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Third Sector Frames and Social Innovation

Thu, June 30, 3:30 to 5:00pm, Campus Ersta, Aulan

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

While social innovation is driven by individual or organisational actors, we may not ignore the influence of the surrounding frameworks in which these players perform their action. The necessity of taking such frameworks into account has recently been underlined in the literature (Krlev, Bund, & Mildenberger, 2014). More specifically the significance of national (1) institutional; (2) political; and (3) societal climate frameworks has been carved out. This panel sets out to present the first comprehensive sketch on these levels from a European perspective, merging theoretical reasoning and empirical data. It addresses all frameworks in reference to third sector activity, which we suppose plays a marked role in social innovation, which is as yet evidenced by single organisational cases only (Chew & Lyon, 2012).

This panel results in testable propositions or directly tests propositions on the context factors influencing the third sector and its potential link to social innovation cross-nationally. This is key to contextualising social innovation eco-systems that are so often referred to merely in a colloquial fashion and from an organisational standpoint (Bloom & Dees, 2008).

The first contribution to this panel presents a systematic account of the socio-economic profiles of nine European countries in relation to their social innovation potential as based on previous conceptualisations, namely welfare regimes (Esping-Andersen, 1990), the social origins theory (Salamon & Anheier, 1998), and varieties of capitalism (Hall & Soskice, 2001). An updated empirical profile of the countries is used to locate the latter within these frames to then derive suggestions on high and low performers in terms of social innovation. These estimations are further matched with an empirical document analysis of more than 50 national policy documents on social innovation goals, actors and context conditions.

The second contribution provides an original account of newspaper attention towards the third sector, in 36 newspapers overall, giving a quantitative and qualitative account of print media reporting between 2003 and 2013. It thereby addresses the ‘under-researched’ medial image of civil society organisations and their contributions (Curran & Seaton, 2010) and culminates in several key findings. Among others that press framing of the third sector is more positive on the local than on the national level.

The third contribution reports on the analysis of cross-sectional and longitudinal data of citizen perceptions of the third sector and social innovation, for which some few points of reference exist to date (Bekkers, Mersianova, Smith, Abu-Rumman, Layton & Roka, 2015). The analysis of three data sources (total n = 29,334 in 30 countries) finds that trust in third sector organizations is higher among younger people than among older citizens and higher among volunteers than among non-volunteers. The third sector is furthermore perceived to have a societal impact in a variety of areas, from health care to employment. Also Europeans recognize that volunteering produces a mix of benefits to society and individual participants, through enhanced cohesion, expression of values of solidarity, self-fulfilment and personal development. Social innovation, however, is not clearly visible as one of the benefits of volunteering in these analyses.

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