All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances – William Shakespeare
When men, women or other, change their exits and entrances, it is not usually welcomed. Innovation requires that we rethink these exits and entrances. In a previous blog post, I used the metaphor of “white space” to help lend some perspective on why innovators may experience conflict with those who are invested in the existing status quo. White space refers to the noise between two radio stations. If two stations are placed too close together, it causes feedback or noise on both stations. This is called white noise.
As someone who spends a lot of time with critical theorists, activists, and sociologists, I often find myself if conversations where I am often accused (falsely) of being a neoliberal. My understanding is that I earn this label because of my interest in business, innovation, and social innovation.
In this post, I try to build on the white space metaphor to help provide some perspective on what I view as the unspoken tension between social justice advocates and social innovation practitioners or theorists. One of the reasons that there seems to be tension between the social justice advocates and social innovation practitioners is that there seems to be a perception that as more funders and companies support social innovation, traditional social sector organizations may see decreases in access to resources.
Social innovation can be thought of as a product, process or policy that changes the resource flow, social relations and observable patterns produced within a system. Social justice is harder to define, but it can be thought of as being the exclusion from institutions or resources that help humans flourish. Many social justice definitions describe unequal distribution or access to social or economic resources, power or institutions. Social justice tends to focus on these understanding the impacts of exclusion, unequal access to, and distribution of resources. Social innovation is less about identifying who is being excluded or denied access to resources and is more about opening the doors to previously inaccessible resources and institutions.
My experience has been that social innovation advocates are sometimes accused of supporting a neoliberal agenda. This bifurcation exists and although I rarely find them helpful in the process of gaining allies, terms like neoliberal are useful as a descriptor. The noise or discomfort that some of my colleagues feel with social innovation may be because these two radio stations are too close together. Imagine two different songs playing at the same time. This is what I mean by white noise and why social justice and social innovation have found themselves in tension.
From my experiences social justice and social innovation should not be thought of as being at odds. Instead, they should be viewed as complementing one another. Social innovation practitioners ask what is the innovation or new combination that would bring about socially justice outcomes. Social innovators actively seek ways to change processes, products or policies. Social justice work, which is usually associated with activism, protest, and advocacy, is only a few degrees of difference away from social innovation work, which focuses on process design, product development or policy implementation and change. These two perspectives are distinct, but they are not at odds. They should instead shake hands and see that they complement one another.
Nick Hanauer, one of the most controversial venture capitalists in the tech world once said,
Prosperity in human society is misunderstood. The difference between a rich and poor society is the number of problems that society solves for its citizens. That means technological innovation is the source of all prosperity, but with every tech innovation, you also get disruption – ultimately, social and civic disruption – Nick Hanauer
Feature image download from Flickr user, PROVictoria Pickering. Title of photo, Protesting