Social Innovation and Action Research

The ability to perform innovation is dependent upon the way in which the relevant actors are organized. This becomes of particular importance when emphasis is on experience-based innovation, on the ability of the wider social context to support innovation, and on the need to create innovation that can meet the demand for social responsibility. This contribution traces the development of a research tradition where the point of departure was research-driven experiments with alternative forms of work organization but which has become subject to a communicative turn as well as a turn towards change that can involve many actors simultaneously. In its present shape the tradition emerges as a distributive set of activities with the idea of democratic dialogue as the core and a strong emphasis on notions like networks and regions. This research tradition has played a major role in establishing Scandinavia as the leading area for “learning organization” in Europe. The article concludes by discussing some of the challenges facing “bottom-up” change in working life today: the increasing dominance of centrally managed systems thinking, a possible reduction in influence from the labor market parties and an associated breakdown of the strong links between the local and the central and, third, difficulties associated with integrating and giving a society level profile to a pattern of distributive research.