The current issue (Volume 26) of the Journal of Responsible Technology carries a book review written by Bassetti Foundation Foreign Correspondent Jonathan Hankins. Hankins reviews the open access publication The fragility of responsibility. Norway’s transformative agenda for research, innovation and business, Edited by Giovanni De Grandis and Anne Blanchard, volume 9 of De Gruyter studies in innovation and entrepreneurship.

The book represents a review and critique of the path trodden in Norway and its broader repercussions and influence on the development of the responsible innovation (RI), responsible research and innovation (RRI) and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) paradigms.

As regular readers might know, Norway’s institutions have played an important role within the development of the concept of responsible innovation (RI) and its close relation Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) since the terms first came into use. Alongside the Bassetti Foundation for example, Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences was a founding partner organization of the Virtual Institute of Responsible Innovation (VIRI), this collection attesting to further commitment that has continued until today, as many of the authors work together within a funded networking and learning center called AFINO (acronym for ‘Ansvarlig Forskning og Innovasjon i NOrge’, or Responsible Research and Innovation in Norway).

The book itself is divided into three sections. Section 1, The Emergence of Responsibility, situates CSR and RRI in Norway, offering context and an overview of long-term trends in the relations between society, science, innovation policy and business. Section 2, Contexts of Fragile Responsibility, offers a more in-depth analysis of some specific challenges encountered by CSR and RRI. The final section, Practices: Fragile or Robust, describes a series of practices through which CSR and RRI are implemented, a narration that raises the question of whether these approaches strengthen or weaken organizations’ abilities to be socially responsible.

The review is available here, and the book can be viewed or downloaded here. An intriguing read of stand-alone chapters, the narrative that runs throughout shows how responsibility is continuously unsettled within contemporary institutional, democratic, and epistemic contexts, while reflecting ideas of ‘doing responsibility’ as a process rather than statically being responsible.