Outlining the Need for Social Innovation

Vienna.
The last stage of my August/September European conference tour has brought me back to Vienna, where I’m an invited speaker at the Challenge Social Innovation conference. We’ve already has an extensive welcome from the conference organisers and sponsors (even including a fictional videoclip of Joseph Schumpeter himself) – and now we’re moving on to the first keynote of the day, by Denis Harrisson.

He begins by noting that no comprehensive theory of social innovation exists today; the conference addresses this problem. So far, there is more practical than theoretical work which engages with the social innovation context. We need to formulate a conception of social creativity to resolve human and social problems, to deal with the flow of knowledge, ideas, and resources and conceptualise civic society.

Social innovation conceives of citizen participation in the development of solutions to problems, co-constructing such solutions with other social actors who hold power. Such concepts range from the idealistic to the realistic; further work to realise them is necessary. Recent concepts include the social movement approach, and enable us to anticipate a theory of social change.

Such approaches take place in the context of imaginations of a post-industrial society – Bauman’s liquid modernity, for example, or the idea of second modernity; they anticipate an end of illusions of a just society, a weakened welfare state, growing individualisation, and domination by large multinational corporations in a context of economic globalisation; they expect a short-term mentality, uncertainty and insecurity, and a sense of being left on one’s own that further contributes to individualisation and a breakdown of common social contracts. (This is the pessimistic perspective, Denis says.)

But in response to these problems, there also are projects to rebuild society, strengthen community links, and develop the capacity of civil society institutions. Social innovation lies within the scope of the general interest to create greater social cohesion between various groups and socio-economic categories; social innovation is an initiative of civil society, filling gaps left by market, government, and family regardless of the overall societal context.

Individual freedom as advocated by the individualists is based on the assumption that collaboration is based on simple calculations of personal benefit; social innovation builds on a different assumption: that building on the interest of interconnected individuals is possible. Social innovation of this type must be examined from two major perspectives: results and process. This highlights new services and answers which may be assessed from the standpoint of performance, efficiency, and effectiveness, of accessibility and fit for purpose; process, by contrast, might be assessed from the standpoint of legitimacy: its ability to handle the problem adequately under the given circumstances.

Co-production and co-construction have no purchase amongst actors who have an interest only in outcomes; these democratising factors are of no interest to them. But social life, rather than the market, should determine the availability and use of services, or otherwise democracy is merely functional and utilitarian, and not filled by the higher aims of social cohesion and improvement. Analysing the process of innovation means including the priorities and contributions of all actors and institutions, and measuring all outcomes, well beyond the monetary.

The social entrepreneur is the leading figure of social innovation: a creative person endowed with cognitive complexity and tolerance towards ambiguity. They are comfortable with contradictory knowledge, spontaneous and intuitive but also comfortable with institutional language, and can convert knowledge into their own language and convey it to the wider community. Such knowledge also deals with the chains used in successive decision-making processes by the actors involved. The more social knowledge the social entrepreneur can draw on, the more effective they will be; their actions, their microprocesses, must be studied as part of the study of social innovation. These entrepreneurs seek more power and more autonomy, as an intermediary between various different other stakeholders.

Social innovation (and social entrepreneurs) rely on trust, therefore, and trust is in short supply in contemporary societies; the failures of civic and commercial institutions have substantially reduced the trust of citizens and social actors. Moral assessment is replaced by procedures and rules than lack the capacity for moral judgment; this capacity is crushed by utilitarianist approaches.

We are in a connectionist world, where personal enterprise and the capacity to network are crucial; self-reliance is required to compensate for systemic failures. Being outside networks means not being able to benefit from available resources in society; being isolated from social networks leads to anxiety. Face-to-face relationships and communities are crucial for social innovation; such relationships also provide a greater capacity for moral judgment. (Hm, hope I got all of that right.)