Maestripieri L. (2017) Does Social Innovation Reduce the Economic Marginalization of
Women? Insights from the Case of Italian Solidarity Purchasing Groups, Journal of Social
Entrepreneurship, 8(3): 320-337.
ABSTRACT (100 words)
The paper explores the relationship between gender and social innovation to highlight the possible
positive effects of women’s participation in social innovation in terms of protection from economic
marginalisation. It focuses on Italian solidarity purchasing groups as a case of social innovation in
the domain of food and agriculture. The analysis is based on logistic regression using primary data
collected in 2016 for the EU funded project CrESSI.
The results show that participation in social innovation does protect households from worsening
economic conditions. However, it was not empirically proven that there is a significant difference
between men and women in the benefit enjoyed from the participation in solidarity purchasing
groups.
KEY WORDS: Marginalisation, gender, social innovation, solidarity purchasing groups, alternative
food networks
1. Introduction
Social innovations are increasingly proposed as a solution to mitigate the worst consequences of the recent
financial crises in order to foster employment and social inclusion in European Societies. Extensively
researched in recent years, given the centrality of the concept in flagship initiatives of the European
Commission, the idea of social innovation has been adopted across various domains of the social and
economic sciences, with several concurrent definitions of the term presented by scholars, stakeholders and
policy makers (Ziegler 2017a). As policy action on social innovation gains consensus and visibility, it risks
becoming a buzz word that appeals to stakeholders and scholars (Moulaert et al. 2013b). The appeal of the
concept lies in the problem that it addresses (Moulaert et al. 2013a): in a neoliberal era, where the role of the
state has been reduced as much as possible, social innovation seeks to give a new centrality to fruitful
interrelations between market and community. It raises attention on how the beneficial outcomes of
innovation are distributed among citizens (Moulaert et al. 2013a).
Gender represents one of the main dimensions of inequality. Equality between men and women is
particularly relevant for EU strategies for economic and societal improvement (André 2013), as a more equal
society can foster economic growth in the longer term and achieve better social cohesion (Hubert and
Helfferich 2016). However, gender issues have, so far, been overlooked by the social innovation debate with
only a few authors discussing how social innovation can foster more equality between men and women
(André 2013; Lindberg et al. 2015; Lindberg 2016). Trying to fill this gap, the author will focus on how
gender can be a source of economic marginalisation, mediated by the disadvantaged condition of women in
the labour market, and on the extent to which social innovations can reverse this process. Being marginalised
can be defined as a positional disadvantage that derives from ‘social processes through which personal,
social or environmental traits are transformed into actual or potential factors of disadvantage’ (von Jacobi
et al. 2017, 151). Marginalisation means occupying a position in the labour market which is characterised by
reduced bargaining power with clients/employers, a lower possibility of career advancement and non-
standard contracts that could affect the individual’s economic independence. The lower integration of
women into the labour market leads to instability in financial resources and increases the gap between
required and available resources which creates a status of economic insecurity that could result in a full-
blown state of social exclusion were any negative event to occur (Kaseauru et al. 2016). Social innovation
should play a role in widening the opportunity for women to be integrated into public life in an empowered
position and in reducing their exposure to financial stress and resource constraints by reversing the pre-
existing processes of marginalisation.
This is the accepted version of the article published by Taylor & Francis: Maestripieri L. (2017) Does Social Innovation Reduce
the Economic Marginalization of Women? Insights from the Case of Italian Solidarity Purchasing Groups, Journal of Social
Entrepreneurship, 8(3): 320-337.. The final version is available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19420676.2017.1364289
The aim of this article is to explore social innovation in terms of its consequences for gender inequality
and its role in reducing the economic marginalisation of women. Can it be assumed that social innovation
could be one of the tools that allow the EU to reduce gaps in the social and economic participation of
women? Is social innovation a tool to tackle the economic marginalisation of women in European societies?
The EU funded project CrESSI
1
provides an opportunity to test these research questions empirically.
