The Impact of Dissonance? A Valuation Perspective on Rural Social Innovation Processes

Social innovation (SI) has been credited with fostering novel solutions to the socio-economic challenges many rural areas face. The quest for a substantiated understanding of its potential for regional development has spawned a rich literature on SI impact assessments. Yet, having been instrumental,...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Societies (Basel, Switzerland) Switzerland), 2024-07, Vol.14 (7), p.122
Main Authors: Hussels, Jonathan, Richter, Ralph, Schmidt, Suntje
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Assessments
Case studies
Decision making
dissonance
impact
Innovations
Regional development
Regional planning
Rural areas
Social accounting
Social impact
Social innovation
Social processes
Sociology
Valuation
value
Value creation
Citations: Items that this one cites
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Social innovation (SI) has been credited with fostering novel solutions to the socio-economic challenges many rural areas face. The quest for a substantiated understanding of its potential for regional development has spawned a rich literature on SI impact assessments. Yet, having been instrumental, these assessments harbour several ambiguities as they seek to unveil objective impacts in a results-oriented manner. First, SI processes take diverse directionalities, questioning the idea of them being ‘straightforward facts’ and giving leeway to a more constructivist understanding. Second, a results-oriented perspective tends to obscure social processes that initially contribute to the emergence of impacts. In response to such concerns, we suggest a valuation perspective that explores how SI impacts are constructed iteratively throughout the innovation process. To do so, we operationalise the notion of dissonance as a critical factor embedded in innovative activities in three instances: impulses, turning points, and lock-ins. This perspective allows us to study how value is experienced, assigned, and strategically attracted while shedding light on how SI processes and their impacts are co-constructed in valuation processes. The article uses empirical vignettes from selected case studies with SI initiatives in Northern Germany.
ISSN:2075-4698
2075-4698
DOI:10.3390/soc14070122