Innovation and institutional change: the transition to a sustainable ...

132 Chapter 5
and search routines in the knowledge infrastructure that were strongly
intertwined with the technological and organisational nature of the electricity
system. In the economic system the mode of provision for electricity was
mostly taken for granted, with the exception of larger industries producing
electricity in-house. With regard to the linkages with the political and policy
system, organisation through natural monopoly was unquestioned, and goals
and problem perceptions of the electricity sector and government were
congruent in the sense that facilitating growth of energy supply and
consumption was seen as intrinsically linked to economic growth. The
concern of long-term security of supply was expected to be solved by a
changeover to nuclear energy. Congruence between goals, problem
perceptions and solutions was also facilitated by rather closed circles of
interaction, with energy policy making restricted to actors in the electricity
sector, oil and gas sector, and the largest industrial companies in the
Netherlands 5 . With regard to the linkages to society, electricity was mostly
taken for granted and did not receive a significant level of public scrutiny.
The mode of communication with society was rather one-sided, and mainly
involved information campaigns regarding potential uses of electricity
(VDEN, 1977). Towards the beginning of the seventies a public relations
strategy was initiated by electricity organisations to respond to increasing
negative and weakly founded publications regarding electricity production
and distribution. The goal was to provide objective information about
electricity, with a strong technical focus on issues of supply and distribution,
in order to refute subjective and ill-founded representations of the
functioning of the electricity system (VDEN, 1977: 128-129).
In chapter three we presented main concepts for the investigation in the
empirical chapters. The focus in this chapter is on understanding the
interaction between corrosion of dominant logics, de-institutionalisation of
the embeddedness of the electricity system in societal substructures, and
institutionalisation of the alternative path of decentral cogeneration, and the
way this has shaped the evolution of decentral cogeneration and its fast rise
in particular.
5 Regular meetings took place between the largest six industrial companies in the
Netherlands (Philips, Hoogovens, Akzo, Unilever, Shell and DSM) and the Ministry of
Economic Affairs where energy was discussed among a range of issues.