Third ISA Forum of Sociology (July 10-14, 2016)

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Social Innovation in Agriculture and Food: Old Wine in New Bottles?. Part I: Values in Social Innovations

RC40 Sociology of Agriculture and Food (host committee)

Language: French and English

The concept of social innovation (SI) has long been used to describe social and solidarity economies (Klein, Laville and Moulaert, 2014) and approaches the alternative organization of these economies from a Polanyian perspective of “embeddedness” (Hillenkamp and Laville, 2013). Within the sociology of food and agriculture, the concept of alternative agri-food networks (e.g., Goodman, DuPuis and Goodman, 2012) has developed in a similar vein. In both cases there is a strong influence of social movement theory in how empirical examples are identified and explained, but relatively little learning from innovation theory (cf. Stirling, 2015). 
Considering recent upsurges in public attention and support for promoting SI, we want to develop a stronger positioning of this concept in debates around agri-food systems. This regular session invites papers that interrogate the foundational concepts of SI in agri-food systems. Independently, and as a construct, what do “social” and “innovation” mean? What is the genealogy of SI and where are its boundaries or overlaps with other concepts? What is the role of knowledge production and circulation in SI? What are the normativities, ethics and values of SI? How to cope with the contradiction between adaptation to local situations and wide-scale diffusion? How are these approaches institutionalized? We invite papers from sociology and other disciplines working on SI that draw upon empirical work to contribute theoretical and conceptual insights to this debate. Posters: