Paper long abstract:

The theme of social innovation has emerged in recent decades and references to it are steadily increasing in the international scientific literature. Certainly, in the 1930s , Schumpeter studied the innovation process; he highlighted the phenomenon of creative destruction and the role of the entrepreneur, echoing the concerns of Weber and Durkheim on the change and the regulation of modern societies. But since the 1990s, the novelty lies in the enlargement of the innovation to the social dimension in several areas -management science , science of arts and creativity- as well as multidisciplinary approaches which examine the compatibility between economic success and socio- environmental improvements, forms of local development, political governance and public management.

This contribution aims at locating the use of social innovation in historical perspective by clarifying the reasons why it is often associated with social and solidarity economy or social entrepreneurship . The hypothesis put forward is that modern democratic societies are not characterized , as it is often argued , as a market economy, but rather by complex institutional arrangements between market and solidarity . Social innovation is in this case a response to the crises of the arrangements that have arisen in the last third of the twentieth century.