Gijs ten Berge

Summary The English writer George Orwell stated in his renowned novel Nineteen Eigthy-Four that those who control how the past is remembered, control what the future will look like. Sustainability Transitions Research (STR) has emerged as an academic field that amply studies how actors collectively imagine sustainable futures. What STR scholars have not conceptualized in this respect is the fundamental role of perceptions of the past. In accordance with Orwell’s statement, this means that an indispensable part of the way actors acquire authority for imagined futures remains out of sight. In this dissertation, I employ the concept of (collective) memory to increase understanding of actor agency in imaginary development. I propose memory as an important aspect of actor agency in the development of so-called socio-technical imaginaries into the solidity of identities. The concept of socio-technical imaginaries accounts for the way scientific and technological ideas can evolve into collective identities through four phases: origination, embedding, resistance and extension. Yet, there are several research issues in relation to identity development in STR. I address four of them in my empirical chapters. First, there is no firm understanding of the agency of individuals in social identity development. In chapter 2, I assess discursive conditions that enable individuals to align their personal identities to collective ones in a variety of ways. I investigate this as part of the embedding phase of socio-technical imaginaries. Second, understanding is lacking how a sense of togetherness among actors across multiple scales comes about while innovations develop within and across scales. In chapter 3, I study how transition actors can mobilize the past to encourage such a sense of togetherness in the extension of socio-technical imaginaries. Third, it has remained unclear how coherent identities emerge from the multitude of roles that actors have in transitions. In chapter 4, I assess how the different roles that prominent actors in transitions have, can be coherently reflected in the socio-technical imaginary these actors appeal to in the resistance phase. Fourth, the way actors mobilize the past to contribute to the development of narratives that other actors can identify with asks for examination. In chapter 5, I assess patterns of ‘mnemonic rhetoric’ that prominent actors employ from the origination of socio-technical imaginaries onwards. To move forward on the role of memory in imaginary development, I conduct a within-case analysis of the transition to gas and electricity in Dutch households. Based on literature research, I find that prominent women’s organizations and their members developed multiple modern household imaginaries in this transition, starting in the 1870s. Some of these women’s organizations imagined the modern household as full of energy technologies adopted by a professional housewife. Other women’s organizations imagined the modern household without a housewife, envisioning that the industrial mechanization of household tasks would turn women into wage earners. Eventually, the professional housewife imaginary would rise to dominance in the 1930s. I investigate how memory accompanied the development of these modern household imaginaries. Hereto, I analyse a variety of women’s magazines and advisory guides for women, produced by (members of) women’s organizations, for the historical narratives on technological development they entailed. My study reveals that in the studied transition, the mobilization of perceptions of the past by (members of) women’s organizations was at the core of the development of modern household imaginaries. In the embedding phase, women’s organizations provided discursive conditions that enabled individual housewives to identify with modern household imaginaries through historical narratives on technological development (chapter 2). In the phase of extension, women’s organizations propagated social relations between actors operating within, across, and beyond the household encouraging the spread of modern household imaginaries across scales (chapter 3). In the resistance phase, the social and political roles that members of women’s organizations identified with cohered with the imaginaries that appealed to them. They paved their memories, visions, and expectations in a coherent narrative explaining how the imaginary they appropriated was desirable and achievable (chapter 4). And, from the origination phase onwards, the development of modern household imaginaries was accompanied by the employment of several patterns of mnemonic rhetoric in historical narratives on technological development. It was only when members of one of the women’s organizations consistently employed each of the studied rhetorical patterns that the professional housewife imaginary rose to dominance (chapter 5). I conclude that (members of) women’s organizations memorized past experiences and events to present the socio-technological futures they imagined as achievable and desirable. They operated as so-called mnemonic actors attempting to exercise mnemonic agency in the conversion of modern household imaginaries into identities. With this conclusion, I bring forward the role of actors of an in STR yet unaddressed type exercising an in STR yet unaddressed type of agency. It is important for transitions research to further study this type of agency. Future research could investigate the extent to which mnemonic actors have the capacitiy to influence future imaginaries, as well as ways for them to facilitate people with a variety of backgrounds to develop shared stories of the past.