Social Innovation as a Discipline: Agency and Scale

Transcription

1 Social Innovation as a Discipline: Agency and Scale Kirsten Robinson, SiG@Waterloo David Robinson Laurentian University INORD Working Paper #6-09 August 25, 2009 Abstract Social innovation is a movement, but it is also a discipline in the process of coming into being. A good deal is to be learned about the prospects of the social innovation movement by looking at social innovation as a discipline. The study of social innovation, like every discipline, has a distinct ontology embedded in its shared vocabulary. In this paper we argue that the concept of agency proper to the analysis of social innovation differs from the notion of agency commonly employed in the established social sciences. Prepared for the International Social Innovation Conference, Skoll Center for Social Entrepreneurship,Said Business School, University of Oxford, September.

2 1 A Discipline in the Making Social innovation is a movement, but it is also a discipline 1 in the process of coming into being. A good deal is to be learned about the prospects of the social innovation movement by looking at social innovation as a discipline. Frances Westley defines social innovation as an initiative, product or process or program that profoundly changes the basic routines, resource and authority flows or beliefs of any social system. [2] She adds that successful social innovations have durability and broad impact. The study of social innovation, like every discipline, has a distinct ontology 2 appropriate to the typical question of the field. The ontology is simply the set of objects that characterize the discourse and the relationships between those objects. The ontology is embedded in a shared vocabulary in which meanings often differ from common usage. In the field of social innovation these objects include the agent, group, society, relationship, network, organization, contract, law, and revenue. Notably, these objects are mid-level phenomena they are not concerned with describing the individual per se, as psychology often is, and they are not concerned with generalization about society at large, as political theory might be. Furthermore, there is no single meso level. These objects necessarily operate across scales. 1 The OED provides nine definitions of the noun discipline, two of which provide the sense in which we use the term: 1) Instruction imparted to disciples or scholars, 2) A branch of instruction or education; a department of learning or knowledge; a science or art in its educational aspect. The term [science is also multiply defined and overlaps with the notion of a discipline: 3.a) A particular branch of knowledge or study; a recognized department of learning. A particular branch of knowledge or study; a recognized department of learning. and 4.a). In a more restricted sense: A branch of study which is concerned either with a connected body of demonstrated truths or with observed facts systematically classified and more or less colligated by being brought under general laws, and which includes trustworthy methods for the discovery of new truth within its own domain. We see social innovation evolving in the direction of a social science that statisfies this latter sense of 2 Ontology is used here in a manner consistent with its use in formal logic and programming, where it refers to what might be called being for the discourse rather than in the older philosophical sense of being per se. It is a descendent of Leśniewski s axiomatic notion of otology, sometimes called a Calculus of names. In his collected works Leśniewski s described his project this way: While using colloquial language in scientific work and attempting to control its logic, I endeavoured to somehow rationalize the way in which I was using in colloquial language various types of propositions passed down to us by traditional logic. 1

3 1.1 Scale The commitment to meso-level analysis has practical implications. Approaching the question of mental illness, for example, the social innovation approach does not focus on the efficacy of pharmacological treatments, which deal with the biochemical level, nor does it focus on health care policy per se. A distinctively social innovation approach is focused on changes capable of shifting the rules or patterns that affect the larger society. Unlike the traditional problem of designing policy-level changes that are implemented at the level of the society and shape the experience of members of the society, these changes may begin with small local innovations. Although, profound changes are rare and most changes leave the larger society almost unaffected, local innovations can, in rare cases, have significant aggregate effects or trigger changes in larger systems. A remarkable example that has received a good deal of attention lately is Specialisterne 3, a competitive Danish technology consulting company that does testing for clients such as Microsoft, CSC, Oracle and LEGO. What s unusual is that Specialisterne s business model is designed around the particular needs of employees with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). Three-quarters of Specialisterne s expert software testing staff are diagnosed with some form of ASD. Those with ASD typically have trouble reading people and interacting socially, and are often highly sensitive to disruptions and uncomfortable with novelty. As a result they may perform poorly in job interviews and have difficulty integrating into a conventional work environment. On the other hand, those with ASDs, tend to be highly focused, precise, and thorough so they typically are particularly well suited to testing, which involves complex repetitive work over an extended period. Specialisterne s employment model challenges patterns within meso-level systems that exclude those with particular sets of talents. If such an approach, were widely adopted, those with ASDs would have greater access to income and they would place fewer demands social support systems, reducing dependance and poverty. Making available meaningful work with competitive salaries, might also shift how people think about ASDs and about mental illnesses more generally. 1.2 Agency The notion of an agent in the context of social innovation is different from the agent in most social science. In economics, for example, the agent is modeled as making choice 3 The company website is 2

