Considering insights from socio-economics, work psychology, and occupational health, this study focuses on the job satisfaction and well-being of employees working in nonprofit social enterprises (SE). We question the idea suggested by the recent literature that working for a SE brings employees a high level of job satisfaction and well-being. We also investigate whether being involved in social innovation is associated with even higher job satisfaction and well-being. Indeed, understood as a manifestation of positive social change, social innovation is expected to improve outcomes such as the quality of life at work. However, because social innovation is an umbrella concept, it embraces different innovation-related concepts. Here we explore the distinction between service innovation and workplace innovation. This article applies a multivariate analysis to an original dataset covering 1134 employees working in the field of elder homecare in Wallonia. Its implications for social entrepreneurs and scholars are also examined.

The social entrepreneurship discourse in Germany has become more prominent at a time when the deeply rooted corporatist traditions of social provision have come under pressure for marketization. This article examines the potential role of “social entrepreneurs” in the institutionally established German welfare state. The article analyzes the opportunities and constraints that new players face. Drawing on survey data and case studies in the areas of elderly care and advancement of children with immigrant background, the analysis retraces the structure and diffusion of social entrepreneurial projects. It concludes that the simple transfer of the social entrepreneurship model is unlikely. The analysis suggests that successful social ventures in Germany adapt the notion of social entrepreneurship to prevalent institutional realities. In the context of more encompassing social services, dense decentralized networks, and different cultures of philanthropism, new players have a complementary role that stimulates rather than dominates the process of social innovation.

This research identifies conditions of intra- and cross-sector partnerships with nonprofit organizations that lead to social innovation development. Primary survey data were collected from a nationally focused sample of executive directors in Canada (n = 720) on two valid and reliable multifactor measures, including partnership dynamics for social innovation and human services social innovation. Results of a multivariate regression analysis found that the structure of engagement and clarity of outcomes in partnerships were found to significantly predict all three types of social innovation (including product-based, process-based, and socially transformative social innovations), while alignment of partnership outcomes was not predictive of any social innovation outcome. Results identify aspects of partnerships that are most supportive of nonprofit social innovation development and provide a measurement tool for partner actors to assess partnership dynamics that lead to the development and undertaking of socially innovative initiatives.

Using data from a sample of 301 Australian disability nonprofit organizations (NPOs), this study applies configurational thinking to identify combinations of organizational capabilities that lead to Nonprofit Social Innovation (NSI)—a new service or process that promotes social inclusion of people with disabilities—and examines whether NSI is a sufficient condition for high societal impacts to be achieved. The conceptualization and components of the NSI framework were developed in our previous research through a two-month researcher-in-residency at disability NPOs. In this study, we employ fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis to identify several “recipes” of capabilities (varying by organizational size and geographical location) for NSI development. The analyses find that high societal impacts from NSI occur when organizations adopt diverse perspectives, and embrace either person-focused approaches or operate in a risk-tolerant environment. These findings provide valuable linkages to managerial practice in nonprofits and advance emerging theoretical understandings of social innovation.

We investigate social innovation adoption and extend instrumental factors of adoption intention by including non-instrumental factors. We argue that, from a market-based perspective, conventional innovation adoption models based on instrumental factors do not fully consider specific characteristics of social innovations. Our objective is to improve the explanatory power of conventional adoption models by including symbolic, emotional, and motivational factors as non-instrumental factors. We conducted two empirical studies in which we investigated younger adults’ adoption intentions regarding time-bank-based senior cooperatives. The results extend the findings of conventional adoption research and show that explanatory power can be substantially improved by including non-instrumental factors. The results contribute to the understanding of social innovation adoption and indicate limited generalizability of conventional innovation adoption research to social innovations. Implications and directions for future research are discussed.

Social innovation (SI) is a promising concept that has been developed and mobilized in academia, government policies, philanthropic programs, entrepreneurial projects. Scholars propose multiple conceptions and categorization of what is SI (trajectories, approaches, theoretical strands, paradigms, streams). Some recent work has also addressed the question of who is doing SI. In both cases, the what and the who remain the key characteristic of SI. Two approaches are confronted: one where SI is more presented as a concept that reproduces the neoliberal–capitalist societies; a second that conceives SI as a transformative and emancipatory pathway. With this article, I contribute to the possibilities to conceive SI as performative concept. My proposition is to analyze SI as a discourse with precise performative practices and apparatus. By doing so, it allows scholars and practitioners to better reflect and identify the effects, tensions and ambivalence and possibilities of SI. Moreover, it gives us few key aspects of what might constitute an emancipatory social innovation.

