Controversies in social innovation research

The aim of this paper is to make a critical and theoretical review of the concept of social innovation by analysing the unresolved controversies that have accompanied its success. Social Innovation has become a fashionable concept, described as an accessible resource for organisations or governments to solve social problems and used as an antidote to resort to in any kind of situation. In these cases, social innovation becomes rhetoric void of content, working as container concept, and reducing its theoretical, empirical, and analytical possibilities and practical proposals. This article stresses the need to rescue the concept for scientific purposes, by establishing a direct linkage between social innovation studies and the main problems and challenges of social research, with a particular emphasis on the methodological and analytical approaches provided by social theory and the need for an empirical verification of everything social innovation claims to be and provide.