Constructing ‘Problems’ and ‘Solutions’: Social Innovation as Social‐Symbolic Work
从社会符号工作视角批判当前社会创新话语对市场活动的过度强调，提出一个基于Rothman社区干预模式的分析框架，揭示社会创新者构建社会问题与解决方案的符号实践。
There are nearly a billion people living in extreme poverty,[1] around 800 million people without access to electricity,[2] more than two billion people who do not have safe drinking water,[3] and 89 million people who have been forcibly displaced.[4] Persistent inequalities and the effects of a changing climate are compounding all the above (Kemp et al., 2022). Social innovation, commonly defined as ‘a novel solution to a social problem that is more effective, efficient, sustainable, or just than existing solutions’ (Phills et al., 2008, p. 36), has emerged as an influential approach for social scientists and policy makers, guiding thinking about how society can organize to address seemingly intractable issues such as these. In organization theory, a burgeoning set of ideas has coalesced around the concept of social innovation, which has become a key focus of the field (Beckman et al., 2023; Gegenhuber and Mair, 2024; Tracey and Stott, 2017; van Wijk et al., 2019). Social-symbolic work – ‘the purposeful, reflexive efforts of individuals, collective actors, and networks of actors to shape social-symbolic objects’ (Lawrence and Phillips, 2019a, p. 31) – offers a powerful lens to critique and extend current conceptions of social innovation. Viewed through a social-symbolic lens, the discourse of social innovation is dominated by a particular understanding of social change which emphasizes the need for organizations to embrace market-based activity and balance social and commercial goals. As a consequence, social innovation has come to be perceived narrowly and in ways that arguably distort both how it is theorized and how it is enacted in practice (Mair and Rathert, 2024; Stott and Tracey, 2018). The effects of this understanding have been felt most profoundly by social sector organizations, whose funding is increasingly dependent on their ability to convince governments, foundations, and social investors that they can address the most deep-rooted social issues through ‘enterprise’ (Dey and Teasdale, 2016) – and to do so at scale (Beckman et al., 2023). The social innovation discourse has also incorporated an expanded role for corporations, which some consider the only organizations with the necessary resources and innovative potential to make change at the level of ‘systems’ (Dionisio and de Vargas, 2020). Meanwhile, government is often seen as impeding progress, their new role in the social innovation landscape being to facilitate the efficient functioning of markets connected to social issues, often in partnership with for-profit firms (Rao-Nicholson et al., 2017). By contrast, we argue that social innovators who foster sustained social change enact a broader repertoire of social-symbolic practices – practices which the social-symbolic work perspective helps to reveal and illuminate. This does not imply that the creation of ventures that combine social and commercial goals is unimportant for social innovation. Rather, it shifts the focus to a wider set of practices designed to shape meaning and institutionalize social change. We begin by outlining our understanding of social-symbolic work and its relationship to social innovation, arguing that social innovation is fundamentally concerned with the construction of social ‘problems’ and ‘solutions’ – the objects of social innovation (Lawrence et al., 2014). We then introduce Rothman's (1970, 2007) ‘modes of community intervention’ typology, which we combine with the social-symbolic perspective to propose a simple framework for ‘social-symbolic organizing’. Our framework offers a novel way of thinking about the work of social innovators that draws attention to a repertoire of persuasive practices that we believe sit at the core of social innovation. We conclude with reflections on social-symbolic work as an approach with the potential to bridge social innovation research and practice. It is important to emphasize that while Rothman's work is focused on interventions in marginalized communities, his modes – and the types of social symbolic work that we derive from them – have relevance to social innovators working in any context. Social-symbolic work is an important and increasingly influential perspective in organization theory. Rooted in the tradition of social construction (e.g., Bauman, 1992; Berger and Luckmann, 1966; Giddens, 1984), it provides a theoretical architecture and vocabulary to explain how people and organizations purposively shape the world around them while at the same time accounting for the constraints on action that emanate from the social context they inhabit. A key idea within the social-symbolic work perspective is the concept of a social-symbolic object: ‘a combination of discursive, relational, and material elements that constitute a meaningful pattern in a social system’ (Lawrence and Phillips, 2019a, p. 24). Social-symbolic objects are the targets of social-symbolic work. They convey meaning, helping actors in a social setting to interpret the social world. At the same time, they are malleable; their meaning can be shaped and is open to multiple interpretations. Social-symbolic objects can take many forms, including ideas, beliefs, practices, signs, values, emotions, language, artifacts, technologies, identities, bodies, and social spaces. We can think of work and objects as conceptual counterparts which, while theoretically distinct, are also mutually constitutive (in the sense that when actors engage in social-symbolic work, their work is necessarily directed at something). The social-symbolic work perspective distinguishes between three types of work, each of which is targeted at objects located at a corresponding level of analysis: self work – the purposive efforts of actors to shape aspects of the self; organization work – the purposive efforts of actors to shape aspects of organizations; and institutional work – the purposive efforts of actors to shape aspects of institutions and institutionalized understandings of the social world. While self work, organization work, and institutional work are all key elements of social innovation, here we focus on social innovation as institutional work.[5] In doing so, we conceptualize social innovation as a social-symbolic endeavour in which work is targeted at two types of social-symbolic object: institutionalized understandings of social problems and their solutions. From this perspective, social innovation entails social-symbolic work designed to legitimate (1) a particular understanding of an issue so that it is widely viewed as a problem in society that needs to be addressed, and (2) a particular approach to addressing that issue so that it is widely viewed as an effective solution to that problem. For example, in Lawrence's (2017) study of the creation of the first safe drug injection site in Canada, the focal social innovators became embroiled in a discursive struggle to (1) convince local stakeholders that the deaths of people from the injection of impure drugs was a problem that even merited attention (some stakeholders viewed illegal drugs as so profoundly immoral that the idea that drug use should be made safer was an anathema), and (2) that safe drug injections sites were an appropriate solution to this problem (some stakeholders believed these sites would merely promote drug use and endanger community members, and that efforts should be focused on prohibiting illegal drugs). This example neatly illustrates how social innovation may require deliberate efforts (social-symbolic work) to frame a social problem in a particular way and to justify the solution to that problem – the ‘problem’ and its ‘solution’ being the objects of the work. While Lawrence's (2017) study focuses on a contentious issue, even an organization that is tackling an issue that is widely accepted as a social problem worthy of attention needs to frame the issue in a particular way so that its specific solution makes sense vis-à-vis the alternatives. 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