The relationship between social innovation venture and poor communities has received little attention from studies in the area of social innovation. In order to clarify this relationship, our study seeks to answer: What strategies would help to bring social innovation ventures closer to poor communities? We developed an empirical and qualitative research in a social innovation venture and two poor beneficiary communities in Brazil. The results indicate that the proximity between those agents was based on five main items: (a) reputation of the social venture; (b) appropriate prices according to the community’s reality; (c) close relations with the community; (d) structure proximity; and (e) winning the community leadership’s trust. Thus, our study contributes to the literature by exploring the beneficiary communities and their relationship with social innovation ventures. In addition, we suggest the use of the term “social innovation venture” to designate a wide range of types of organizations willing to generate social innovation in the practical field.

This study investigates which organizational capabilities (OC) enable Work Integration Social Enterprises (WISEs) to pursue both social objectives and sustainable sources of revenue. It does so by focusing on the nature and use of OC that support both the social and the economic sustainability of this type of enterprise. The focus of the study is a consortium of 22 organizations that operate under the umbrella of Harmony, the fictional name of a WISE founded in Veneto, Italy. Case study analysis revealed three essential key prosocial capabilities supporting social innovation, namely the capability to engage and include stakeholders, the capability to learn from stakeholders and the capability to grow by diversification. We recommend that WISEs should establish a set of prosocial routines which enable solutions to complex neglected issues, such as the integration of the various categories of people facing specific challenges and which explicitly work towards the creation of social value.

Food security and food waste are unanimously recognised as relevant issues affecting the whole society and should be therefore acknowledged as a priority on the public agenda. Nonetheless, in many countries the third sector stands in for public actors and operates to tackle both these issues. This paper explores the role of public and third sector in tackling food poverty and food waste, particularly analysing the role of the non-profit organisations involved in the food recovery and redistribution processes in two European regions: Lombardy (Italy) and Baden-Württemberg (Germany). By comparing the two different policy framework and the organisations’ actions, the study recognises the ability of the non-profit sector to create new relationships among different actors (private for-profit, private non-profit as well as public actors) while answering various unmet needs. The paper draws on a mix of secondary and primary data including observations and interviews in the two regions carried out in 2014 and focuses on two relevant case studies (the “Associazione Banco Alimentare” and the “Tafel”).

Social entrepreneurship—a new business model that combines a social goal with a business mentality—is in a transitional phase, from a rough cowboy market to a more established market niche. This process results in two interconnected dilemmas for the social entrepreneur. First, how it can capture market share despite its role as an antagonist to current market values. Second, how it can prevent the loss of its own core values in the course of greater interaction with the incumbent regimes. Using a tool known from innovation sciences to analyse radical innovations, namely strategic niche management, and both survey data and interviews from actors in the Netherlands, this article shows that social entrepreneurs have an attitude that is still more in line with the cowboy market than with the new diplomatic role they are expected to take on. Subsequently, it provides recommendations on how to achieve this new attitude.

Extant research has focused on the role of philanthropy in the socio-economic development of western countries, but little is known about the role of indigenous voluntary organisations in bridging social divides in the developing world. To help redress this imbalance, we present findings on the motivations, strategies, methods, and impact of five large philanthropically funded voluntary organizations in Pakistan. We ask how and why such organizations are formed and gain traction to provide valuable services for large numbers of poor people in a society riddled with inequalities. Although differing considerably in their relations to markets and philanthropy, we find that success in all cases followed from commitment to Islamic philanthropy and the ideal of social inclusion, social innovation, exploitation of social capital, and scaling-up. Our contribution is to demonstrate how in developing countries philanthropy and social entrepreneurship together can play a decisive role in realizing a more just society.

This essay embraces a notion of critical scholarship concerned with proposing normative and actionable alternatives that can create more inclusive societies and focuses on the role of institutionalizing experimental places for inclusive social innovation as a bottom-up strategic response to welfare state reforms. By mobilizing the notions of utopias and heterotopias in Foucault, the paper sheds light on the opportunity to move from policy utopias to democratic heterotopias, discussing the politics embedded in this cognitive shift and the democratic nature of social innovation changing social and governance relations by interacting with politico-administrative systems. Some obstacles to institutionalizing social innovation are highlighted, as well as some key governance mechanisms that can be activated either by public and/or social purpose organizations to try to overcome those obstacles. Finally, we discuss the importance of linking inclusive social innovation with democratic, rather than market logics.

This paper seeks to explain the process by which an innovative social and solidarity economy initiative allowed a marginalized population that had no say in development activities to meet certain urgent needs and bring about sustainable social and institutional change. The article looks at the case of a solid waste management program initiated by a group of residents and structured around a third sector organization in Cerro el Pino, a hillside slum located in the La Victoria District of Lima, Peru. We analyze this project through a processual model that focuses on three dimensions: context, process, and consequences. The results highlight the role of social and human capital and the presence of various types of knowledge in the implementation of an initiative driven by locals.

