, in order to convince the powers that be that he is playing by the rules. “I’m shakin’ the tree, boss!” as Cool Hand Luke would say.

Then the battle moves on to the corridors and the floor of the state legislature as it becomes a linguistic wrangle over a draft bill aimed at enabling architectural experimentation and protecting it from the excesses of the planning code. It is a battle to convince the guardians of the standard that the breaking of the standard should be tolerated and even protected. While our entrepreneur is driven to innovate by and for a global cause (that is the threat of global warming), he is not even allowed to utter those two words in front of senators who do not consider it either a matter of fact or a matter of concern. Ultimately it takes the Asian tsunami but especially the economic fallout of Hurricane Katrina to help the bill pass through the legislature after a number of failed attempts.

In this sense the film is all about innovation: locally with building materials, construction techniques and sustainable living, but also globally with legislation and communication (by way of this film, for instance) to address a global cause for concern.

References

Heidegger, M. (1977). The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. New York; London, Harper and Row.