4 subject to given constraints. Choices may be rational on not, information may be complete or not, but the vast majority of results in economics flow from the specification of the choice problem. In sociology the agent acts subject to social norms and predetermined attitudes. In psychology drives and predispositions shape individual behaviour. Economists, sociologists and psychologists are not so simple-minded that they believe their models describe human beings fully, but as disciplinary professionals their first contribution is, and should be, to use specialized tools to generate the type of result that their methodologies their models of agency are designed to yield. When we come to think about social innovation, however, we are imagining agents who examine the constraints and consider how they might be changed. The agent required for a theory of social innovation is not the atomistic agent of most social theory. These agents act on the system at the same time as responding to it. Unlike the agents that would be found in the economist s model, they are conducting the same kind of analysis as the economist or the sociologist, often in an eclectic, interdisciplinary and creative way. A great deal might be said about the philosophical background of the social innovation agent. He or she is irreducibly free, responsible, empathetic, strategic, creative, and social. This meta-agent is a descendent of Plato s philosopher king, but one who has lost the power to command. Like the philosopher king, the social innovator accepts the responsibility for making decisions on behalf of others, but unlike that king, the innovator s power is bounded, local, and contingent. Without the power to command, the innovator must shape the world step-by-step through negotiation and inspiration. The social innovation agent is also analytic, and can set out to acquire skills and knowledge. She is thus a moral agent who makes herself into the instrument of her moral choices over time. The analogous agent in economic theory is the entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs identify opportunities, mobilize resources, and invest effort to realize possibilities that other agents often can t imagine. The term social entrepreneur is typically used in contexts where the objective includes social well-being and not just private gain. It is hard to incorporate an agent like this into the kind of modeling characteristic of the social sciences. The typical modeling strategy, which is to treat agents as automata, cannot capture agents who are actively using the tools of the other social sciences. Entrepreneurs play a minimal role in predictive models in economics precisely because they act in highly specific rather than generic situations and are fundamentally unpredictable. They change the rules that are the foundations of prediction. 3

5 1.3 Collaboration Just as the scale of analysis in social innovation is consistent with, and derived from, the nature of the agent, the nature of the agent dictates many of the techniques that are of special interest in the study of social innovation. The agent in social innovation is a limited, and in principle unique entity whose fundamental capacities for cognition and collaboration shape and constrain the process of social innovation. For example, an important class of innovations looks at overcoming particular problems in coordination. Von Neumann and Morgenstern in their pathbreaking Theory of Games and Economic Behaviour [3] pointed out that, as groups get larger, the number of possible coalitions grows far more rapidly. The set of possibilities soon outruns the individual s cognitive capacity. It is impossible, therefore, to discuss an issue with all groups of members in even a moderately small group. Agent s cognitive limitations force them to search for and use social technologies that support communication and commitment. Systematized hierarchies work in this way, as do a number of innovations in social media. One particularly vivid case is the PledgeBank website that allows people to independently make conditional pledges of the form If enough people agree to do X, I will do X (or Y). A platform that makes the problem of conditional commitment an asynchronous one can enormously reduce the procedural barriers for coalition formation and thereby increase the rate of social innovation within a community of users. This approach may overcome important limitations of small groups. The hope is that, by making a particular coordination problem more tractable, the platform can actually change how the agents interact with existing structures and shift the typical behavour of individuals. 1.4 Stability and disruption One of the contradictions of the social innovation literature is rooted in the almost inevitable combination of destabilization and stabilization. Much of the literature on social innovation emphasizes projects with the potential to disrupt and change the broader system. Innovation is possible when when the neighbourhood in the stability landscape presents accessible possible states that a decisive individual or coalition can access by modifying or by taking advantage of the dynamics of the system at a particular moment. Reform and revolution both play an important role, however. Recent work on complex systems and networks, emphasizes the role of discontinuity and reorganization on both micro and macro scales, but coalition formation is typically easier at a small scale, and 4

