The role of values in grassroots innovations

Abstract

Connecting to the previous chapter, here we take another key psychological construct – values as cognitive-emotional phenomena – and explore the relevance of values for an exemplar grassroots innovation within the sharing economy that has energy consumption implications. Grassroots innovations have been viewed from a sociotechnical perspective as operating within ‘niches’. Drawing on previous research, we show why values matter in this context and discuss the extent to which values may or may not limit scale up from the ‘niche’, to influence the ‘regime’. Our example uses Schwarz’s value scale and Freegle as a sharing economy activity. We discuss the wider relevance for sustainability of what are regarded in sociotechnical thinking as slow-changing phenomena, conceptually located in the background ‘landscape’ of taken-for-granted assumptions.