The private household kitchen as an arena of innovation. Development and diffusion of the kitchen in the post-war boom and in the "post Fordist age"

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Reinhold Bauer; Professor Dr. Wolfgang Burr
• Subject Area: History of Science ; Management and Marketing
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 570684442

On the basis of two project parts (business administration, history of technology), this interdisciplinary project examines the development of kitchen ideals, concepts and, above all, technologies since the middle of the 20th century. The kitchen will be examined as an innovation arena, in which social and technical innovations and ensemble and individual appliance innovations are intertwined (kitchen as a system). As the central arena of the "consumer goods revolution", the kitchen not only became a heterogeneous (multi-)technology space, but also remained a working and living space (multifunctional space). The kitchen is also characterized by a hybrid innovation system with numerous actors from different sectors and social subsystems. Against this background, the project examines the economic, technical, social and cultural conditions, factors and agents that drove the evolution oft the modern kitchen. The investigation will take the form of two interlinked but discipline-bound sub-projects comprising two interlinked case studies: Development of the kitchen industry; development of the kitchen as an ensemble (based on two diachronic sub-studies); development of two selected kitchen appliances (each based on two diachronic sub-studies: Thermomix and electric stove); synthesizing sub-study on the kitchen as a systemic innovation arena. Within the framework of the project, economic (including patent analysis, content analysis, theory-based analysis) and historical research methods (including discourse analysis, systematic archive work) will be used. This also involves the transdisciplinary transfer of methods. Interpretative approaches from economic research (dominant design, product architecture) will be compared with other interpretations of technical change, such as the actor-structure approach, the social constructivist approaches intensively received by the history of technology and systems theory approaches. The kitchen is interpreted as a large-scale technical system in the domestic ensemble. The overall project aims to provide a well-founded history of innovation in/of the kitchen from the mid-20th century onwards. The existing concepts and interpretations of innovation research are to be reviewed and expanded. The proposed interdisciplinary cooperation is indispensable for this. The project will enable more differentiated answers to the question of the dominant driving forces but also the limits of system innovations or innovations in the system.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants