How should we understand the relationships between culture and social innovation?

• Many perspectives on culture – Geertz to Bourdieu

• Mary Douglas approach may be the most fertile. She saw culture as ‘the creation of classifying processes….’ and studied ‘the connection between kinds of social organisation and the values that uphold them’

• This led to the grid/group approach that has spawned a lively and dynamic stream of research over 40 years

• Each culture is self-defined by opposition to the others • The four cultures interact within organisations,

movements &c, and compete for members, prestige, & resources

• But all living organisations contain all four – in varying degrees of equilibrium (think of a university, business, NGO…)

• Big social changes usually mobilise all four cultures – and much writing about social change misses this crucial point

• Aaron Wildavsky claimed that: ‘the general well-being of a community depends on the extent to which all of its interacting cultures are recognized’

Research agendas that follow from this: • Understanding the dynamics of big cultural change through this

lens. The recent work on ‘clumsy solutions’ provides one approach (eg on climate change)

• Understanding online communities and tools – eg how wikipedia and others have introduced elements of hierarchy and individualism.?

• Growth and culture: how social ventures change their cultural mix as they grow.

• Problems and potentials of collaboration – again how to do these achieve the right balance, and the ability to make decisions as well as to talk?

• Power and love: how are these kept in balance