Human Service Organizations: Management, Leadership & Governance

Guest Editors: Marissa Kaloga, Ian Williams, James M. Mandiberg, and Monica Nandan

Social Work Innovation Network (SWIN)

The Social Work Innovation Network (SWIN) is an international group of social work entrepreneurs and innovators strategically collaborating with practitioners, researchers, and academicians to advance innovation, intrapreneurship and entrepreneurship, social enterprise, corporate social responsibility, design methods, sustainable development, and social impact. Social enterprise, social entrepreneurship, and social innovation (SE/SI) comprise a group of terms used to describe innovative approaches for realizing core social work commitment towards social, economic, political, environmental, racial, and cultural justice. SE/SI approaches can be implemented through traditional and hybrid organizations that may combine characteristics from traditional nonprofit, for-profit, and public services entities; challenge common assumptions in human services about what can and cannot be achieved and how to

achieve it; utilize non-traditional ways of assessing, designing, planning, implementing and evaluating services, such as through various forms of futurism, creative destruction, and design thinking; dismantle silos that separate service user populations, the context they live in, issues they confront, and the assumed approaches to address their needs for services; and, co-create services with end-users in order to be more responsive to their challenges and opportunities as well as attentive to their standpoints.

SE/SI has origins in human services descending from the settlement house movement (late 1800s), which prioritized the perspectives of the communities in which they were embedded and created sustainable solutions to address endemic problems. For instance, models such as Goodwill Industries (1902) engaged with the market to employ and serve community members who lived in poverty; affirmative businesses (1960s – 1970s) created a range of community-embedded retail and manufacturing enterprises to train and employ social service populations. While SE/SI has a rich history in the helping professions, it has received scant attention within human service organizations, social work academia, and sister professional societies. Rather, SE/SI has become associated more with those trained in business and public administration, particularly since business schools began to pay attention to socially engaged business issues and practices in the early 1980s.

The tools, models, and applications of SE/SI have become more prominent globally in tandem with the rise of social work as a profession over the 20th and early 21st centuries. SWIN aims to reinvigorate human services as well as the practice, research, and teaching of social work, by advancing theoretical models and incorporating SE/SI approaches into program development/redesign and service delivery. Through this special issue, SWIN aims to enrich and broaden the knowledge base for social work practitioners and academicians, including developing and disseminating innovative methods to address structural inequalities. This special issue extends an invitation to social workers engaged in, or curious about, SE/SI to learn from and contribute to the SWIN community of practice and other knowledge networks. Grounded in the rich history of SE/SI in human services, we invite human service professionals and academics to view clinical, community, and organizational issues in human services through an innovative lens.

Human Service Organizations: Management, Leadership & Governance has been a leader in publishing innovations in human services, including SE/SI. This special issue aims to further extend the SE/SI orientation into human services through contemporary research, case studies, and theoretical frameworks. We seek to represent a broad range of topics and perspectives in SE/SI, and are open to reviewing abstracts from non-traditional social work domains. We welcome paper proposals on a wide range of relevant topics that include the following:

• Case examples using novel applications of SE/SI to address key concerns of social work.
• The use of SE/SI orientation in human services, especially those that address wicked problems (i.e., complex problems that have resisted conventional approaches) assigned to human service organizations.
• Theoretical and conceptual advances in SE/SI related to human services.
• The use of SE/SI methods in clinical social work practice.
• The development of human services that address double- and triple-bottom line (social-economic-environmental) concerns.
• Programs that break down the traditional distinction in human services between service providers and service users in the planning, managing, and delivery of services.
• The use of SE/SI to address issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion.
• The role of indigenous innovation in decolonizing SE/SI.
• Proof of concept, adoption, and diffusion of emerging technological innovations and their implications for the future of human services.
• Innovative policy practice approaches within organizations and/or larger decision-making bodies at local, regional, and transnational levels.
• Alternative and novel resource models that support the implementation of SE/SI initiatives in social work and human services.
• Innovation and/or entrepreneurial activities in the realm of eco-social work and environmental justice.
• Organizational innovations, including new organizational models, workplace initiatives, supply chain issues, and intrapreneurship.

Review Process:

Please include text in your abstract that directly addresses these two questions: 1) What about your research, initiative, or idea is innovative or entrepreneurial, as opposed to more traditional approaches?; and 2) How is your proposed contribution advancing social work and/or the human services?

Authors should send abstracts of up to 250 words to the Guest Editors at: [email protected]. If you have any questions, please contact Professor James Mandiberg at [email protected]. Abstracts will be reviewed on the basis of substance, methodology, originality, acknowledgment of the literature, and relevance to the journal.

Timeline:

Abstract submission: 250-word abstracts submitted to Guest Editors by 15 February 2023.

Invitation to select authors: Select authors will be invited in March 2023 to prepare full manuscripts for peer review.

Full paper submission: Submission of full manuscript for peer review in late Summer 2023.

Review process: Reviewers’ comments, recommendations for revisions, and decisions will be communicated by the Guest Editors.

Expected journal publication: Expected publication of the special issue in late 2024 to early 2025.

Through this special issue, SWIN aims to enrich and broaden the knowledge base for social work practitioners and academicians, including developing and disseminating innovative methods to address structural inequalities. This special issue extends an invitation to social workers engaged in, or curious about, SE/SI to learn from and contribute to the SWIN community of practice and other knowledge networks. Grounded in the rich history of SE/SI in human services, we invite human service professionals and academics to view clinical, community, and organizational issues in human services through an innovative lens. We seek to represent a broad range of topics and perspectives in SE/SI, and are open to reviewing abstracts from non-traditional social work domains.

Instructions for AuthorsSubmit an Article