Abstract
The field of social innovation is deeply mired in an urbanised, globalised and US-based discourse emphasising the potential of globally scaled business models of impact and the promise of impact investments in the billions. Yet, the realities of social innovators are most often much more mundane, local and steeped in daily challenges of making ends meet under changing regulatory related conditions. As social innovation is offered as a recipe for counteracting the decline of social services, economic development and community well-being in rural communities, the risk of imposing models and frameworks presents itself as a definite risk. The only defence research can offer in this respect is careful contextualised and rich accounts of the everyday challenges and successes of social innovators in rural areas.
This is exactly what Richter, Fink, Lang and Maresch offer in this latest instalment of Routledge’s book series on Social Enterprise and Social Innovation. This volume adds a specific rural perspective to the study of social innovation. Based on a comparative study of four cases in Ireland, Austria, Greece and Poland, the authors provide deep and rich insights on social innovation within the context of rural Europe.
The book takes its conceptual starting point in an action perspective of entrepreneurship, thereby emphasising the importance of entrepreneurial agency in countering decline in rural communities. This is perhaps not surprising given the strong entrepreneurship research background of the authors. The case descriptions thus offer rich accounts of how entrepreneurial agency becomes a catalyst for positive change and maintenance of crucial activities and services in rural areas. Despite this emphasis on entrepreneurial action, the authors carefully avoid the trap of glorifying the individual social innovator. In fact, in the case descriptions, the authors use the extended space of the book format to carefully trace the stories of the cases in ways that clearly demonstrate how entrepreneurial agency in these social ventures is distributed among multiple actors at the project level.
Furthermore, and this is certainly the strongest point in the book, the authors combine the action perspective with contextualising analyses of the spatial and institutional levels and fields in which the entrepreneurial ventures are embedded and which hold deep and important factors that shape the emergence of the social innovations. Specifically, the analysis offered in the book extends the work offered by the authors in research papers, where the three-level hierarchical model is developed to show how bridging and bonding social capital enables and constrains social innovation (see, for example, Lang and Fink, 2019). This model posits social ventures as intermediaries between the community level at which services and products are delivered and the regime level where governments, international institutions and organisations and funding agencies become enablers and gatekeepers for social innovations. The model offers a conceptually rich perspective on how social innovations, their survival and growth are not simply a matter of internal strategies and resources, as sometimes indicated in the literature on hybrid organising, social impact and scaling of social ventures. Rather, even the most competent social entrepreneur is almost entirely dependent on the hierarchical structure in which they are embedded and the flows of action, resources and legitimacy across the hierarchical levels. Without explicitly labelling it so, the authors’ analyses provide an excellent contextualised view of the interplay of context and entrepreneurial agency.
The hierarchical-level model is supplemented with a field-level analysis highlighting how social ventures need to act across fields, which exposes them to legitimacy challenges. This requires the social ventures to engage in positioning strategies that, when successful, actually turns the hybrid identities into an advantage. Notably, in rural Europe, such positioning strategies are as much about survival and making ends meet as they are about growing and scaling social innovations. This field analysis significantly extends the already published contributions of the authors and provides a fresh and important supplement to the research on the role of legitimacy for social ventures.
For the strongest research contributions of the book, the reader must be sure to take in Chapters 2 and 3, which offer the theoretically driven analyses of the cases. The remaining chapters of the book present the case studies in full, some policy advice and research implications as well as a chapter featuring ‘practitioners voice’. The latter chapter, although a good idea, fails to fulfil the potential of integrating the practitioners own accounts, as the frame is given by questions set by the researchers. These largely replicate the structure of the research cases, and as such add validity to the research but do not add much nuance and insight.
Overall, this book offers an important and carefully crafted contribution to our understanding of social innovation in Europe, in particular, the complex interplay of agency and context. Free of the restraints of a research paper, the authors take time to unfold the complexities of innovative action in context and across hierarchal levels. It is a worthwhile read for everybody seeking to understand the gritty and complex realities of innovating for social value creation in the challenged rural landscapes of Europe.