The concept of ‘open social innovation’ (OSI) has not yet been fully understood, particularly in relation to social enterprises (SEs). This paper explores the use of OSI as a means of achieving social change through two in-depth, longitudinal, qualitative case studies with Scottish SEs. The researcher undertook participant observation for a year as well as conducting interviews and reviewing documents of the case study organizations. We build on Wikhamn (2013) by conceptualizing two approaches to OSI: ‘controlled’ which is closely connected to market-based attitudes, and ‘libre’ which is connected to the knowledge commons. Each approach has ramifications for how SEs achieve social change: either through exploitation of intellectual property as a means of income generation or freely revealing to accelerate social impact. The ways in which SEs manage OSI could thus determine the impact they can have on tackling some of society’s most challenging social problems.

This study examines the impact of social economy organizations’ networks on social innovation in local communities. A Social Innovation Index, covering the input, process, and output phases of innovation, was developed using 2020 data from South Korea to assess the extent of social innovation at the local level. Utilizing this composite index, the research explores how collaborative efforts between social economy organizations and the local government, as well as the networks that social economy organizations have with other local entities, influence social innovation. The micro–macro multilevel analysis shows that, at the local level, collaboration between social economy organizations and local government enhances social innovation. However, at the organizational level, membership in social economy associations and stronger networks with state-owned enterprises have a negative effect on social innovation.

Literature describing the social change efforts of direct social service nonprofits focuses primarily on their political advocacy role or the ways in which practitioners in organizations address individual service user needs. To elicit a more in-depth understanding of the varying ways that these nonprofits promote social change, this research builds off of the innovation literature in nonprofits. It presents a model of the typology of social innovations based on the empirical findings from survey data from a random sample (n = 241) and interview data (n = 31) of direct social service nonprofits in Alberta, Canada. Exploratory principal factor analysis was used to uncover the underlying structure of the varying types of social innovations undertaken by direct service nonprofits. Results support a three-factor model including socially transformative, product, and process-related social innovations. The qualitative findings provide a conceptual map of the varied foci of social change efforts.

In recent decades, the Brazilian Movement Against Electoral Corruption (MCCE) has been promoting social innovation in the public sphere, which led to mobilization towards the creation of two popular initiatives in Brazil: the “Law Against Vote-Buying” (Law 9840/1999) and the “Clean Record Law” (Complementary Law 135/2010). This paper explores how the collectives of MCCE engage in social innovation in the public arena of electoral corruption in Brazil. The analysis shows social innovation as a driving force of social change promoted by the association of a multitude of actor networks both in the long term and at the interface of macro and microscales of social reality. Therefore, social innovation in the Brazilian electoral corruption arena occurs simultaneously as a process and an outcome produced by the collective actions of different public groups that can reflect, organize and reform a cause, manage trial situations and create new solutions for this public problem.

Social innovation (SI) solves social problems. What features distinguish NGOs that are experienced in implementing SI? This article employs a survey of a representative sample of 400 rural NGOs from Poland to highlight certain features that distinguish NGOs with experience implementing SI among the following: (1) cooperation with other organisations and public institutions; (2) the involvement of rural inhabitants in activities intended to solve their social problems; and (3) human and financial resources. NGOs implementing SI are distinguished by features (1) and (3). The results are interpreted in the context of rural NGO activities in the postcommunist countries of Central and Eastern Europe.

Inspired by the South American research tradition known as “social technology,” this article proposes an operational framework to advance the understanding of mechanisms that help to promote social transformation. To illustrate its theorizing potential, we apply the framework to a nonprofit organization–Parole d’excluEs–that was created in Montreal (Canada) in 2006 and that has been promoting citizen mobilization and commitment to social change (parole-dexclues.ca). To that end, we offer a theoretical paper with an empirical illustration as a first step in a reflection on employing a global South theoretical lens–drawing on the concept of social technology–to make sense of a global North social innovation experience and to advance existing knowledge on the mechanisms of social transformation. The results contribute to social innovation research and practice, particularly at the interface between the management and nonprofit literatures.

News reporting typically has a dual function: it mirrors what is going on in real life, but it also shapes how actors behave. Previous studies suggest that media presence, by way of shaping public and policy perceptions, influence how well nonprofits are able to raise funds and mobilize human resources. Yet, we are lacking insights into how the third sector is actually framed in the media, in particular with regard to innovation, which increasingly complements the more traditional functions of advocacy and service provision. To find out, we performed a longitudinal content analysis and an in-depth framing analysis on national and regional newspapers from nine European countries. The analyses demonstrate that third sector activities, especially those related to social innovation, are largely ignored. We find no systematic evidence that crises increase news attention to nonprofit activities. The third sector is becoming more newsworthy when it co-engages with government and business actors, but can benefit only little from this “positive glow”. We suggest how research on these matters can be taken forward, with a specific focus on the agenda-setting theory of mass media, the strategic management of nonprofit organizations, and collaboration in the context of social innovation.