SCOT and Lighting: The Era of LED

The current attention to climate change and resource deficiency as well as how to overcome these issues by governing and enabling sustainable transition request a need for looking into factors that enables or restricts the dissemination of energy saving technology. In this article, I will therefore revisit Bijker’s analysis of the fluorescent lamb (Bijker and Law, 1992), but in relation to the appearing LED technology. Through the analysis I will identify relevant social groups that have significant influence on the evolvement of lighting technologies, with special attention to the LED technology. I will look at interpretive flexibility among the groups, and I will give special attention to how the environmental aspect of energy efficiency is perceived by the different groups. I will also look into how the dynamics between the groups may affect the social group(s) of consumers. The relevant social groups will be identified by ‘following the actor’ and further by ‘rolling the snowball’ (Bijker and Law, 1992). I believe that applying a social-constructivist view on the evolvement and spreading of energy efficient technology will result in an understanding of enabling and restricting factors that influence the path of dissemination. Further, I believe that associating SCOT with energy-efficient technology will help create attention to the potential of applying social-constructivist perspectives when discussing, and perhaps managing, sustainable transition.