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How WEIRD is Research on Social Innovation?

2025· article· en· W4416004905 on OpenAlex
Ian P. McCarthy

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenueAcademy of Management Proceedings · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicInnovation, Technology, and Society
Canadian institutionsSimon Fraser University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsPhenomenonField (mathematics)Focus (optics)ReductionismEmpirical researchSocial researchSocial phenomenon

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Using a systematic review we examine the extent to which empirical studies on social innovation focus on Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) samples and are produced by WEIRD researchers. This examination reveals that 56,1% of social innovation research is WEIRD and that non-WEIRD research is 37,8%, with 6.1% in non-disclosed contexts. We also find that this field of research focuses on social or technological outcomes and whether it views the phenomenon as a single or multi-actor process. This classification identifies four quadrants with the following levels of WEIRDness. From these findings, we outline three critical issues: a limited understanding of diverse contextual factors, a reductionist view of non-WEIRD contexts, and the marginalization of non-WEIRD scholars.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.003
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.698
Threshold uncertainty score0.891

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0030.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.006
Science and technology studies0.0010.001
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0010.000
Research integrity0.0000.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.128
GPT teacher head0.437
Teacher spread0.309 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it