IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/spr/sprchp/978-3-642-32879-4_4.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Do Non-humans Make a Difference? The Actor-Network-Theory and the Social Innovation Paradigm

In: Challenge Social Innovation

Author

Listed:
  • Alexander Degelsegger

    (Centre for Social Innovation)

  • Alexander Kesselring

    (Centre for Social Innovation)

Abstract

Social innovation is becoming a widely used term in international debates in the context of social challenges. Neither in political nor in social scientific discussion there seems to be a consensual definition or concept of social innovation. In search of a sociological understanding of social innovation this paper turns to Latour’s Actor-Network-Theory (ANT). Latour is known for his insistence on the role of non-humans (which usually refers to technological artefacts) in society and how the reference to non-humans changes our understanding of social action and structure. In his view, the “social” is nothing but a type of relation, it is the way human and non-human actors link to each other, are translated and form actor-networks in a “flat” world without a “context” or “macro-level”. As a consequence, we cannot separate technological artefacts from the “social sphere” of humans anymore. Furthermore, Latour and Callon introduced a variety of general concepts that allow to empirically study this world of relations and translations. This article discusses the potentials in applying Latour’s version of ANT to social innovation following two main questions: Does ANT provide empirical tools appropriate for analyzing innovation processes that do not have technology as their main driver and output? Does ANT help us to conceptualise social innovation in a way that avoids the exclusion of technical artefacts per se?

Suggested Citation

  • Alexander Degelsegger & Alexander Kesselring, 2012. "Do Non-humans Make a Difference? The Actor-Network-Theory and the Social Innovation Paradigm," Springer Books, in: Hans-Werner Franz & Josef Hochgerner & Jürgen Howaldt (ed.), Challenge Social Innovation, edition 127, pages 57-72, Springer.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-3-642-32879-4_4
    DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-32879-4_4
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Jol Stoffers & Klaes Eringa & Jamie Niks & Anne Kleefstra, 2021. "Workplace Innovation and Organizational Performance in the Hospitality Industry," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 13(11), pages 1-13, May.
    2. Edwards-Schachter,Mónica & Wallace,Matthew, 2015. "âShaken, but not stirredâ: six decades defining social innovation," INGENIO (CSIC-UPV) Working Paper Series 201504, INGENIO (CSIC-UPV).

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-3-642-32879-4_4. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.