Social Labs as Dedicated Arrangements for Action Research to Provoke Institutional Change

Of recent, experimental approaches to co-creative problem-solving, that go under such names as living labs, city labs, social labs and the like, gain currency across a wide range of policy fields. The lab-like settings are highly diverse in their concrete manifestations yet hold in common that they bring together a range of stakeholders to jointly reflect on a complex issue and elaborate concrete actions to help resolve it. These labs can be understood to present dedicated settings for action research, as they involve “researchers and practitioners acting together on a particular cycle of activities, including problem diagnosis, action intervention, and reflective learning” (Lau et al., 1999: 94). Of particular interest is a sub-set of labs in which stakeholders develop interventionist actions intended to induce institutional change. The question is how a lab’s design and methods can produce a setting that not only facilitates deliberation (on a reflective level) about possible institutional change but that itself, on a practical level, contributes to such changes. In search for answers, this paper reflects on experiences with setting up a Social Lab in a project on Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) that intended to impact research funding institutions in view of incorporating responsibility as an integral element in science and innovation. The paper discusses how selected methods and design characteristics of the RRI social lab produced a setting that made the lab itself a “transformative space.” By mobilizing embodied knowledge and background ideational abilities of its participants, the setting helped them to develop a sense of agency and elaborate and engage in concrete action that fitted the particularities of their institutional contexts. Furthermore, because of the foregrounding of the discourses that characterize their contexts, and infusing these with the innovative ideas on RRI developed in the lab, the lab itself can be argued to present a disruptive event in the practices of its participants. The combination rendered the lab a site of both deliberation and institutional dynamics. By elaborating this line of reasoning on an empirical basis, the paper seeks to combine insights from interpretive approaches to policy analysis and deliberation with a (discursive) institutionalist take on understanding the dynamics of change in practice.