Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-4rdpn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-05T09:15:24.147Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

7 - The Theoretical Foundations of Social Innovation: Sources, Ideas and Future Directions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 April 2021

Get access

Summary

Introduction

The field of social innovation has grown up primarily as a field of practice. There has been surprisingly little attention to theory, or to history, and at times even a disdain for intellectual input. Although there has been much promising research work, no major thinker has yet written about the topic; there are no clearly defined schools of thought, no continuing theoretical arguments and few major research programmes to test theories against the evidence.

But, to mature as a field, social innovation needs to shore up its theoretical foundations, the frames with which it thinks and makes sense of the world. Sharper theory will help to clarify what is and isn't known, the points of argument as well as agreement. It will help in the generation of testable hypotheses.

Above all, it may help to guide practice. Social theories, unlike theories in fields like physics, are inseparable from their purposes and their uses. Not all innovations are good, nor are all social innovations. So, theory needs to fuse three things: rigorous and objective analysis of patterns, causes and dynamics; normative analysis of social change from an ethical perspective; and guidance on how practitioners can do better in improving wellbeing, alleviating poverty or widening distributions of power.

Here I suggest some of the main theoretical currents that have flowed into the broad river of social innovation; I suggest how they may be synthesised, and the contribution that other fields may make. To summarise, I suggest that together these theoretical foundations show:

  • that social innovations tend to originate in contradictions, tensions and dissatisfactions that are caused by new knowledge, new demands and new needs that make the transition from being personal to being recognised as social in their causes and solutions;

  • that they then depend on a wide array of actors, including social entrepreneurs, movements, governments, foundations, teams, networks, businesses and political organisations, each with different ways of working, motivations and capacities, but united by a belief in plasticity and what I call (drawing on Albert Hirschman), the ‘rhetorics of progress’;

  • that innovations gain traction only when they can attract vital resources, which include money, time, attention and power;

  • that the processes whereby innovations develop have strong analogies with a much wider family of evolutionary processes that multiply options and select and then grow those best suited to changing environments;

Type
Chapter
Information
Social Innovation
How Societies Find the Power to Change
, pp. 111 - 136
Publisher: Bristol University Press
Print publication year: 2019

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×