Digitally-enabled social innovation. Mapping discourses on an emergent social technology

Abstract

The growing number of digitally-enabled social innovation initiatives have recently attracted social scholars’ interest; and required an attentive consideration the complex entanglements between innovation, social agency and power. This paper contributes to the debate on this juvenile research field by analysing the different conceptualisations, cultural framing, and socio-political entanglements of digitally-enabled social innovation.

It adopts a Foucauldian perspective in order to analyse the diverse discourses on socially transformative digital initiatives that work as ‘social technologies’ and support distinctive power/knowledge nexuses within diverse coalitions of actors. To this end, the paper applies a combination of bibliographic and text-mining methodologies to a large number of academic publications (191 scientific papers) and grey literature (1948 EU-project reports). Retrieved data are elaborated to map the emerging discursive field and identify a genealogy of associated concepts, the distribution of co-incidences and linkages with other concepts, and their ideological layers.

Keywords:

• Social technology
• discourse theory
• digital social innovation
• civic technology
• bibliographic mapping
• Europe

Notes

1 The search string used is the following. TS=(‘Technologies of the citizens’ AND NOT ‘Social embeddedness of technology’ AND NOT ‘Social Innovation and new technologies’ AND NOT ‘Collective Awareness Platforms’ AND NOT ‘Citizen-led digital social innovation’ AND NOT ‘Civic technology’ AND NOT ‘Digital Social Innovation’ AND NOT ‘Social Innovation in a digital context’ AND NOT ‘Digital technology in/for social innovation’ AND NOT ‘Social tech’ AND NOT ‘ICT-enabled Social Innovation’ AND NOT ‘Tech4Good’).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Università Ca’ Foscari di Venezia via SPIN Grant 2020.