Deviant Innovation
What is the true nature of innovation? Sociologist Robert Merton theorized innovation as a form of social deviance, in which the innovator uses abnormal means to achieve socially acceptable goals. Like risk, deviance can benefit or harm society. Dr. Santana’s research disentangles the bonds and tensions between innovation and deviance, unveiling the mechanisms of the “gray zone” between legitimate and illegitimate innovation.
Publications
The institutionalization of occupations tends to assume homogenization of occupational values. This study addresses the question of how members of an occupation with dissenting preferences reach consensus on a code of ethics. We build on prior theorization of occupational institutionalization and institutional discourse to theorize ethical codification as a dynamic discursive process of internal dissent and consensus culminating in a professional code of ethics. We use email data from the IEEE-ACM Software Engineering Ethics and Professional Practice Committee tasked with producing the 1997 Software Engineering Code of Ethics to show how ethical codification follows a process of initial competition followed by semantic convergence. This study demonstrates how natural language processing and semantic network analysis can contribute to discourse analyses of institutional processes.
Projects
Deviant Innovation
Several manuscripts are currently under development, including:
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“A Comparison of Bibliometric Sources for the Science of Innovation: Microsoft Academic Graph and the Web of Science” w/Charles Gomez and Seonghoon Kim
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“A historical analysis of formal and informal ethical discourse in software engineering”
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“A theoretical model of the ethical codification process”
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“Modeling Discursive Boundary Work in Science and Technology”
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“Predicting Ethical Codification in Critical Scientific Discourse”
Get in touch to learn more about Jessica J. Santana, PhD.