6 resistance to innovations is often, though not always, less for small scale changes. What the relationship between the two should be is an old debate - reform has often been seen as the enemy of revolution, and the dream of revolution is often characterized as a barrier to feasible improvements for important minorities or even majorities. Social innovation emphasizes the potential of a range of different activities to transform the basic routines, resource and authority flows or beliefs in a social system by interacting within a relatively complex landscape of possibilities. 2 The Discipline of Social Innovation and its Practice All established disciplines have an evolving canonical literature that provides a synthetic history for practitioners. In creating a discipline, Social Innovation theorists are collecting tools from a wide variety of established fields. They are trying to clearly delineate a field of action and to articulate a theoretical framework. As recently as 2003, W. O. Nilsson [1] could write, There is no literature on social innovation in a document prepared for a foundations interested in funding social innovation. In 2004 when the the Canadian Policy Research Networks (CPRN) released Social Innovation: in Canada How the non-profit sector serves Canadians... and how it can serve them better [4], not a single reference for the paper had the term innovation in its title. A remarkable feature of the current social innovation movement is that innovation is now the goal of a surprising array of established institutions that encourage people to develop into active and effective agents of change. The recent success of social innovation as a practice, combined with the particular difficulty of developing formal theory for complex adaptive agents, raises important questions about the role of, and opportunities for, disciplinary analysis. 2.1 Practice Social innovation does not yet have a coherent body of theory, but it does have a body of techniques that are in the process of being systematized and taught in a variety of institutions. Some of these institutions, such as the Social Innovation Generation, and the Stanford Social Innovation Review are specifically focused on understanding how social innovation happens and teaching people to be more effective. Others, like the Center for Social Innovation in the Stanford Business School, concentrate on improving management 5

7 skills for social change or supporting social action or on training individuals or groups to engage in social action effectively. The practice of social innovation potentially challenges the social system and social institutions which govern our conduct by affecting the fundamental distribution of power and resources and it may influence the basic beliefs that define the system or the laws and routines which govern it [2]. Social innovation as a field of practice is focussed, in general, on building social and ecological resilience in the face of mounting complex challenges to our economic, social, political and cultural institutions. Nilsson [1] describes think tank meetings in 2002 that began without a formal definition of social innovation, but in short order came to interpret social innovation as a significant, creative, and sustainable shift in the way that a given society dealt with a profound and previously intractable problem such as poverty, disease, violence, or environmental deterioration. This definition highlights the activist, morally engaged approach that is often taken to social innovation. While there is a strong tradition for this, in an important sense it confuses reality and desire, or science and its applications. The definition lacks the clarity it would have if it clearly differentiated between the technology and its uses. Many of the established disciplines originate in a search for models and innovations that achieve goals like those of the modern social innovation theorists and activists. In Economics, Adam Smith analyzed institutional forms that supported growth, Marshall sought understanding of market dynamics as a approach to reducing poverty, and Pigou proposed tax structures as a mechanism for reducing environmental impacts. This disciplinary effort to do good can be useful, but it must be handled carefully. One of the basic principles of economic analysis is the distinction between constraint and objective functions. Both of which may evolve over time. Constraints embody the available technology, the inexorable resistance of the real world, and even the particular limits imposed by the behaviour of other players. The objectives function represents what is wanted - whether it is the individual s tastes with respect to beer and pretzels or the society s implicit preference for wealth and equality. A social innovation in this sense is only the significant change in societal patterns, flows, and beliefs. It may be positive or negative. While social innovation has its own ontology including recognizable stages and phases, achieving durability and scale is a dynamic process that requires both emergence of opportunity and deliberate agency, and a connection between the two. Innovation is often, although not always, disruptive. In developing a practice, this raises important questions. Who hires a certified disruptive agent? Why might the state contribute to the education of trained agents of change? What businesses might hire such 6

