Narrative mapping for systemic change: a multi-level participatory framework for researching social innovation and its scaling deep
(2026) EGOS - Reframing Organizations in the More-than-Human Society 2026 — Location: Bergamo (9.July.2026)
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- Systems perspectives have gained renewed attention within organization studies as scholars seek to better understand how change emerges, stabilizes, and transforms across interconnected social, organizational, and institutional settings (Dentoni, Roglic, Williams, & Bansal, 2026). By emphasizing interdependencies, feedback loops, and multi-level dynamics, systems approaches encourage researchers to move beyond linear explanations of change and toward a more holistic understanding of societal transformation. At the same time, scholars increasingly recognize that systemic transformations are not only structural phenomena but also depend on how actors interpret, navigate, and respond to complex and evolving system dynamics (Dentoni et al., 2026; Geels, 2020). To address recent calls for stronger micro-foundations in systems and transition research (Geels, 2020), we draw on insights from social innovation scholarship, which offers valuable conceptual resources for understanding the meaning-making processes through which systemic transformations are experienced and enacted. Social innovation scholars have examined how social innovations generate broader forms of societal impact through processes that unfold across multiple levels and scales (Westley & Antadze, 2010). They have drawn attention to transformations in values, identities, relationships, and shared understandings that shape how actors engage with social challenges and possibilities for change (Moore, Riddell, & Vocisano, 2015). Such transformations are often discussed through the notion of scaling deep, which foregrounds the cultural dimensions of social change (Moore, Olsson, Nilsson, Rose, & Westley, 2018) for a just transition (Lam et al., 2022; Olsson, Moore, Westley, & McCarthy, 2017). Viewed from this perspective, systemic transformation depends not only on changes in structures and institutions, but also on the development of actors’ capacities to reframe assumptions, build new relationships, coordinate across differences, and engage in collective sensemaking around emerging possibilities for change. While those approaches provide valuable conceptual lenses for understanding the (just) transformations in values, identities, relationships, and shared understandings, studying them empirically, within and across systems, remains challenging. Observable outcomes may indicate that change has occurred without necessarily explaining how actors experienced the process, how meanings evolved, or how diverse concerns converged around collective action. Nor do they easily reveal how actors develop the capacities that enable them to engage with complexity, uncertainty, and interdependence across multiple levels of a system. As a result, researchers continue to seek methodological approaches capable of documenting how such transformations are experienced, interpreted, and made meaningful across interconnected levels of a social system. Across these streams of research, a common methodological challenge emerges for organization scholars: How can researchers empirically investigate transformations in values, identities, relationships, and shared understandings across interconnected levels of a social system while remaining attentive to the meanings and lived experiences of actors?
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Solbreux, J., & Hermans, J. (2026, July 9). Narrative mapping for systemic change: a multi-level participatory framework for researching social innovation and its scaling deep. EGOS - Reframing Organizations in the More-than-Human Society 2026, Bergamo. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/280171