Introduction

The notions of social innovation and empowerment have a rather similar history, at least over the past half a century. Whereas the first regular use of the notion of social innovation can be traced back to the period of utopian socialism in the late nineteenth century (Godin, 2012), interest in social innovation experienced a revival in the 1960s and 1970s (see Chapter 2), nurtured by the same leftlibertarian new social movements that also put issues of power at centre stage. Opposing oppression, exploitation and domination, the civil rights, feminist and the black power movement all aimed at – in the words of John Lennon ‒ ‘giving power to the people’. Its heyday, the 1960s and 1970s, was a period of severe social upheaval, challenging existing power structures of colonialism, racism and sexism as well as the excessive power of large corporations and state bureaucracies. ‘Black power’ was even the name for the radical wing of the civil rights movement. New social movements did not concentrate their activities on policy reforms, but on systemic change in favour of the disempowered. Different from revolutionary approaches, empowerment, however, was never only about reforms from above. It always required that oppressed and marginal populations ‘gain mastery over their affairs’ (Rappaport, 1981: 3). It was in this historical context of the 1960s that empowerment was first conceptualised as neither merely an individual nor only a collective endeavour. It integrated an ‘agent centric’ and a structural understanding of power (Hayward and Lukes, 2008: 17) aiming at increasing agential power to shape one's destiny as well as changing uneven and asymmetrical social relations. In opposition to authoritarian and homogenising left-wing civil society organisations, parties and trade unions, the key innovation of this new type of grassroots activism resided in assuming that the personal is political, linking self-empowerment and societal change in an innovative way. It inspired social innovations in such diverse fields as psychology, education, community development and social work, as it offered innovative practices to transform deep-rooted forms of domination.