Narratives of Innovation: The Case of UK Infrastructure - News Articles Data, 2018-2021

Sergeeva, Natalya and Johan, Ninan (2021). Narratives of Innovation: The Case of UK Infrastructure - News Articles Data, 2018-2021. [Data Collection]. Colchester, Essex: UK Data Service. 10.5255/UKDA-SN-855184

This research contributes to innovation theory by arguing that narratives of innovation and their interactions at different levels play a vital role in constructing meanings, building innovative capabilities and shaping individual and collective identities. An innovation narrative is part of an organisation’s culture that encapsulates employees’ beliefs about a company’s ability to innovate. Narratives of innovation are consistently promoted by policy makers at the industry level to meet the targets set by the Government. The UK infrastructure sector, on which the ESRC grant focuses, provides a particularly rich setting in which to explore narratives of innovation, which have changed over time, with the focus on sustainability and climate change and digitization as enabler.

Data description (abstract)

To address our research objective, we choose to conduct a single in-depth case study research. Single case studies are meant to study phenomena in depth within a single context to retain the holistic and meaningful characteristics of real-life events. We chose to study the High Speed Two (HS2) megaproject in the United Kingdom. The data that informs this research is captured from naturally occurring news media articles. Naturally occurring data or naturalistic data arise without a researcher intervening directly or providing some ‘stimulus’ to a group of respondents. The news articles for the study were collected through a key word search in the ‘google news’ repository. Google news is one of the major aggregators of news on the web and is used as a scholarly source for research. Hence as part of theoretical sampling, we chose to study the early stages of the project from 2009 to 2012. We selected 113 news articles from different newspaper agencies such as the Telegraph (32 news articles), British Broadcasting Company (29 news articles), Daily Mail (7 news articles), Bucks Herald (5 news articles). Other newspaper agencies such as Independent, Financial times, etc. that had less than 4 articles each were also considered for the study. It should be noted that the news articles were not evenly spread across the study period, rather were dependent on a particular event and the criticality of it.

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