Social innovation and social sciences: reflections on a difficult relationship

This paper scrutinises how deeply academic research, institutionalised by higher education institutions as organisations and by social-scientific disciplines as institutions of thought, is connected to emerging social innovations and social innovation research. We hypothesize that one reason for the alleged academic reluctance towards social innovation, in particular within the field of social sciences, is the partial lack of a robust epistemological foundation of social innovation research. We then scrutinise if the strong notion of social entrepreneurship in higher education contributes to a hermeneutical contraction as regards a more comprehensive understanding of social innovation. Finally, we argue that the lack of institutional and organisational support for social innovation research in the field of higher education negatively affects a stronger academic relationship to the practice field of social innovation and, as a consequence, to transformative research approaches.