Major Social Innovations Research Articles

Be the Cat's Whiskers: Breaking (Down) the Law of Unanticipated Consequences

How can we predict the unpredictable? How can we plan ahead when we create a new business category, a new market, or a major social innovation that breaks with precedent? How can we make sure we stay ahead of unintended social consequences and don't become a bull in a china shop? How can we foresee the unexpected consequences of our own success?

Putting users at the heart of care: engaging the “cared-for” in integrated innovation

Putting users at the heart of care: engaging the “cared-for” in integrated innovation

Social innovation for women empowerment: Kudumbashree in Kerala

Kudumbashree 1 is a major social innovation initiated at the instance of the Government in the state of Kerala in India. Kerala is known for its unique development model, which attracted world atte...

Escaping the Tyranny of Earned Income? The Failure of Finance as Social Innovation

This is an article about the outcomes of the mass marketing of retail financial products in the USA since the early 1980s. Our aim is to change the frame of the debate about the democratisation of finance by evaluating the extension of credit and ownership as a major social innovation led by profit-seeking retail banks. We focus on privately led social innovations of income supplementation through credit and of security through property. Put simply, we ask: to what extent has this social innovation of credit and ownership released wage and salary earners from the tyranny of earned income? To this end we present empirical evidence from the United States, which suggests that the extension of credit and asset ownership in an unequal society is self-defeating because it does not abolish the tyranny of earned income and, indeed, it tightens the vice insofar as low-income individuals and households accumulate debt but not assets. The implication is that finance as privately led social innovation has failed and it is time for fundamental rethinking of much that has been taken for granted.

Changes in juvenile justice: evolution or reform

492 0037-8046/78/23 The juvenile justice system is ness and of assuming that youngsters currently undergoing changes that are helped and society protected by many persons believe to be as revolugood intentions alone, tionary as those that led to the conAt present, the juvenile justice sys struction of the first house of refuge tem is actively pursuing a host of new for children following the American programs of diversion and deinstitu Revolution or the creation of the juvtionalization. The prevailing assump enile court in the late 1800s. Today, tion is that by placing delinquents in the popular concepts in juvenile justice noncoercive organizations outside the programs are diversion and deinstitulegal arena, the negative effects of la tionalization. At all levels of society beling will be decreased. However, there are increasing efforts to divert given the rapid growth of such pro large numbers of persons from full grams, it would seem that instead of processing under the law and to refer decreasing the adverse effects of co them to voluntary community agenercive supervision and labeling, the cies. Deinstitutionalization has been locus of control over these youngsters linked to the policy of diversion but has merely been transferred from legal goes beyond it into the area of combureaucracies to those outside the munity-based placement of many perlegal province. Furthermore, with in sons who would once have been insticreased resources, these bureaucracies tutionalized. will increase rather than decrease the Efforts to implement these concepts number of juveniles actually under are not without opposition and certheir supervision. Such possibilities i1 tainly not without ambiguity. But the lustrate the point that reforms should changes they symbolize and the ideolnot be taken for granted but should ogy on which they are constructed are be examined to determine whether the widely shared. The concepts of diverpurposes for which they were created sion and deinstitutionalization indicate are actually being realized. To avoid a widespread disillusionment with the future lamenting over diversion and notion that the juvenile justice system deinstitutionalization, the way training can be society's superparent and schools are being deplored today, care symbolize new ways for organizing the should be taken to examine what is in system. fact occurring and not just what one This fact alone should give one hopes will occur, pause. As Rothman has pointed out, there is a prevailing tendency to gard major social innovations as re forms. 1 The prison, for example, Some leaders in the field of juvenile was regarded as a humane improvecorrections have claimed that a major ment over prior means of punishment, revolution is in progress. This revo just as the juvenile court was seen as lution is characterized as one that will an improvement over older ways of lead to the destruction of the tra dealin'g with the problems of juveniles, ditional large institutional training In light of subsequent events, howschool in favor of a variety of commu ever, it would be difficult to maintain nity-based treatment centers and will that either innovation signified unmishasten the reduction of the large num takable progress.2 To do so, as Rothbers of youngsters being processed man suggests, would not only be bad through the traditional juvenile jus logic but bad history. tice system. Such a movement repre In view of this, do today's innovasents more than a change of program, tions merit the support of well-meanbut a change in concept as well. In ing citizens as progressive steps in the short, the movement claims to recog treatment of the youngster? Or are nize that the central focus of correc they alternatives to current means of tions is the impact which programs social control but with the same end? have on the juvenile's relationship to As is true with all social reforms, withthe community and its institutions and out careful evaluation there is a danthat this task is best implemented ger of equating change with effectivethrough programs located in the com