Managing Technological Modernisation in Peripheral Industries: Policy, Organisation, and Technological Inequality in Kerala's Coir Industry
This article investigates the transformation and deinstitutionalisation of the coir production space in Alappuzha, Kerala, by examining how state-sponsored innovation initiatives and technological infrastructures reshape the sector's organisational, material, and epistemic foundations. Drawing on a mixed-methods design that combines primary survey data from 115 coir production units with longitudinal analysis of policy documents and government reports from 1990 to 2025, the study adopts a sociotechnical perspective inspired by Science and Technology Studies to analyse mechanised fibre-processing technologies, digital platforms, and the Coir Industry Technology Upgradation Scheme as forms of techno-political stabilisation. The findings reveal highly uneven patterns of technological adoption across private, cooperative, and women-run units, particularly in the uptake of defibrin machines, electric looms, and enterprise management systems. While these interventions are promoted as pathways to productivity and global competitiveness, they also produce new forms of infrastructural inequality and epistemic exclusion, as policy incentives, trade standards, and certification regimes privilege capital-intensive technological configurations and generate lock-ins that marginalise smaller and women-led enterprises. Rather than a neutral process of modernization, technological change in the coir sector emerges as a politically structured reordering of industrial space, labour, and legitimacy. The study highlights the need for innovation policies that move beyond uniform technology diffusion and instead build inclusive ecosystems of skills, institutional support, and differentiated pathways of technological integration in peripheral and labour-intensive industries.
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