A promise-attentive triple embeddedness framework, applied to cellular foods

By conceptualizing embeddedness as integral to how incumbent firms evaluate technology promises, we might gain a clearer understanding of the roles these actors could play in sustainability transitions. Geels' Triple Embeddedness Framework (TEF) is traditionally applied to long-term historical analysis of firms-in-industries in the context of grand challenges; here, the framework is extended to enable analyses of technology promise dynamics, as conceptualized in cultural political economy terms. The promise-attentive TEF demarcates a global universal realm of promises from a contextual realm wherein pressures are experienced and strategies employed. The framework is applied to a study of Norwegian food system actors' views on cellular food (CF), which encompasses cultured, in-vitro meat and precision fermentation. The analysis shows how globally articulated promises become interpreted in relation to national-level factors, which not only filter pressures but also give direction to hypothetical response strategies. Empirically, the article documents skepticism among incumbents regarding CF's global uptake potential and food system transformation promises. Conceptually, the article elaborates on how the promise-attentive TEF might inform future research into technology promises as a distinct phenomenon across transition domains (e.g. health, energy, digitalization), via attention to characteristic processes in incumbents' promise evaluation, including boundary-drawing, scalar attachments, and digging deep.