Make love, not war: a process-based approach to social innovation

2017

Traditional approaches to social innovation focus on products, services, and ideas that enable social problems to be solved. They also often view social innovation as resulting from a cross-fertilization between multiple stakeholders. We advocate for a process-based approach to social innovation internal to organizations, anchored in the concept of ethical love. While love, as a concept, has only received attention recently in academic management research, contrary to its common usage in psychology, we propose a philosophical and anthropological perspective on the call for love in organizations and distinguish with the help of the philosopher Levinas between political love and ethical love.…