Tuna Forum represents the institutionalization of a cultural project of Tuna Foundation in Romania. One of the main objectifs of this platform is promoting and facilitating intercultural dialogue. The concept of intercultural dialogue implies the idea of communication, relations and exchange of ideas between different cultures.
Sometimes, in promoting a solution, a policy or strategy, its innovative character is used to legitimize its implementation based on the fact that the effort needed to verify such an assertion is relatively high not only epistemologically speaking, but ontologically, as well. On the other hand, as the conditions that stimulate innovation are yet to be clearly established, although there are efforts made in this direction, innovation cannot be assumed to appear automatically, if some efforts are made to support it. This issue is even more acute when it comes to social innovation. Consequently, in researching social innovation it is important to be able to decide which innovations should be disseminated based on a relevant set of criteria. Moreover, as most areas of the social sciences have overlapping elements, and thus, as one cannot simply assume that what is not an economical, political or other type of innovation is necessarily a social innovation, it becomes useful to integrate the links between these areas into the analysis. In the first section I propose a working definition and contrast it with existing ones. The second section will use the working definition to give an example of how we might classify innovations. After constructing the framework, in section three, I shall give, in the fourth section, one example of how it might be used, based on an analysis of two community projects. The concluding remarks will summarize the ideas of the project and suggest further development of the framework.
Economic research is currently focusing on the role of social capital in the development process and particularly on the role of social capital and social networks in migration flows in a social development perspective. The main questions our research is trying to address are as follows: which are the major constraints in migration processes affecting the integration process of migrants? Do social capital or social networks play a role? Which is the integration model developed at European level? In order to address these questions we are focusing on a specific case study: the Romanian migration process in Italy and particularly in the area of Rome.
This article deals with the relationship between social and technological innovations in the area of environmental protection. The theoretical question is whether some social innovations can be interpreted as innovative responses to former technological and economic innovations, especially to the deleterious effects of the latter. In other words, social innovation can be seen as having a corrective function in relation to those economic and technical processes which have yielded, over time, negative social outcomes. Green consumption, conceived as a form of consumption aimed at preventing the effects of environmental toxins on one’s body, can be seen as a innovative response to the problems of environmental health.
This article is intended to support an early discussion around the social innovation topic in the Romanian academic debate initiated by the Research Institute for Quality of Life, through its project “Social Innovation ‐ factor in socio‐economic development”. In the preface to this discussion and theorization of the field, a review of existing literature and a critical analysis of the concepts covered so far in this thematic map prove to be necessary. The article advances a definition of the social innovation concept, continues by emphasizing aspects related to product and process in social innovation and concludes by stressing the alternative perspectives that can be developed in a theory of social innovation.
In this article we are concerned about the social innovation concept (its multiple meanings, the difficulties of conceptualization, the standards and the obstacles in its working definition; it presents the definitions currently employed for this term by the Research Centre on Social Innovation in Quebec). Furthermore, the article briefly talks about the role of social innovation in social development and if its importance for different actors: researchers and research organisations, decision-makers and public authorities, European and non-European organisations, civil society organisations.