Building upon grassroots innovations: articulating social and ethical capital

Abstract

The healthy growth of democracy depends upon the emergence of decentralized, dispersed, polycentric spurs of social, ecological and economic entrepreneurship. Networking among these seemingly disparate cross currents some times gives enough momentum to the civil society initiatives to transform the social and cultural values of the society. There is always networking taking place among stronger economic and cultural forces, not withstanding the nature of state. But some times, this transformation also takes place through subtle networking among the grassroots deviants, innovators, and other marginal but creative forces in society. Gerlach and Palmer (1981) called these forces as SPIN (segmented, polycentric, integrated networks) while I tend to view these SPLICES that need attention today since these have the potential to take the society by surprise when their real power manifests, if it does. It is true that due to loose coordination, may times these forces remain on the margin and thus their potential does not get realized for a long time.