| Eagora

Recently, there has been the rise of social innovation research, in which social and human science researchers find themselves situated within the same type of innovation research milieu as the technical innovation research. Social innovation research becomes a context within our universities in which a type of policy attitude flourishes. This policy attitude seems to be situated in the world of innovation research at large, including both technical and social innovation research. The overall concern for the social and human sciences would be a response to an inquiry: What type of influence does the policy attitude have on human science research strategies and methodological developments at our universities? In order to answer this question, we started to thematize the policy attitude within the particular context of social innovation research and asked what methodological focus would be necessary to disclose it. The purpose is here to propose a human scientific methodological stance in order to illuminate the policy attitude. More specifically, a phenomenological anthropological reduction will be used in order to clarify this particular phenomenon. Such a focus could set up a research project making an inquiry into the manifold, empirical-ladden meanings constituting the policy attitude as a phenomenon that presents itself in the world of social innovation research. The policy attitude, working within the realms of the overall natural attitude and the correlate to the lifeworld, constitute the possibilities of an overall unreflective attitude habitually adopted by certain agents and permeated in the social innovation setting itself, in which the meanings of innovation and business are intertwined with its social context. Conclusions are made in how a policy attitude could directly result in traditionalism and dogmatism, hindering innovation in social innovation.