Abstract
Social work as a human services profession has been distinctive for its inclusion of research as a required element of practice and instrument in instigating reform. At the present time, the relationship of social work to science and a redefinition of social work as a science have reentered our national dialogue with new force. This expansion of perspective has, however, failed to explicitly attend to a closely related intellectual and practical domain, the world of social innovation. Innovation as an end itself, a synonym for progress, has largely been owned by the professions of business, engineering, and the biosciences. This essay presents a discussion of how social work may engage with social innovation and the tensions inherent to such an engagement. A place for social innovation within the recognized domains of scientific investigation and social work is essential. Social work would make a unique contribution to the enhancement of this conception through the weight given to values, social purpose, and context that is endemic to the social work perspective. The result of combining science and social innovation perspectives in the same academic home might be a flowering of new social configurations, networks, organizations, and relationships disciplined by repeated appraisals through the scientific method.
The tradition established by Jane Addams, social work as a human services profession has been distinctive for its inclusion of research as a required element of practice and instrument in instigating reform. At the present time, with the maturation of the field during the past century, the relationship of social work to science and a redefinition of social work as a science have reentered our national dialogue with new force. This expansion of perspective has, however, failed to explicitly attend to a closely related intellectual and practical domain, the world of social innovation.
Innovation as an end itself, a synonym for progress, has largely been owned by the professions of business, engineering, and the biosciences. A close corollary is the notion that original ideas, as intellectual property, can be owned and distributed to the public through marketing and sales mechanisms. In academia, the generation of intellectual property has taken place through laboratories and other typical disciplinary collaborations in the older sciences. In addition, and most notable, has been the celebration of innovative ideas through open competitions, prizes, team efforts that receive media attention, and often with a spirit of fun. In these competitions, there is a sense that students and faculty members are addressing some of the most fascinating questions of the future. For example, the Viterbi School of Engineering at the University of Southern California has established the Min Family Prize in social entrepreneurship. Teams of undergraduate and graduate students are challenged to develop social and technology solutions to the Grand Challenges for Engineering of the National Academy of Engineering or grand challenges of any other major profession or society (including social work). Awards of up to US$10,000 are granted for implementation of ideas.
Social Work and Social Science Have Sidestepped The World of Invention
Innovation and invention are often intertwined conceptually, and their association with physical, mechanical, and biochemical discoveries is both historic and natural. Since the U.S. Patent Office was established in 1871, thousands of submissions to that office have been tied to appliances, drugs, and other devices. Over time the intellectual and institutional support processes for adoption of these innovations and inventions have taken a separate and very different character from the norms and methods of social work and the social sciences. The latter has focused on the so-called “soft” aspects of life such as unbounded institutional and human interactions, where interventions are typically less discrete and results often difficult to define. The evolution of social science has thus carried social work down a much different path in the practices and norms associated with the idea of change.
The theory base for physical, mechanical, and biochemical invention is also significantly different than that of social science and social work, leaving the two worlds to orbit in two very different realms. Given the advantage of 300 years of intellectual exploration, the oldest sciences have moved much closer to explanatory laws and more universally accepted metatheories that permit accurate prediction. Knowledge is more cumulative. In social work and the social sciences, important explanatory relationships are still not understood; knowledge has a patchwork quality. The pathway to innovation remains considerably more uncertain, methodologically cumbersome, and time consuming.
However, since the latter part of the 20th century, unprecedented possibilities for convergence have emerged. The business and technology sectors have moved aggressively into the area of social innovation at several levels. Within the university, schools of business now offer programs in social enterprise and social innovation. They have founded interdisciplinary centers that explore models of practice that apply business solutions to social change. In the community, venture capitalists have defined social innovation as a risk that can produce tangible returns to both program beneficiaries and investors. These new forms of investment extend to social impact bonds and other collaborations between business and government to generate better social outcomes tied to market discipline. New for-profit institutions known as B corporations have been approved by the Internal Revenue Service as an alternative to nonprofit 501(c)3 entities. B corporations are dedicated to social good but allowed to earn profits for shareholders in the process.
At the same time, advances in engineering and the biosciences have produced discoveries and inventions that are now acknowledged as central to behavioral science, the design of social programs, and clinical interventions. Robotics and computer science have extended human capability in previously unconsidered ways through communications capabilities, opportunities for mobility, imaging devices, drug-delivery mechanisms, virtual and immersive learning environments, “big data” systems, and others. Major government entities such as the National Science Foundation are now funding innovation centers that are open to social workers and others. Training offered by the centers tries to assist such newcomers in understanding how to bring social innovations to the world, beginning at the stage of very early discovery and through later processes of commercialization. In general, there is more encouragement of social workers to participate as a bridging discipline and partner in social innovation.
