Fostering Transformation. A Governance Frame for Large Private and Public Organisations as Critical Actors in Transformations

Abstract

For socio-technological systems to shift, large organisations, ranging from large companies, governmental funding bodies, higher education institutions, and related intermediary organisations need to actively foster the transformation. These organisations are situated between the individuals and their behaviour and the broader systems level, where they fulfil critical systemic functions. If they are not willing and able to engage, reflect and change, both in their internal dynamics as well as in their relationship with other system actors, transformations will fail or go wrong.This article fills a gap in the studies of transformation governance. It conceptualises and illustrates generic governance conditions for those critical corporate actors to engage constructively with the transformation of wider socio-technological systems as an ongoing learning process. We do so by drawing on and expanding a set of governance principles that originally were developed in the context of ‘responsible research and innovation’ (Kuhlmann et al. 2016; Randles 2017).

Keywords: Corporate actors, System transformation, Transition studies, Meta-governance, Organizational change, Responsible research and innovation