Civil activism and social innovation – in context of transformational dynamism of the civil society

Abstract

The role of civil activism and social innovation can increase as ways and tools to affect and shape globalization and digitalization (processes) that play important, even decisive role in shaping current development trends practically at all level. The civil activism in fact carries out structural social innovation (Marques et al. 2018) which impacts and can generate changes in social institutions. Both the civil activism and the social innovation interplay with the civil society organizations transformational dynamism which provides the capability to carry out social agency - the study argues. The research literature indicates that the civil society can play significant role as change agent in the knowledge-driven society’s emergence. The paper assumes that the exploration of the third sector’s role in the globalizing world can capitalize on the research identifying interplaying constructs constitutive of the CSOs dynamism and its capacity to generate transformations in context of knowledge society emergence (Veress 2016). The feed backing constructs allow running dynamic simulations which can outline a proto-model of the transformational dynamism of the civil society organizations. The study argues that these interplaying constructs and quasi-models propose a coherent frame and a set of exploratory tools for the analysis of various civil society related phenomena including social innovation and civil activism. The analysis of the feed backs among the social innovation, activism and civil society dynamism can shed more light on alternative dynamics they can generate. Considering complexity and non-linearity can help to explore potential broader effects also in context of the emerging Anthropocene.