It would seem natural for social work to adopt innovation as one of the hallmarks of the profession. Like most professions, it has a primary responsibility for implementation, making ideas useful as a tool for improving life. From the onset of organized modern social work activity, social work has been identified with change and public advocacy of ideas. As a discipline, it is future-oriented, endorses hope, and believes profoundly in the potential of all for growth. As a result, social work has been intimately involved in the struggle for great social change for more than a century. And there are signs of responsiveness in our field to new directions that might be offered through greater ties to some of the constituencies and stakeholders in social innovation.
For example, the School of Social Welfare at Stony Brook University has a new dean of social innovation, the School of Social Work at the University of Washington has a new national social innovation program in health, and the National Association of Deans and Directors of Schools of Social Work is contemplating a series of presentations at its next annual conference on this topic. Several other schools from the University of California at Berkeley in the West and Fordham University in the East claim new initiatives on this theme. The School of Social Work at the University of Southern California has two “resident innovators” from a Chicago-based company, Greenhouse, who work with the faculty, students, staff, and school constituents to promote innovation. From “incubators” and “accelerators” to “laboratories,” it would appear that something is in the air.
The curiosity and eagerness with which the notion of innovation—however, conceived—has been greeted suggests that there is a growing impetus afoot to address a significant challenge for the profession. It is interesting to consider what is implied by the use of new language and what problems those interested in social innovation are trying to solve.
I would argue that social work is being affected by the convergence of several deep-rooted trends that have great significance for the future of the profession and its ability to influence social well-being. These trends are driving an urgent sense that something more must be done. However, the challenge is to address these trends at the right level, seeking the most significant outcomes, and harnessing the most effective methods.
Defining Social Innovation
Social innovation has gained special importance as the most traditional forms of social support through government resources have declined. Europeans have perhaps been the first to examine thoughtfully the alternative benefits and problems associated with social innovation strategies as an alternative to publicly funding and charitable giving. The issues is whether social innovation is a legitimate conceptual alternative in promoting institutional change or simply means of distracting attention from necessary improvement in public policy through familiar legislative processes. (Grisolia & Ferragina, 2015). In an effort to define what social innovation might mean as a policy option, the Bureau of European Policy Advisers (2011) has argued that in seeking social good, no private value should be accrued and innovators must also employ justifiable means. Whichever the case, social innovation is usually proposed either explicitly or implicitly as an alternative to traditional government processes or programs that are perceived as unsuccessful.
There seems to be agreement that social innovation is characterized by disruption to customary relationships, problem-solving processes, structures, or some combination. Solutions are intended to be creative, new, and ambitious in scale (e.g., see the Social Innovation Exchange: http://www.socialinnovationexchange.org/home). It is assumed that social innovations will be more cost-efficient and cost-effective in the long run when compared to usual practice (Mulgan, 2007).
Social innovation is occasionally confused with social entrepreneurship. There seems to be relatively little consensus on what social entrepreneurship means. In academia, it has been somewhat narrowly construed to include the application of business solutions to social problems. Social entrepreneurship can be seen as the practice of offering new ideas for social transformation, including business methods that themselves may generate better social solutions or the transformation of social capital using business methods (Abu-Saifan, 2012).
Trends Affecting Interest in Social Innovation
Six trends may be among the most important factors that are shaping interest in social innovation and concurrently leading to how we should define this concept. These trends are: (a) decreased relevance of traditional change strategies and welfare state theory; (b) effects of the communications revolution, leading to increased relevance of engineering and computer science to the design of social programs; (c) global immigration with unprecedented scale of megacities and near cities in both emerging and advanced economies; (d) rapidly? expanding health and human services operations owned by the for-profit sector; (e) a new and competitive professional environment for social work, reducing the profession’s institutional base in government and labor with fewer sources for legitimization; and (f) demonstrated limitations of reliance on contemporary science and the scientific method for driving social change.
Although these trends cannot be examined in depth in the confines of this article, it is worth pausing for a moment to consider how each factor impacts the profession’s capacity to adapt, affect change, and participate more fully in an altered global context.