Through the project primary data has been collected on three different cases of social innovation across
Europe through interviews with the beneficiaries of socially innovative actions. The cases were: autonomous
water management in Germany (Ziegler, 2017b), complementary currencies in the Netherlands (van der
Linden, 2017) and, finally, solidarity purchasing groups in Italy. This study will focus on the Italian case,
which is considered to be an ideal case on which to base a study on the economic marginalisation of women
as it is set in the agricultural sector where employment is traditionally strongly gendered in favour of men.
The paper will analyse the following aspects: first, the role of solidarity purchasing groups in fostering a
wider participation of women in the food production and agricultural sector; second, the extent of the
positive impact of being a supplier of solidarity purchasing groups in terms of the reduction of the economic
marginalisation of women working in this sector. This last analysis will be conducted via a series of logistic
regression models on the primary data collected in 2016 within the framework of the CrESSI project among
solidarity purchasing group suppliers, taking the economic condition of the household the respondent
belongs to as a dependent variable. This allows the researcher to assess whether participating in social
innovation has prevented the family from the risk of worsening economic conditions in the last three years,
thus supporting the assumption made in this paper that participation of women in the labour market ensures
their individual economic independence and protects the entire household from financial constraints
(Curatolo and Wolleb 2010).
The paper is organised as follows: the literature review provides some insights into the marginalisation
of women in the labour market and attempts to define the factors that prevent full equality between the
genders in this context, while highlighting the potential of social innovation in addressing such inequality.
The following section on the methodology used in this study presents the CrESSI investigation and the
primary data that will be used to study the relationship between gender and social innovation. This section
provides a detailed analysis of the Italian context, focusing on the disadvantaged condition of women in the
agricultural sector. The main sources used for this analysis are the Eurostat database, the Italian Labour
Force Survey and the descriptive analysis based on CrESSI primary data. This is followed by a regression
analysis on the effect of participating in social innovation with the aim of assessing the role that gender plays
in this relationship. The final paragraph presents the conclusions drawn.
2. Women’s Marginalisation and the Role of Social Innovation
Social innovations are ‘socially innovative actions, strategies, practices and processes’ that ‘arise whenever
problems of poverty, exclusion, segregation and deprivation or opportunities for improving living conditions
cannot find satisfactory solutions in the ‘institutionalized field’ of public and private action’ (Moulaert et al.
2013a: 2). They are initiatives (usually promoted through a bottom-up process) that propose grass-root
solutions that rupture pre-existing socio-economic structures and that promote the involvement of the
beneficiaries in the processes (von Jacobi et al. 2017; Ziegler et al. 2017). Such initiatives usually have two
axes: first, they put in question the economic, social and political relations that produce marginalisation;
secondly, they promote the active participation of citizens in the process of disruption (von Jacobi et al.
2017). An innovation must be social in its ends and means to be considered a social innovation (BEPA
2010): being good for society should also imply that the action of social innovation enhances the capacity of
a society to act in favour of the wider inclusion of its citizens. Social inclusion – defined as the increased
participation of citizens in public life - is prominent in the process (Moulaert et al. 2013b) and social change
is the desired outcome of social innovation’s activities (Lindberg 2016).
Social innovation is an increasingly appealing concept, both for scholars and for European policy-
makers. Especially for policy-makers, the value of social innovations might be found in the assumption that
they can be more effective, when compared to traditional policies relying on market or top-down public
interventions, in meeting the social demands of marginalised groups as they promote a participatory
approach (BEPA 2010). Starting from the 1990s, social innovation has been increasingly extended as a
concept to include collective and bottom-up actions occurring not only in urban deprived neighbourhoods,
but also in peripheral rural localities, which had been overlooked in previous years (Moulaert et al. 2013b).
Although social innovations disregarded gender inequalities as an object of analysis in itself (Lindberg et al.
