Social innovation in troubled times – learning from social innovation of the past

• In Event: Explaining Social Innovation

Abstract

In the growing field of social innovation research, most common approaches look at specific innovative activities of single persons, organizations or movements. We instead propose to take the long view and analyse social innovations like social housing, financing access to education or fresh water supply over a time period of 150 years. Our paper will therefore present first results from our contribution to the running EU/FP7-project “CrESSI – Creating Economic Space for Social Innovation” and show how social innovations develop, adapt to changing circumstances and sustain or fail during times of economic or political crises.

Such an approach allows to critically reflect current approaches on social innovation lifecycles (e.g. McGowan and Westley, 2013; Murray et al., 2010), and to understand the specific relevant ecosystem factors of social innovations in comparison to related research fields and models such as SCOT (Social Construction of Technology, e.g. Bijker, 1995) or socio-technical transitions with a multi-level perspective analysis (Geels, 2011; Geels and Schott, 2007).

The social innovations studied and analysed from their broader implementation during industrialisation in the 19th century until today follow the logic of an “embedded single case study”, which means that they generally focus on a single phenomenon, yet give attention to different subunits (Yin, 2003, pp. 39 ff.). Accordingly, we conducted some individual cases of more specific developments in certain towns, countries or periods in addition to the general macro perspective.

Data collection covered both qualitative and quantitative data and used mostly historical literature and databases. The data collection was organized along a template based on the common, theoretical framework of the CrESSI project. In the “extended social grid framework” (Nicholls and Ziegler, 2014), Beckert’s social grid framework on change processes (Beckert, 2010) is combined with Mann’s analysis of different societal dimensions as power sources (Mann, 2012, 2013), and the capabilities approach (Sen and Nussbaum, 1993) as a more solid conceptual foundation for the “social” of the innovation.

By applying qualitative content analysis, we will identify stable patterns and actor constellations that (re)occur at different stages of social innovation lifecycles and can explain certain incidents that contribute to a broad adaptation of the social innovation.
This includes for examples different welfare regimes and policies, economic and political crises, actor constellations, as well as changing demands.

The historical perspective provides insights in the face of current societal challenges. This includes in particular social housing in the context of the refugee crisis, but also with regard to rising levels of rent because of the economic crisis and the political responses. Fresh water supply is currently under discussion as a general human right on the one hand and efforts of privatisation or remunicipalisation of the supply on the other. Also, the development of broad band internet access as a major infrastructure project might as well gain valuable insights from the development of fresh water supply networks in Europe.

Authors

• Thomas Scheuerle, Centre for Social Investment, University of Heidelberg, Adenauerplatz 1, 69115 Heidelberg, Germany

• georg mildenberger, university heidelberg

• Gudrun-Christine Schimpf, Centre for Social Investment, University of Heidelberg, Adenauerplatz 1, 69115 Heidelberg, Germany