Strategic niche management in transition pathways: Telework advocacy as groundwork for an incremental transformation

摘要

This article presents telework advocacy in the United States as a case of strategic niche management that contributed to an incremental transformation of office work location practice in the United States. In its first decades, telework advocacy showed elements of strategic niche management including vision and expectations, learning processes, and social networks. Supported by environmental and economic landscape pressures, trip reduction and travel demand management policies opened up protected spaces at the local, state, or federal levels for the practice of telework, with public agencies as experimenters. Niche and incumbent actors shared a strategy of promoting telework in structured circumstances and spoke to organizational and employee benefit alongside societal benefits. Yet as landscape pressures lessened, incumbent actors took greater ownership of the innovations of telework, and shifted their vision to one that considers telecommuting as a function of human resources rather than a societal imperative.