Bohemian bourgeois and abstract space in social Innovation : Some remarks from Italian experiences

Periodically, in the world of social sciences, it is possible to find concepts that are able, over a more or less long period of time, to focus the attention not only of scholars and researchers, but also of policy makers, together with a wide range of professionals. This is certainly the case of Social Innovation which, in a brief period of time, has proved to be fully capable of creating its own object of research and application (performative character), and of bringing back to its own schemes a multitude of social facts recurring in contemporary societies (functionalist character), and of presenting itself as a democratically desirable activity (normative character). It is astonishing, however, that within such a wide latitude of application, the SI continues to be not analysed in itself and for itself, but as a solution and that it continues to be treated as intrinsically positive(without posing the problem of its motivations and objectives, which are assumed as given: solving new and acute social problems. The purpose of this essay is to dislocate this mainstream approach to social innovation from its traditional pluralist framework to a radical critical perspective. Through this détournement, the essay suggests two critical aspects within social innovation practices: first, the existence of human factor management practices aimed at recapturing the control of work(ers) in the enterprises and, second, the transformations of the entire urban space (public and private) in a productive slant.