Decreased Relevance of Traditional Change Strategies
The industrial revolution in Europe and the United States shaped the contours of social work in the late 19th century and 20th century. Government and private charity emerged as the primary counterpoise to factory exploitation, poverty, and other social ills. Social work focused on human services, humane and adequate delivery of economic support for vulnerable populations, and policy reform as the chief instruments for change. Community organization, policy implementation, and administrative leadership were focused on building opportunity structures within the general ideal of the welfare state.
However, across all the economies of Europe and the United States in the 21st century, the pillars of the welfare state are eroding. Although basic social security as a percentage of gross national product still remains substantial and important, some individuals no longer accept the premise that government social services and government policy are or can be the mainstays of future policy. Global relationships, the role of business as direct provider, and quasi-public, quasi-private entities have come to occupy a much more central role. Exploration of other types of structures, processes, and relationships has grown much more inviting, including new Internet-based crowd-sourcing options. Traditional methods of influence are much less effective for these and other reasons (Flynn, 2014).
Effects of the Communications Revolution
The communications revolution has introduced new theoretical models that explain societal relationships based on analysis of networks, interactions of users with physical technology around learning and social connection, and other human–machine connections. The world has fundamentally mutated in some ways; face-to-face encounters remain basic, of course, but the dimensions of human experience are different, more varied, and subject to rules that are still not well understood in the virtual environment. Although the social work world is fascinated by neuroscience discoveries, it may be that the more important world is that of computer science and communications if we are considering the basic tools with which social work is concerned in achieving change.
Megacities and Increasing Scale of Institutions
Approximately 80% of the world’s population will live in urbanized environments by 2020. Traditional units of government have been overrun by near cities that transgress political boundaries but house all the social ills of poverty and isolation. The sweep of immigration to cities, whether voluntary or involuntary, and the rush of unmet human need involved in this often overwhelming influx have not been successfully addressed. Particularly challenging is the scale of response required to understand, ameliorate, and finally prevent the rash of social problems that are so prevalent and increasingly complex today. Traditional social services are neither conceptualized nor organized to do this (United Nations Population Fund, 2015). This change is reminiscent of the great rural-to-urban shifts that erupted from the industrial revolution, first in England and subsequently in the United States. It was in fact these tectonic movements of people that produced the profession of social work in the last part of the 19th century.
Assumption of New Human Service Roles by the For-Profit Sector
In the United States and China, the for-profit sector is the single largest and most rapidly growing area for health, education, corrections, and health-care services. Private insurance rather than public insurance is now solidly fixed as part of the health-care landscape as part of the Affordable Care Act. Businesses are today permitted to organize as B corporations, best thought of as for-profit mechanisms committed to advancing social good. Corporate social responsibility as a function of modern business is mandated in many parts of Europe, is of interest in China, and has found a home in the United States. Foundations as expressions of private interest in public good have resumed their importance, with new forms of philanthropy emerging all the time. Public–private partnerships are scarcely new, but much more prevalent. In short, the active role of business in every part of the human welfare landscape has rocketed in recent years, displacing and overriding more traditional forms of social provision.
Competition for Professional Domains
The institutional base for the profession of social work has grown considerably weaker both in government and labor due to diversion of funds for contemporary wars, globalization of employment, and other factors. The professional competitive environment that social work faces now includes official recognition of human services professionals, marriage and family counselors, health navigators, nurses, public administrators, business administrators, and others.
Our field has also been increasingly isolated from connection to the newest sources of power in society and to some extent has been set adrift. At the beginning of the 20th century, social work leaders commanded the center of charities and corrections, public assistance, and child protection programs in government. Today, the for-profit sector and business community lead prison management, schools serving students with special education needs, substance abuse treatment facilities, and many other human services. Local United Way chapters as the center of gravity for community social planning and charitable giving are as frequently led by individuals with an MBA as an Masters in Social Work (MSW). The Affordable Care Act as the embodiment of a return to community-based preventive care did not initially envision a role for social work at all, even though hospital administrators and medical personnel were clearly recognized. These and other examples underscore the fact that we need new moorings, new sources of confidence, and new mechanisms for legitimization and professional differentiation.
Demonstrated Limitations of Contemporary Science and the Scientific Method in Driving Change
There is dissatisfaction on almost all sides with how ideas and interventions are being generated and translated into action, given our reliance on traditional science and the scientific method. For the past five decades, PhD programs and advanced graduate education have been anchored in social science language, social statistics, and an inductive philosophy of science that have reified empiricism and the scientific method. Clinical trials have not unexpectedly come to represent the gold standard for generation of reliable and sometimes valid knowledge and as the base for establishing better means of addressing human problems.
