Social Innovation, Power, and Marginalization

The neo-Weberian theoretical model, which Michael Mann presents in his The Sources of Social Power, reduces the multitude of relations of interaction in social networks to ideological, economic, military, and political sources of social power. Taking Mann’s IEMP model as its point of departure this chapter makes an attempt to develop such an approach in the theory of innovation, which would go beyond the ordinary dichotomy between technological and social innovation, recognizing instead that there are several types of innovation and there is a social aspect to all of them. By integrating Mann’s approach to the Social Grid model (Beckert 2010), the capabilities approach to well-being (Sen 1999; Nussbaum 2000) and to an extension of the IEMP model to a NACEMP model, which also includes nature (N), artefacts (A), and the whole culture (C) as sources of power, a new approach to power, innovations, and marginalization is outlined.