Breaking the Wall: Emotions and Projective Agency Under Extreme Poverty

Abstract

In this inductive, exploratory study, we explore how emotions affect the agency of vulnerable persons and their engagement in social innovation to challenge oppressive institutional constraints. By presenting the in-depth case of a successful entrepreneur from a shantytown, we show how emotions affect the construction of a self that contributes to the reproduction of social order rather than change, and how effective interventions can break the cycle of poverty and hopelessness that is dominant among excluded people. We find that this process is fragile and contingent on the presence of known strangers—that is, a web of actors that contributes not only resources but also emotional engagement that helps the emergence and development of low-power actors’ projectivity. We identify mechanisms for and provide a model of the development and emergence of the projective self that is necessary to engage in future-oriented agency.

Social Innovation: Integrating Micro, Meso, and Macro Level Insights From Institutional Theory

“…Second, extant literature has tended to concentrate on tensions experienced by people in hybrid organizations (Battilana & Dorado, 2010), but less on the emotional distress at the individual level for those acting as social innovators. Yet, social innovation can also create serious social stress and distress for social innovators as shown in the paper by Martin de Holan and colleagues (2019). The innovator they studied was left “in between” the social worlds and networks of the shantytown and cosmopolitan metropolis, which implicated emotional states such as loneliness, sorrow, and guilt.…”

“…Third, the paper by Martin de Holan and coauthors (2019) speaks about the societal level institutions that make poverty and exclusion in the shantytowns of South America such an intractable problem. The challenge they explore is old, the fields involved are unclear, and the paths to alleviate it in any meaningful way appear sterile.…”

“…Finally, whereas the papers in this special issue touch upon our understanding of the potential unintended negative effects of social innovation processes such as the negative emotions experienced by the social innovator due to his liminal position (Martin de Holan et al, 2019) or mission drift in a socially innovative organization (Ometto et al, 2019), unintended consequences are frequent occurrences in institutional change efforts (Merton, 1936; Selznick, 1949). For example, Khan and colleagues (2007) described how efforts to eliminate the long-standing practice of child labor in soccer ball manufacturing in Pakistan ended up exacerbating the original situation and reinforcing the deep poverty of these children’s families, with consequent impacts on the well-being of the children.…”

Social Innovation and Local Development: An Analysis in an Agroenergy Condominium for the Family Agriculture

“…Increasingly, organizational and sustainability-related studies approach innovation as a means of generating competition and economic development of groups and nations (Lyytimäki, 2018;Martin de Holan, Willi, & Fernández, 2019;Mwirigi, Makenzi, & Ochola, 2009;Tigabu, Berkhout, & van Beukering, 2015). Although the massive concentration of research in Brazil still emphasizes technological, process and product innovation, the concept of social innovation has also aroused the interest of researchers in the face of increasing debates about new solutions that can also bring governance to social groups, communities and to society in general (Agostini, Vieira, Tondolo, & Tondolo, 2017).…”

“…Brazil, for its vast territorial extension and difficulties in solving complex public policy problems, becomes a relevant scenario for the study of how social innovation generates local development. Several studies (Martin de Holan et al, 2019;Mwirigi et al, 2009;Tigabu et al, 2015) indicate that it is possible to make reflections to contribute theoretically and methodologically in the analysis of the generation of development in countries with characteristics of income concentration and other indicators that reflect bottlenecks in the implementation of public policies and income generation. It is also perceived that there is no consensus among authors about how social innovation occurs and what its consequences are.…”