Paper long abstract:

This paper is divided in three parts. In the first one, I frame the questions raised in this panel's abstract around the transformation of accumulation regimes, in which technological and social innovation are inevitably embedded. In the second part of the paper, I address social innovation as social practice and as a subject for social research, as well as its transformative impact, using the example of the social economy as it has developed in Quebec since the end of the 1960's. In the last part of the paper, ethnographic material related to my own research on local exchange trading systems and collective urban agriculture, two types of social innovations that appeared in Quebec in times of economic crisis and continued to grow thereafter, although at different paces and to different degrees of institutionalization, is used to illustrate how local practices relate to economic and social imaginations and social change.