This special issue is dedicated to the various forms of social innovations in rural areas. In 2017, at the biannual Conference of the Austrian Sociological Association in Graz, the Working Group "Rural Social Research" organized three sessions covering this topic. The decision to address this issue was motivated by the fact that rural areas are facing significant challenges: migration, demographic change, dismantling of infrastructure, to name but a few, with more or less serious consequences affecting the quality of life of the rural population. However, in some places these challenges are being actively addressed with new ideas. This special issue aims to present the results of these sessions and to discuss current and innovative answers to tackle the challenges faced in rural areas. Before doing so, we want to reflect upon the concept of social innovation by asking what is meant by the term, in which contexts it is taken up, and who has a particular interest in promoting this idea and why. First mentioned in the 1970s (Zapf 1989), the concept of social innovation has been increasingly discussed, gaining particular momentum since the 1990s (Christmann 2019). In 1992, a new perspective was developed at the programmatic level of European research and innovation policy, by expanding the content of innovation and understanding it as a social phenomenon (Aderhold 2016). As a result it was picked up by different disciplines, like economics (
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