‘We Don’t Go the Way of Revolution. We Don’t Go the Way of Reform.’ Social Imaginaries as Utopian Method in the Social and Solidarity Economy (SSE)

Building on recent work that makes a conceptual connection between utopia and social innovation for social change (Langergaard & Eschweiler, 2022), this chapter draws on two interviews with founders of German SSE organisations that can be understood as platforms or intermediaries for social innovation for social change. They can be associated with the social and solidarity economy in the sense that they pursue community values and transformative change in collaborative and participatory manners, using different strategies and working on different societal challenges. In a hermeneutical phenomenological approach, the analysis focusses on the function and form of social imaginaries, inspired by Levitas’ distinction of content, function and form of utopia as utopian method (2011). It examines how two SSE founders form, share and enact social imaginaries in their various transformative pursuits. The paper concludes with a short reflection on the main insights and what they indicate about the relevance of utopia in SSE research.