Summary:
Innovation Studies have become a central field in the policy-making and political decision fields. Since their conception in the 1930s and their establishment as a multidisciplinary academic field in the 1970s, they have gone through several reiterations and reformations. The most recent among them is the broad adoption and implementation of the Multi Level Perspective (from now on, MLP), a descriptive model that concerns itself with sociotechnical transitions through History, mainly from the Industrial Revolution and onwards. In this thesis, we will see how the MLP employs itself in the study of History by utilising three analytical levels, the landscape (macro), the regime (meso), and the niche (micro) and the interfacing of the historical actors among all three of them. Through the study of its conceptual and ontological genealogy and a critique of its applications on case studies, I hope to assess its explanatory, descriptive, and predictive aspirations, its political impact and its epistemological status within the broader fields of the History and Sociology of Technology.
Keywords:
sts, mlp, history of technology, transition studies