2015; Lindberg 2016), as gender is a pervasive dimension of inequality, social innovations should have an
impact on gender relations – especially if they are oriented to foster a wider participation in the labour
market, even when their goals are not explicitly oriented to rebalancing gender relations in society (André
2013). In fact, as they are oriented to favour participation in public life, the potential role of social
innovations in reducing the marginalised condition of women is sound.
The post-industrial transformation has brought three main changes to the structure of the labour force in
European societies: an increased number of service jobs with a correspondent decline of employment in
manufacturing and agriculture, a stronger presence of female workers and, finally, a progressive deregulation
in working contracts (Cucca and Maestripieri 2015). All the cited processes have impacted women’s labour
market participation and, in recent years, a wider women’s activity rate has been recorded in all western
economies as one of the consequences of the de-industrialization process. Women’s increased participation
was helped by the formalization of women’s work, by opening opportunities in the service sector, by the
increase in female educational attainment and the wider availability of part-time employment opportunities
(Hakim 2000; Thévenon 2013). The growth has been steady since the 1970s, also due to a progressive de-
standardisation of contracts: part-time and temporary jobs offered the opportunity for more women to be
active in the labour market without being employed full-time, thus easing women’s participation in public
life even when they have duties of care. This was an advantage for all those women who wished to be active
in the labour market as well as in family life (Hakim 2000). Nevertheless, due to women’s non-standard
involvement in labour markets, other sources of gender inequality, such as occupational segregation, the
gender pay gap and disequilibrium in the distribution of work within families, still persist (Hakim 2000;
Vosko et al. 2009), exposing women to economic insecurity and financial constraints (Kaseauru et al. 2016).
Additionally, it has also been demonstrated that a wider participation of women in the labour market reduces
inequality between families (Grotti and Scherer 2016).
The factors that lead to women’s disadvantage on the labour market can be enumerated by the
dimensions that follow: the quantity of work accessible to women, the quality of the work they have, the
financial resources available from their jobs and, finally, the unequal distribution of paid/unpaid work
between genders that hinders the capacity of women to be as active in the labour market as men (Maestripieri
2015). Regarding the quantity of women’s work, the gap in women’s labour market participation is still
persistent – albeit it is closing especially following the financial crisis that impacted men’s occupations more
than women’s (Cucca and Maestripieri 2015; Maestripieri 2015). Regarding the quality of women’s work,
the persistence of a strong gender bias in non-standard work, including part-time and temporary
employment, has been empirically proven (Maestripieri 2015). Although the timing varied across Europe,
non-standard positions started to increase in the mid-1980s, specifically interesting women, young and other
marginal workers such as migrants. Women are particularly more interested in part-time jobs than members
of other social groups as part-time contracts provide an ideal way to reconcile a woman’s private and public
life (Thévenon 2013).
The concentration of women in certain sectors is, in fact, another possible signal of their economic
marginalisation. Segregation can occur in two ways: vertically and horizontally. Vertical segregation refers
to the position of women in the work hierarchies, with women more likely occupying low-skilled and low-
paid positions. Horizontal segregation refers to the concentration of men and women in certain sectors.
Where women make up the majority of workers, the working conditions in the sector tend to be worse than
in other sectors, with increased destandardisation of contracts and lower salaries (Cucca and Maestripieri
2015). Thus, the two types of segregation (vertical and horizontal) tend to intertwine with non-standard job
contracts to produce niches of women’s marginalisation (signalled by low salaries and lower attachment to
the labour market).
