Social Innovation, Gender, and Class

Vienna.
Finally in this session at Challenge Social Innovation 2011 we move on to Edeltraud Hanappi-Egger, who highlights the question of gender in social innovation – who has a voice and who doesn’t in defining this space? How could gender be incorporated into social innovation, then?

Edeltraud notes for example the impact of microloan schemes on the independence and empowerment of women in upper Egypt – there was significant improvement at the individual level, and women who began to run their own businesses gained a higher status in their families, but at the same time, gender hierarchies in households and at the societal level still weren’t discussed.

What, then, could achieve sustainable social and societal change; what would result in structural change? The Egyptian institutions supporting microloan programmes went further in their approaches and implemented a number of additional promising aspects in 2010 – longer-term outcomes have yet to be studied.

If nobody explicitly takes care of gender issues, it seems, nobody takes care at all; so, different models need to be explored. Equality-oriented views (which position women as equal to men) still take men as the norm, and neglect gendered socialisation processes that force women to assimilate to the norm; difference-oriented views (which see women as biologically or sociologically different from men), by contrast, tend to reproduce dualistic gender concepts, while assuming intra-gender homogeneity; finally, deconstruction perspectives see gender as permanently produced and reproduced in social settings, and critique gender categorisation as such – such approaches promote fluid identity constructions, but may be seen as politically ignorant if they ignore the systematic disadvantaging or exclusion of specific (gender, ethnic, …) groups.

Diversity studies highlight multiple identities and social categorisations, thereby recognising and potentially reproducing these categories; exploitation theories focus on distribution issues by studying working class identities and structurally disadvantaged groups. How can such structurally disadvantaged groups (including women) be addressed without essentialism, and how can we initiate sustainable social change?

A structuralist perspective may help here. Structural frameworks determine the collective space of actions, and individuals themselves reproduce and maintain given power structures by accepting and following a specific habitus. Social classes are defined by a similar positioning in the social space, including assessment in relation to other concepts and an inner concept of distinction.

A structuralist approach to social innovation, then, would mean to focus on how to change structures rather than how to change individuals, using relational concepts; this would focus on similarly socially positioned classes of people, taking a group-oriented approach rather than social identification theory, it would foster social justice, search for grand theories drawn from observable patterns, and may even seek revolution rather than evolution.