(Illustration by Ben Wiseman)
We had an intuition that where social innovation happened matters, but we didn’t realize all of the different ways that it matters,” says Thomas Lawrence, professor of strategy at the Said Business School at Oxford University. “We started looking at specific places, and we were surprised at the diversity of places that matter.”
Along with Graham Dover, executive director of the Mindset Social Innovation Foundation, an organization in Vancouver, Canada, Lawrence studied how the use of certain physical sites affected the development of two social change projects. First, in an area near Vancouver known as the Tri-Cities, a group of citizens developed a program to provide homeless people with shelter in community churches. Second, in downtown Vancouver, another group created the Dr. Peter Centre, a day-care and residential facility that serves people with HIV/AIDS.
In their research on those projects, Lawrence and Dover conducted interviews, engaged in direct program observation, and analyzed program materials, local news reports, and other documents. A place, they discovered, can often be a powerful factor in “shaping the values and norms and beliefs of a community,” says Lawrence. More specifically, the researchers concluded that place is a variable that can “contain,” “mediate,” and even “complicate” social change work.
Lawrence and Dover found that a place can contain—in other words, it can provide meaningful boundaries for—efforts to solve a particular problem. The Tri-Cities isn’t just a location on a map; it’s an idea that helps foster a sense of shared identity. People in that region originally saw homelessness as an issue that applied only to other communities. But activists, using counts of how many homeless people there were in the area, tapped into that shared sense of identity and framed homelessness as a local matter. They showed that homelessness was a Tri-Cities problem that merited a Tri-Cities solution.
The strategic use of place can also help people mediate between different forms of meaning and value. In the mid-1980s, a television series called The Dr. Peter Diaries aired in the Vancouver area. It featured Dr. Peter Jepson-Young, a gay man with AIDS, and it took place in his apartment. Back then, Lawrence notes, “it was really an extraordinary idea for your neighbor to be HIV-positive or to be gay [in a public way].” Filming the show in the doctor’s apartment—rather than, say, in his office—provided viewers with a connection to Jepson-Young and helped them expand their sense of solidarity to include people like him.
In addition, using a place as a venue for pursuing social goals can complicate such efforts, especially when that place has multiple and sometimes conflicting purposes. The Dr. Peter Centre, for example, incorporates elements related to health, housing, and other issues of concern to people with HIV/AIDs. Using the center to deal with multiple needs makes for a more complex approach than implementing stand-alone programs—in part because community members, public officials, and professionals from various fields have to collaborate within a shared space.
The complex way that people experience place presents both a challenge and an opportunity for social change. “In a place like the Dr. Peter Centre, which brings in lots of different norms, you start to see the collisions very strongly,” says Charlene Zietsma, associate professor of organization studies at York University in Toronto. (Zietsma and Lawrence have collaborated on research projects in the past.) Even so, the need to confront such differences can lead to a beneficial shift in perspective. In her own work on institutional change in the forestry industry, Zietsma observed that industry leaders and industry opponents—environmental activists, for example—would often engage with each other when they lived in the same neighborhood or met at their children’s day-care center. “Place forces [disparate groups] to interact more deliberately,” she notes.
Thomas B. Lawrence and Graham Dover, “Place and Institutional Work: Creating Housing for the Hard-to-House,” Administrative Science Quarterly, 60, September 2015.
Read more stories by Rachel Wright.