Joan Subirats

Social innovation and relational leadership: opening up new perspectives on social change

Social innovation, understood as resulting from an interwoven discursive– material process, could be seen as a driver of social change. Nevertheless, social innovation is not the only possible driver of social change (Light 2011); nor do all socially innovative initiatives necessarily trigger social change. As such, we argue that to become a real driver of social change, social innovation must necessarily be effective and scalable. To better understand how social change comes about and the extent to which processes of social innovation could become drivers of it, theories of leadership offer a new perspective that complements and goes beyond existing studies. Bringing relational leadership theories to bear on the study of social innovation dovetails with the context–leadership debate addressed by the SOCRISIS project. As we will show empirically in Part III of this book, context – understood as a varying path-dependent and spatio-temporal configuration of constraints and opportunities – shapes how, where and in what form social innovation emerges. At the same time, however, we need agency-based explanations in order to comprehend the capacity of socially innovative initiatives to catalyse collective action in particular ways, specific conjunctures and broader structural contexts. Understanding social change – as driven by context-sensitive dialectical relationships between neighbourhood features and collective agency, materialized through discursive practices and mediated by institutions – opens up new avenues both for analyzing urban and regional development (Moulaert et al. 2016) and for social innovation studies. In this chapter we review the literature on social innovation, bringing together disruptive theories of social innovation and constructionist theories of relational leadership. In so doing we identify the main challenges for the novel approach to analyzing social change developed theoretically and empirically throughout this book.