We have extended this reliance on traditional science to the notion of implementation science and the study of how organizations can best be seduced into adoption of changed practices. The cost and extended time periods involved in both have been a source of impatience, disappointment, and political antagonism for many who are confronting massive need in our country. The disregard for practice-to-research discoveries has also led to resentment among activists and others on the ground whose experience and insights are generally lost on the social work scientific community.
This is not to dismiss implementation science as a thoughtful, even critical, extension of research and discovery. Nonetheless, closing the 20-year gap between identification of effective interventions and use of those interventions in everyday practice deserves urgent attention. Innovative practice based on traditional scientific methods of testing and research development will always stand as a primary pillar for supporting advancement of clinical work with individuals and groups. In the long run, it will help immeasurably in identifying the elements of human psychology and social behavior that facilitate the adoption of evidence-based practices but is only one route to improving the rate of organizational transformation.
However, implementation science as an approach is new in itself. As some have observed, it requires new methodologies and strategies for operationalization of variables and can contribute to additional costs and time in bringing intervention outcomes to wider application (Franks, 2009). As a perspective, it does not fit comfortably in the culture of for-profit organizations nor does it address the dynamics of rapid scaling.
In sum, increasing population scale, loss of moorings in traditional government structures, greater competition for visibility and resources from other professional groups, the communications revolution, an ascending role of for-profit enterprises in health and human welfare services, and inability to effect rapid conversion of ideas to practice are all exerting pressure on social workers to consider the meaning of innovation and how it might be incorporated into knowledge development and practice.
Contrasting Science and Social Innovation as Change Strategies
Science and Social Work
Social workers have a deep commitment to change, always with an implicit assumption that properly directed change will lead to improvement in the human condition. It is this commitment that prevents social workers from becoming bureaucrats in the worst sense of the word and drives the urge for advocacy. However, under what conditions should we seek to change behavior if we wish to ensure that the outcomes are at least benign and at best improved for those exposed to the process?
For the past 60 years, our profession has increasingly emphasized application of science, systems understanding, and problem analysis to describe and predict outcomes of the change process in individuals and communities. Administrative data systems have recently been recognized as a source of information beyond strict financial and organizational accounting purposes. The critical point here is that the end of science and systematic organization of observations is knowledge and eventually discovery of general laws that explain and predict behavior. Although still a point of philosophical debate, many argue that knowledge obtained through the scientific method is not unbiased or objective but affected by historical setting and other psychological or cultural variables. Even if this is in fact the case, the best scientists strive to learn the sources of their bias or at least to acknowledge their underlying assumptions.
Good science is shaped by theory, is limited in the range of phenomena it can explain by this theory, and produces results that require verification by the observations of others. Although the imagination that inspires theory and the formulation of original questions is fundamental, the scientific process of testing and replication ultimately produces as much, and perhaps more, rejection of scientific hunches than intuition alone would suggest. This is little acknowledged by traditional science or recognized by the public, because findings that do not support hypotheses are almost never published. It is unclear, but highly probable, that much science represents repeated trials leading to the same null result.
Science is slow and reflective. Science is deliberate. Science is repetitive and evolutionary. Scientific knowledge is cumulative. Only rarely are there great breakthroughs. Research universities and their schools of social work are dedicated to this culture.
Social Innovation and Social Work
Fascination with innovation has grown almost hand in hand with the advance of computer and communications technology, gaining strength since the 1980s. Initially, most of the interest lay in theories of diffusion and how technology transfer was most likely to occur. However, today, innovation has taken on added meaning; in relation to strategies for meeting human need, the concept includes initiation, start-up, and the launch of ideas or new practices.
Much of the innovation literature derives from engineering, computer science, and business. The engineering literature is preoccupied in part with the notion of invention, from which the patent process flows, and only secondarily with innovation. Computer science, because of its much more immediate connection with the end user as a part of the system, has greater angst about innovation and the adoption of innovation.
Possibly, most important from the standpoint of the social work profession is the language of innovation derived from business. Here lies some of the most important departures from the scientific tradition and the greatest number of implications for how social work might opt to adopt ideas from this movement.