One of the most unbalanced sectors in terms of women’s presence is the agricultural sector. Previous
research demonstrated that a gender rebalancing in agriculture is favoured by the diffusion of alternative
farming practices and by the reduced dimensions of farms (Ball 2014). This type of farming is the main
target of the activity of the social innovation that project CrESSI studied in the Italian case. In fact, solidarity
purchasing groups (SPGs)
2
are small self-organised groups of citizens that collectively purchase primary
goods directly from family producers (Altraeconomia 2015), with the explicit aim of enhancing their
economic and social participation (Maestripieri 2018). The novelty of their activities lies in the process of
consumption: SPGs allow consumers to avoid intermediation and to promote critical consumption principles
by choosing suppliers that respect the principles of sustainable agriculture. Oriented by principles of political
consumerism (Stolle et al. 2005; Arcidiacono 2013; Forno and Graziano 2014), they can be considered as
being social innovators, as the movement promotes new processes that open new end-markets for their
suppliers (usually small organic producers, local artisans or social cooperatives that employ vulnerable
individuals), thus favouring their inclusion in society by offering fair prices and enhancing their proximity
with final consumers. The aim of their activities is to foster practices of solidarity with family farmers: the
idea is to put into question the traditional food supply chain and to avoid the intermediation of mass retailers
in order to empower consumers and producers by favouring alternative systems of food production. The
principle of solidarity towards producers and sustainable agricultural productions is what motivates social
innovators: SPGs explicitly seek to sustain small farming activities that operate with organic and sustainable
forms of production. In order to achieve their purpose, they sustain practices of small family farmers whose
production is organic (Maestripieri 2016; Maestripieri 2018). A social innovation in this sector is particularly
relevant in terms of gender equality: agriculture is one of the main segregated sectors in terms of women’s
participation and Italian women are usually employed as family helpers in farm households in a position that
is dependent on their partners (see paragraph 4). SPGs sustain farm households and organic farming. Organic
farming is more popular among women entrepreneurs in agriculture, supposedly having a rebalancing effect
on gender inequality in the sector as it favours niches in which women are more likely to be active as farmers
(Ball 2014).
In conclusion, policies of labour de-standardization promoted by European governments in the last years
have achieved mixed results. The number of women in the labour market has increased in the last decades –
especially in the service sectors. However, women’s marginalised position on the labour market means that
there still is insecure integration and an economic dependence on a primary earner. Even for those women
who are active on the labour market, the quality of the job they get should be questioned: they are usually
segregated to certain services sectors, leading to limited integration especially in the manufacturing and
agricultural sectors. They also suffer worse working conditions than men, also because their income is
usually considered to be additional to the breadwinner’s. Nevertheless, the decisive role of gender in creating
niches of marginalisation has somehow been underplayed by the current debate on social innovation
(Lindberg et al. 2015; Lindberg 2016), although the main goal of social innovation should be the promotion
of a process of participation in public life and improvement of the social conditions of its beneficiaries.
Previous research (Ball 2014) shows that alternative farming practices in agriculture are able to
rebalance gender inequality in a sector such as food production, which is normally masculinized in
developed countries. This paper seeks to investigate the extent to which the processes promoted by SPGs
address the structuration of women’s disadvantage in agriculture. The following analysis will try to open the
black box of social innovation in regard to women’s situation on the labour market with the aim of assessing
whether the experiences of social innovation in the food and agriculture sector, through SPGs’ bottom-up
processes of empowerment, are able to lift women out of marginalisation.
3. Research Design and Methodology
The data presented in this paper are part of a wider primary collection of data which was gathered as part of
the actions of the EU funded project CrESSI (2014/2018) funded under the 7
th
Framework Programme. The
general scope of the project was to explore the economic underpinnings of social innovations with a focus on
how policy and practices can enhance the lives of marginalized and disempowered citizens in society. The
theoretical approach of CrESSI was indebted to the theories of Jens Beckert (2010), Michael Mann (1986)
and the capability approach (Sen 1999, Nussbaum 2000): the so-called extended social grid model explores
the structural dynamics behind processes of marginalisation and the role of social innovation in overcoming
them (Nicholls and Ziegler 2018). The project carried out a comparative investigation of three cases of social
innovation that were considered as being particularly relevant to study process of marginalisation. The
Italian case focused on solidarity purchasing groups: in this case, the social innovation aims at reconnecting
consumers and producers, shortening the supply chain in the domain of food and agriculture. It is an ideal
case to use to analyse women’s economic marginalisation as it regards an economic activity in a strongly
gendered sector in which women make up the minority of workers and are usually employed in subordinate
positions (see paragraph 4).
