Making Space for Social Innovation: What We Can Learn from the Midwifery Movement.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
I contend that the emerging field of social innovation is at risk of â social innovation washingâ â organizations capitalizing on the trend of social innovation, rather than actually innovating. The current discourse is loaded with language and approaches that suggest market-force solutions to social change and largely ignore that notion that each time we attempt social innovation, we evoke a site of struggle. I draw on literature that is grounded in understanding society from a lens of domination of others to propose a strategic approach to social innovation as an alternative to current conceptualization of the term. The thesis explores the question, how can social innovation be understood or used as a strategic or intentional approach to social change? I use a reflective and iterative approach to conceptualize social innovation. I argue that for an activity or process to be considered a social innovation, it needs to accomplish three things: to have changed social practices, relations, or interactions; deeply challenged or changed our existing paradigms (or stances); and significantly changed resource flows within an existing social system. After considering several potential case studies (for example, credit unions, insurance, or the internal combustion engine), I selected midwifery. Midwifery was the only example I could find that had experienced social innovation multiple times. Prior to the invention of hospitals, all births happened in homes and within communities. Later, and in many parts of the world, birth moved into hospitals and many communities were excluded from the birthing process. Today, we are witnessing a trend toward births occurring in homes, birthing centres or hospitals, with varying degrees of community inclusion. The thesis argues that for agents to achieve social innovation they need free spaces where they can co-develop their collective identity. Next, agents need to transform current spatial and social practices, existing stances, and finally, the extent to which they can be autonomous or dependent on the existing system. The thesis explored, midwifery communities in Trinidad and Ontario and proposed a model that forefronts the production and reproduction of space as being integral to creating the conditions for generating social innovation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".