ABSTRACT
Social innovation is an emerging construct that has mobilized governments at local,
national and international levels: policy think tanks and international research institutes;
the business and nonprofit sectors; civil society groups; and community activists during
the last 2 decades. The lack of definition and analytical foundation for social innovation
poses problems for scholar-practitioners such as me working with marginalized
communities toward social justice goals. This qualitative inquiry uses the lenses of
critical social theory, transdisciplinarity, and transformative phenomenology to inform an
analytical foundation for the construct of social innovation. The study illustrates through
case examples from my work in the community-based nonprofit sector how a critical
transdisciplinary, transformative, phenomenological analysis illuminates important
lifeworldly features of socially creative strategies that are not captured in some current
constructs of social innovation.