Paper long abstract:

What are the direct implications of 'social innovation' for collective action? Much implicated academic and policy activity around 'technoscience', 'innovation governance', 'sociotechnical systems' and 'technological transitions' tends (if only implicitly) to assume as a deep social order, that action depends on knowledge. Such ideas are common to a variety of otherwise contrasting disciplinary approaches: in positive and co-productionist traditions, qualitative and quantitative styles, critical and instrumental modes and across many different empirical settings. Strong drives in all these fields for 'comprehensive ontologies', 'integrated understandings', 'coherent multidisciplinary frameworks' and transcendent notions of 'reflexivity' illuminate deep commitments on the necessary orderings of knowledge and action. Seen this way, social innovation may hold profound implications for collective action. But these are indirect: mediated by general prioritisations in relations between knowledge and action.

This paper will explore the possibility that the reverse is the case. Here, the apparent primacy of knowledge over action is seen as an artefact of mutually reinforcing political dynamics - reflecting a positive feedback between policy pressures for justification and disciplinary appetites for linked kinds of privilege. Social innovation is thus engaged with as a subject rather than an object. Instead of assuming a dependent role, social innovation is the prior material field that constitutes the contours of social understandings and imaginations - and forms the only non-self-contradictory formulation for reflexivity itself. Rather than seeking to understand social innovation, then, it is (whatever the disciplinary vanities), primarily through social innovation itself that society enacts any kind of change in understanding.