Social innovation and sustainability; how to disentangle the buzzword and its application in the field of agriculture and rural development
By B. Bock. 2012
207 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Social innovation is often appointed as an essential part of agricultural and rural innovation. Everybody seems to agree that social innovation is important but what exactly is meant by the term remains often unclear. This paper aims at clarifying the meaning and significance of the concept by going back to its root in innovation science and policy. It appoints three main interpretations of social innovation, referring to the social mechanism of innovation, the social responsibility of innovation and the need for innovating society. Studying its application in the field of agriculture and rural development reveals that social innovation is rarely referred to when agriculture as a singular economic activity is concerned, but prominently present in discussions about rural development. Here social innovation may be referred to when identifying society’s need for more sustainable production methods, the necessity for collaboration and social learning, and the scope of change needed for revitalising (rural) society. Often, however, social innovation is presented as a tangle of interdependent processes and beneficial outcomes. Its fuzziness contributes to its discursive power in discussions about agricultural politics and the significance of sustainability, but also hides the valued-loadedness of social innovation. As a result its critical potential becomes neutralised. For gaining more insight in how to more effectively support social innovation, it is important to disentangle the social innovation jumble, to unravel the diverse interrelations and to explore and monitor its functioning and contribution to processes of social change and renewal.
Subfields: Business and International Management, General Agricultural and Biological Sciences, Management of Technology and Innovation
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9a4d7cadb510e931426efdc645a4967c0763400e
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In Business and International Management
In General Agricultural and Biological Sciences
In Management of Technology and Innovation
Citations in the corpus
- Rural Marginalisation and the Role of Social Innovation; A Turn Towards Nexogenous Development and Rural Reconnection (2016, methodology): “When unravelling the use of the term ‘social innovation’ for the Standing Commission on Agricultural Research (SCAR), Bock (2012) identified three main interpretations of the social innovation concept that are also relevant in the context of rural development: 1.”
- Transformative social innovation for sustainable rural development: An analytical framework to assist community-based initiatives (2020, background): “How social innovation addresses community interests necessarily involves socio-political mobilization, which will normally lead to empowerment of rural communities (Bock, 2012, 2016; Moulaert et al., 2013; Neumeier, 2012).”
- Resilience and why it matters for farm management (2014, background): “…an approach would strengthen farmer-led initiatives such as civic food networks or care farming, support farmer-led innovations in production methods (e.g. organic farming, which was also initiated and developed by farmers), as well as enable a broad range of social innovations (see Bock, 2012).”
- The Leader programme 2007–2013: Enabling or disabling social innovation and neo-endogenous development? Insights from Austria and Ireland (2016, background): “Innovation is thus a vital component of these policies, with its initial impetus and introduction often triggered by external factors, such as RDPs (Copus et al., 2011; see also Bock, 2012).”