The empirical enquiry in CrESSI was based on a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods, in
order to investigate the two sides of the social innovation relationship (von Jacobi et al. 2015): the opinion of
the social innovators (SPG members) on the functioning and practices of their SPGs, that was obtained
through semi-structured interviews, and the impacts of SPGs on their beneficiaries (suppliers of SPGs) that
was investigated using an online survey. In the context of this paper, the data analysis will concentrate on the
data collected from the beneficiaries of the social innovation. There are two reasons behind this choice:
firstly, the aim of this paper is to assess the role of social innovation in empowering women as beneficiaries
of SI actions and the interviews were carried out with social innovators; secondly, the structure of the
interview did not envisage a specific analysis of gender issues as it focused on the organisation of SPGs and
comprised an analysis of their role in the reduction of the marginalisation of beneficiaries. The data collected
qualitatively from social innovators informed the questionnaire sent to the beneficiaries, as several questions
were derived from the analysis of the interviews in order to propose categories which were grounded in the
phenomenon of SPGs.
The final distribution of respondents in the SPGs case is illustrated in Table 1. The beneficiaries included
small farms, local artisans and social cooperatives that cooperate with SPGs, while the control group
comprised the same type of actors that have never sold their products to SPGs. Beneficiaries are
differentiated in terms of those who are currently benefitting from the social innovation and those who have
benefitted from it in the past: in the case of Italy, 750 are current beneficiaries and 175 were beneficiaries in
the past. This last distinction will not be used in the analysis presented here.
Table 1 – Total questionnaires in the Italian social innovation case (SPG) under the EU funded project CrESSI,
distinguished by gender
Men
Women
Total
Control group, of which
1,348
692
2,040
Never heard of SPGs
217
92
309
Heard of them, but never been active with SPG
1.131
600
1.731
Actual Beneficiaries
439
311
750
Past beneficiaries
104
71
175
total
1,891
1,074
2,965
Source: CrESSI survey data, 2016
The sample was not randomly selected as a list of SPG suppliers is not available given the informality
that characterises this social innovation (Maestripieri 2016). As such, the analysis cannot be representative of
the entire population of SPG suppliers and/or Italian small family farmers. The control group has also not
been randomly selected. Selling products to SPGs is the sole criterion used to differentiate the respondents
falling under the control group from the beneficiaries. The data does not specify whether the individuals who
fall within the control group are not selling their product to the SPGs out of choice or because they have not
been selected by SPGs: however, the data shows that knowledge about SPGs is well spread in the sample
even among those who are not currently active in SPGs, confirming the hypothesis that respondents are
indeed potential beneficiaries of the social innovation under study. Respondents involved in the social
innovation and control group are also distinguished by gender, with more women in the first group (41.3%
vs. 33.4% in control group) and by age, with those in contact with social innovation being slightly younger
(mean age 47 years old) than those in the control group (mean age 49 years old). The figures are reported in
Annex – table 1.
Although the sample could not be wholly representative in this case, the aim was to provide one that
would be as comprehensive as possible. Different methods were used to build up such a list, including asking
each interviewed SPG in the qualitative phase to share the list of suppliers (500 contacts were collected);
listing producers who self-declare themselves as potential suppliers for SPGs on the two main websites
devoted to the social innovation (www.retegas.it and www.eventhia.com - about 2000 contacts were
collected); collecting contacts from events that were considered relevant for the movement of solidarity
purchasing groups (i.e. fair-trade or organic fairs) or online public databases that could potentially comprise
beneficiaries, such as local databases of biological and bio-dynamic farm households, farmers’ markets,
tourist itineraries that involve local products, etc. In total, about 20,000 potential respondents received a
direct invitation to participate in the survey by email: however, there was certainty about the respondents’
involvement in the social innovation for the first 500 contacts; the rest were only potentially beneficiaries.
