Struggling towards sustainability: productivity paradoxes and institutional wayfinding practices in an early-stage socio-technical energy transition
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The fascination with the phenomenon of productivity itself takes it beyond traditional economic perspectives. The `sociological eye' treats productivity like any other institutional practice in society, capable of being studied from many different angles. This paper takes up the idea that the productivity challenge persists and considers the role of stubborn institutions, particularly the strong hold of institutional regimes that grips the doing of work and how things get done in institutional environments. Drawing on data from a sample of geoscientists, geo-consultants, policy and government actors, and international trade associations (no=39) and close dialogues (no=34), we explore the doing of productivity under financial regime duress in an early-stage energy market transition. We identify the duress of the financial regime and demonstrate that which harks back to the historical precedence, bounded decision-making requirements and short-term determinacy. These insights illuminate how the productivity assessment practice can stimulate practical wayfinding activity of 'stitching and patching', 'formal diverting to informality and off-scripting' and 'policy pathway reform calling'. The paper concludes by proposing four implications of the sociological eye for the conduct of productivity research, highlighting the intensification of conservativism, commercialisation curtailment, financial economic irony, problematized notions of, and a respect for, the institutional status quo regime.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.013 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.037 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.013 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".