Diffusing making: the performative agency of the fablab hype in france

Alternative organizational models such as makerspaces are part of a dynamic of the institutionalization of new practices of knowledge production and circulation. In France, they have been popularized through the label Fablabs, a brand that originated at MIT (Gershenfeld 2005). The importation of this standard during the early 2010’ deserves a close attention in order to understand how this displacement has performed in terms of practices, how it has been contextualized in innovative milieu. Based on a sociological and ethnographic inquiry of several Fablabs located in science museums and “third places”, we have studied the processes of institutionalization that have accompanied the creation and development of these places since the emergence of the maker movement in France (Lhoste and Barbier, 2016). French fablabbers do not solely prone market-oriented innovation as a goal. They rather target the felicity of making in community of practices where knowledge is produced and circulates freely among professional and field experts. They also consider digital fabrication as a grassroots technology based on practices and experiential knowledge rather than on a scientific literacy, and as an enhancer of citizen empowerment, entrepreneurship, and education in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).In this communication, we aim at further understanding the transformative agency of Fablabs and their contribution to the situated generalization of collaborative practices. Our analytical focus will relay on a grounded description of practices in Fablabs that account for the socio-materiality of heterogeneous assemblages (Orlikowski and Scott, 2008; Leonardi, 2012). Many stakeholders have been enrolled on premises of a transformation of innovation processes from a linear approach to a user-oriented approach. We thus question how a field of situated practices (Nicolini et al., 2003) of makers interrelates with organizational arrangements (Powel, 1987) that sustain the existence of such places. We will seek for the changes that occurred thanks to this Fablab movement in terms of knowledge production/circulation and in terms of the recognition of experiential knowledge. Our findings suggest that the activities of setting and the socio-materiality of Fablab are rather loosely coupled with the collaborative activities of fablabbers. We explore the meaning of this decoupling in terms of performative agency (Butler, 2010).