Moral Hermeneutics in R&D Teams: Making Sense of Conflicting Responsibilities in Technological Innovation

This study adopts a hermeneutic, practice-based approach to Responsible Innovation to explore how a reflective and proactive attitude can be implemented in a start-up context. We hypothesised that a moral hermeneutics framework - rooted in post-phenomenology and theories on technology-induced value change - could provide a way to understand how practitioners in a start-up make sense of the different kinds of responsibilities in their work, balancing professional demands and standards of excellence with broader ecological and social commitments. Using in-depth interviews with the team members of a start-up R&D laboratory, we explored how they interpret their responsibilities-as-(moral)-obligations. Our findings suggest that the syntactical ways team members make sense of the relationship between these responsibilities can be useful for understanding how reflexivity can surface in this environment. We conclude by proposing that less conciliatory interpretations of conflicting responsibilities may lead to a collective search for practical solutions addressing these tensions, as long as it is embedded in a collective dialogue involving the other members’ moral perspectives and technical expertise.