Constructing ‘Problems’ and ‘Solutions’: Social Innovation as Social‐Symbolic Work
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We argue that social innovation, at its core, is a process of meaning construction that shapes understanding of what constitutes social ‘problems’ and what counts as appropriate ‘solutions’. To develop our argument, we combine the social-symbolic work perspective from organization theory with insights from Rothman’s community sociology to propose a simple framework of social-symbolic organizing for social innovation. The framework comprises three forms of work – social inclusion work (participatory organizing within marginalized groups), socio-political work (organizing marginalized groups to engage formal political structures), and social activism work (organizing marginalized groups through protest) – each of which is underpinned by a discrete set of social-symbolic practices. In doing so, we theorize a novel way of thinking about how social innovators construct meaning to make change and challenge the dominant conception of social innovation that prioritizes market-based activity.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.015 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.169 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.026 | 0.032 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.018 |
| Research integrity | 0.010 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".