8 people and for what reasons? An interesting feature of the social innovation approach is that ethics are bound with the agent and that the agent ultimately must take responsibility for the moral implications of his or her actions, even within the model. Social innovation localizes moral action within actors and groups of actors. What is is radical is that the approach does not take the the additional step, commonly employed in the social sciences, of bounding or simplifying the agent s motivation. 2.2 The disciplinary question Disciplines are characterized by a focus on a class of related questions and the determination to exploit and extend a repertoire of successful techniques. Economics, for example, focuses on resource use and individual decisions. The characteristic questions are: what would an agent of this type do in this situation? and what effect would that have? Feminist analysis begins with the conviction that gender explains features of common social situations. The characteristic questions include what differences are there in the treatment of, distribution to, and attitudes about persons of different sexes? In the social innovation field, the typical question is What can change the trajectory of system X? In this, social innovation resembles the applied sciences and professions such as management and engineering. Like them, social innovation draws from a variety of other fields for tools and explanatory models. 3 Conclusions While the theory of social innovation is still developing, a distinct practice and ontology is clearly emerging. In this paper we have suggested that Social Innovation is a discipline in the process of coming into being and that a good deal is to be learned about the prospects of the social innovation movement by looking at the field as a discipline. As a field of study, social innovation calls for new techniques and new terminology. We suggest that it is particularly useful to pay attention to the ontology of social innovation, the appropriate concept of agency, and the level of analysis. There does seem to be some tension between the attempt to theorize this process using tools for example from ecological dynamics and the obvious situation of this field as an applied and practical discipline. Clarifying the distinction between theory and practice is likely to be helpful both in developing the applied discipline and in thinking clearly about 7

9 the theoretical developments that are needed. We do have a body of observations on how disciplines and sciences have developed in the past that will provide some guidance. The entities that dominate social innovation, are meso-level entities. It is unusually difficult to deal with these entities. Unusually, practice is motivated socially, but the moral responsibility rests within the individual. The challenges in dealing with meso-level entities highlight the importance of thinking clearly about the distinction between constraint and objective functions. References [1] Nilsson, W. O. Social Innovation: An Exploration of the Literature. Prepared for the McGill-Dupont Social Innovation Initiative. McGill University, [2] Westley, Frances, The Social Innovation Dynamic. SiG@Waterloo working paper, October, [3] Von Neumann, John, and Oskar Morgenstern. Theory of Games and Economic Behaviour. John Wiley and Sons, New York (1943) [4] Goldenberg, Mark. Social Innovation: in Canada How the non-profit sector serves Canadians... and how it can serve them better, (CPRN Research Report W 25) [5] Leśniewski, Stanislaw. Collected Works, ed. by S. J. Surma, J. T. J. Srzednicki, J. D. Barnett and V. F. Rickey. 2 vols., Dordrecht/Warszawa: Kluwer/Polish Scientific Publishers,

10 Table 1: Agency and Scale CONSCIOUS EVOLUTION SOCIETIES LEVEL Micro Meso Macro meta- complexity, cycles, Social agents as agents multiple adaptive Innovation automata paths, cycles, COLLABORATION path multiple PATH SELECTION dependency basins of RULE SELECTION attraction Human sciences: emergent complexity, conscious institutions, behaviours cycles, Economics agents as strategic multiple adaptive Sociology automata interactions paths, cycles, Psychology path multiple basins dependency of attraction Natural sciences: complexity, unconscious multiple cycles, Biology agents as emergent paths, adaptive Ecology automata behaviours path cycles, dependency multiple basins of attraction UNCONSIOUS EVOLUTION ECOSYSTEMS 9