Decades of neoliberal economics and politics have resulted in major shifts in the ways that policy and research communities now understand, shape and work to organise relations between civil society and the state and within civil society. Over the last 15 years, as neoliberalism clearly revealed its limits, these communities began to deploy a range of concepts. Social innovation is one. Other examples are social cohesion, social inclusion, and social investment. Each of these four “socials” is a quasi-concept, one that is polysemous. The variety of meanings attached to each both provides a foundation for its strength because it can serve as a rallying point and is a complex element in its use because research projects and policy discourses often deploy quite different meanings of the concept. This short paper examines some of the varied meanings, while arguing that one major contribution of social innovation to the world of “the socials” is to provide a novel way to reorganise market relations in the post-neoliberal world. This reconceptualization often involves explicitly exposing and developing a reliance on non-market dimensions (such as community engagement and public policy) in the processes of market-making. Social innovation also involves both altering the very goals of markets, turning them towards purposes such as social inclusion and development in the case of labour markets as well as downplaying the profit principle in markets for goods and services or developing a new agenda for business This market-shifting effect of social innovation is not the only goal that the social innovation community sets, of course. They may be concerned, for example, with remaking public policy or with local community and grassroots efforts to remake urban space, with or without support from local government authorities. Nonetheless, this paper focuses on social innovation and markets, examining examples of the ways this quasi-concept is deployed so as to offer an alternative vision of market relations. [Extracted from author’s abdtract].
Jenson, Jane (2013) Social innovation : redisigning the welfare diamond (Paper presented at the international conference Social Frontiers : The next edge of social innovation research, at GCU's London Campus on 14th and 15th November 2013).
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