In capitalist or market-driven societies, innovation is the single most crucial method for gaining advantage in a competitive environment. It is the principle mechanism by which scale, increased revenue, and profits can be achieved. From a business perspective, survival is impossible without innovation, even for the most successful organizations and companies. Because consumers themselves change and new businesses constantly arise to address the demand created by these changes, the appeal and relevance of established services and products are ultimately destined for decline. Breakthroughs are therefore crucial to success. The best organizations find a way to sustain a culture that rewards and recognizes a breakthrough orientation.
This perspective is for the most part foreign to social work, although of course social workers are invested in improving practice. The difference when compared to business organizations is the urgency, the association of survival even in moments of success with future transformation.
Although the best leaders in business wait for the appropriate opportunity to arise before introducing an innovation, there is also a constant unremitting pressure for movement and creativity, for radical achievement. With this orientation also comes a willingness to take risks, to move in broad and bold strides, to take on the unfamiliar. Sometimes called the entrepreneurial spirit, the risk-taking posture of innovative companies and individuals has been a prized element in American culture, despite the fact that some other nations have actually been more inventive and original.
Both modern science and the innovation movement have a common devotion to creative thought and an impetus to explore ideas outside of common conventions. Innovators and scientists alike—and these roles are not mutually exclusive—are driven by the hunger for discovery, by curiosity, or in some cases by the wish to better the condition of humanity. If successful in their endeavors, scientists and innovators manage to alter the boundaries or definition of their field; they clamber over the usual assumptions and accepted explanation. Great innovators have their ears to the ground and do a better job than their competitors in responding to the needs of the world.
However, just as science can be slow and plodding, with little translation to action except after long delays, innovators and their organizations suffer from the opposite problem. At their worst, social innovation initiatives are too often characterized by an emphasis on rapid start-up and boldness, oversimplification of causation, and disregard for data. The willingness to act and low premium on knowledge as an outcome leaves social innovators relatively free to disregard consequences, intended or unintended. Disruption as a desired end is no guarantee of social progress, especially when carried out without regard to issues of longer term implementation.
Science and Social Innovation in the Academy
The contrast in aims, values, and processes between science and social innovation as defined in this article presents a dilemma for schools of social work and human services organizations. At the university level, there are several barriers to the introduction of social innovation strategies connected to objectives of market competitiveness, scale, and disruption. The social innovation literature lacks theoretical development, the minimal emphasis given to knowledge formation is antithetical to scientific culture, and the institutional mechanisms for bringing disruptive ideas to the wider society are weak in most professions, especially social work. New resources that are generally well developed and supported in schools of engineering such as accelerators are typically unavailable or unfamiliar and alien to social work scholars. Nonetheless, given the challenges identified earlier in this article, it is essential for social work scholars to test these waters. One might assume that the profession would welcome breakthroughs if they advanced the leadership position of the profession and those it serves. If social workers were to understand the principle of scale and were more aggressive in its management, there might be fresh possibilities for bringing initial discoveries to consummation through design of new forms of translation and replication. The stance of risk taking so familiar in the business world is typically expressed by social work academics only through the narrow channel of their publications and formal public presentations. This channel could be substantially widened and with greater impact.
The next step for social workers would be to take these risks in new contexts. This would require different sources of funding and better understanding of markets than is currently the case. Collaborations with vendors in bringing ideas to market, relationships with venture capitalists, and incubation sites for β testing of new ideas all represent new pathways for exploration. One successful demonstration of this approach lies in the school–private market vendor relationships that are bringing online education to graduate students across the country. This model promises to disrupt all of higher education at some future point. Similarly, if social workers were to rethink how they work with Apple, Google, and other communications giants, it might be possible to wholly reimagine the configuration of human relationships and community networks.
It is interesting that psychologists have been more successful than social workers in producing innovations that capture broad public attention. Weight Watchers International is an excellent example. The explanations for why this may be true are numerous (assuming it is true, because documentation is scarce) but part is due to the aversion of our profession to the marketplace and our suspicion of the marketplace as a means of meeting human need.
The scientific tradition in American social work requires much deeper philosophical examination and commitment. At the same time, a place for social innovation within the recognized domains of investigation and social development is essential. Social work would make a unique contribution to the enhancement of this conception through the weight given to values, social purpose, and context that is integral to the social work perspective. The result of combining science and social innovation viewpoints in the same academic home might be a flowering of new social configurations, networks, organizations, and relationships disciplined by repeated appraisals through the scientific method.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.