Re-thinking the conditions for social change and innovation

Social change is the substantial alteration of social structure through time. Since the early days of social science research, scholars have been trying to understand the conditions for social change and the kind of transformations that have shaped modern societies most notably through urbanisation, industrialisation and -more recentlythrough digitisation. The empirical analysis of social change can have different entry points and either focus on the macro or micro level, the structure or agency, or, as many scholars, including myself, would argue, on the (dialectical) relationship between them (Vadrot 2017). The fundamental question on how structure and agency and the macro and micro levels relate to each other and shape social order should be central to any scholarly attempt to explore the conditions for social change. This includes the study of social innovations, which inherently carries the idea of social change. Social innovation refers to those social processes of innovation that address unmet social needs by reconfiguring established social relations. This Open Issue of Innovation brings together articles that seem to share the view that social innovation needs to be conceptualised in relation to social change more broadly by considering the context of innovation and the relationship between the micro level and emerging macro-level structures, such as welfare reform (Cools et al.; Johansson et al.), inclusion (Corthouts et al.) and economic and smart growth (Cáceres-Carrasco et al.; Murzyn). Accordingly, Johansson et al. explore the structural and contextual conditions for the diffusion of social innovation and discuss its role in the ongoing transformation of welfare societies’ response to children exposed to violence and abuse. In their article ‘PolicyMaking for the Diffusion of Social Innovations: The Case of the Barnahus Model in the Nordic Region and the Broader European Context’, they apply an institutional perspective to social innovations, drawing on theories of institutional change and a combination of structural and agency-oriented approaches, where context matters and is understood as a set of situational opportunities and constraints. The authors use the idea of social innovation and its implicit transformative character to challenge the Barnahus model, a best practice-model for working with cases of violence and abuse against children, which has its roots in the Nordic countries and is currently implemented in other European countries. The authors analyse the diffusion and implementation of the model in different countries and conclude that the potential of the Barnahus Model to introduce radical and incremental institutional changes depends on how the original idea is translated and adapted in different contexts and the kind of narratives and stories that are used in ‘framing’ related policies. In order to capture how context determines social innovation, Corthouts et al. combine comprehensive patchwork theory (Pohoryles 2017) and a conceptual framework of organisational innovation for analysing social inclusion in sports clubs. Their article ‘Inclusion in Sports Clubs across Europe: Determinants of Social Innovation’ is based on data from an online survey sent to sports clubs in 10 European countries and aims to identify the