The ‘revolution’ in social enterprise is much wider and more radical than traditional definitions allow for, argues Geof Cox FRSA.
The articles on social enterprise by Geoff Mulgan and others in the summer edition of the RSA Journal raise some good questions about whether social entrepreneurs are fulfilling their potential. They also provide a welcome antidote to the usual pre-perestroika-Pravda flavour of much writing in this area, which only tells the good news! However, the pieces also miss a more fundamental question about the adequacy of the usual conceptual frameworks for analysis of what is really happening in social enterprise.
This issue first opens up around the vexed question of how many 'social enterprises' there really are. The truth is that there is an 'official' social enterprise 'sector' that continues to propagate the figures quoted in the articles: that there are 60,000 to 70,000 social enterprises in the UK. But in addition to this there is a much larger social enterprise movement of at least a third of a million people and organisations actively using business models and methods to achieve a social mission.
The recent Third Sector Research Centre work on measuring the scale of UK social enterprise is helpful in addressing the political construction of the 'social enterprise' concept.
Moreover, the most recent UnLtd survey found that if they had access to the right support about one in three people would like to be social entrepreneurs; a startling figure, but tellingly close to Dr Rebecca Harding's research on the numbers of social entrepreneurs. This suggested some time ago that there are over 230,000 'hidden social enterprises' in the UK, and that over a third of all new entrepreneurs would like to be social entrepreneurs.
The key point here is that the 'official' social enterprise sector is based on the dated model of 'the firm', rather than the new reality of the network, on mitigating market failure rather than developing a whole new way of organising human affairs, and on conventional business growth models rather than the now rather more pressing issue of the limits to growth.
We have to shift to a new paradigm. This means shifting focus from the relatively small number of social enterprises that happen to fit an official definition, or can be used to forward a government agenda, towards the much larger movement of alternative lifestyle businesses, portfolio workers, organisations with or without staff, activists, freelancers and networks working not to redeliver public services but in more challenging and more internationally relevant areas like the environment, local food, fair trade and the open source movement.
In this context Geoff Mulgan's count of recent social enterprise disappointments looks plain old-fashioned. The conventional idea of business 'growth' is precisely what most social entrepreneurs are trying to get away from. Not only because the coming adjustment of our whole economy has to be towards buying, transporting and using much less, but also because the big bland brands world of globalised business, cloned high street and remote call-centre robs us of real human contact, value and fulfillment.
The networked home worker, not driving into an energy-hungry office or factory every day, taking some time to shop locally and cook some slow food, spend time with the kids, get involved in their community and focus on well-being instead of growth; they are not going to be social enterprise celebrities, for sure, but they might nevertheless be driving more radical change.
If this sounds to you like a 'place in the country' idyll, please note that I'm working with precisely this kind of social enterprise network among, for example, people with learning disabilities in the UK, and women house-bound by caring responsibilities in an all-but closed-down former closed town in northern Russia.
The really important questions here are about how social enterprise networks can replace conventional investment, whether we can achieve economies of scale while empowering local people and communities, how we can freely share knowledge but retain our originality, and how sharing can reduce our need for hundreds and hundreds more things that don't really make us happy.
And we need to develop an entirely new brand-paradigm for this kind of social enterprise: one that will propagate brands that are participative and community-owned, that are about collaborating more and consuming less, and that can combine the trust in the familiar that drives conventional brands with a new respect for the unique and the local and the individual.
These are profoundly challenging questions that cannot be resolved with the usual business strategy tools, and that are rarely broached in social enterprise circles. I wonder if the range of skills and experience in an organisation like the RSA might better help us make the paradigm shift social enterprise really needs?
Geof Cox is a freelance social enterprise developer currently working on a number of ground-breaking projects, including a new fair trade model for hard-pressed families with Oxfam in Russia, and the UK-wide roll-out of the miEnterprise supported self-employment network for people with disabilities or other barriers to paid work.
Related articles
-
Democracy at work
Jeremy Fox
Hand the company over to the workers? Madness said the critics. But Jeremy Fox’s exercise in democracy grew the business and made his former employees richer. The only problem? They had to be persuaded to take holidays
-
Decent work and the experiences of young ethnic minorities in Vietnam
Tony Wall
Young people are rarely included in the policies that affect their futures. In fast-growing Vietnam, with many ethnic groups at the back of the queue for decent, secure and well-paid jobs, most are never heard at all. Tony Wall and Ann Hindley explain how Re-WORK aims to redress the balance
-
Why SMEs need new business models
Denis Oakley
The world is changing. Most businesses will die because technological, environmental, and social change will obsolete their business models. They will not, are not, changing fast enough. Read Denis Oakley's look at the future of business and how they need to change.
Join the discussion
Comments
Please login to post a comment or reply
Don't have an account? Click here to register.
I am in fact writing now from a 'place in the country' and by coincidence it was a former closed town in Russia where I first learned of social enterprise, from an American who went there to do it in 1999. Reporting of women with caring responsibilities he wrote:
"There were also critical food
shortages in the region, children living on the streets because they
considered orphanages intolerable, women having to resort to
prostitution to feed their children, and a near-total lack of new
economic opportunities. Economic opportunities for women were
routinely negotiated in bed, if at all. "
It was here in what became known as the Tomsk Regional Initiative that he persuaded US government to try a localised approach which was replicated by them in other cities.
Yesterday morning I learned of his death in service, where the cause of children abandoned to state care took priority over his health.
In the paper he wrote for Clinton's re-election in 1996, he'd asserted that 'the emerging Information Age will provide an unprecedented
opportunity for outreach and communication at local community
levels by way of the Internet' and that was the message brought to the UK in 2004, with a proposal for replication on a national scale:
http://forestofdean.socialgo.c...
In this post growth model , the 20th century production and profit maximising approach to economics gives way to one which is sharing and people-centered and that's how it's been deployed here:
http://forestofdean.socialgo.c...
Could it be, that until now, it hadn't really been understood?
Geof's article is terrific and I welcome its emphasis on participative and community-based enterprise cultures rather than those that tend to be favoured by charities. I founded the Social Entrepreneurs Network in Australia and New Zealand in 2001, and many of Geof's comments ring true. A few observations:
First, the concept of social enterprise has been taken on by governments, charities, philanthropists, and CSR practitioners in often undiscerning ways. Almost any community project in Australia can now call itself a social enterprise and no-one will raise an eyebrow.
Second, voluntary responses to social issues have tended to be discounted, in favour of "enterprise" responses, when sometimes a voluntary response is the best response. Unfortunately, there has been a tendency to think every social problem can be solved with a grant and a business plan.
Third, a culture of grant-seeking has proliferated whereby anyone with an innovative idea has been encouraged to seek a government or foundation grant to develop a social enterprise. I may be old-fashioned on this score, but I tend to think that an entrepreneurial response should be entrepreneurial in its financing. If it requires government grants to be established, then it is probably not an enterprise.
Fourth, charities and CSR practitioners have tended to capture the social enterprise idea in many countries, and have developed ventures that are just as top down in their managerial control structure as any bureaucracy or corporate. The old mutual and cooperative models with their emphasis on member ownership and shared control have tended to be bypassed in favour of charity control over activities that can often be owned and directed by the people who are the intended social beneficiaries. This has often led to social enterprises reproducing passive clienthood rather than a culture of empowerment.
Fifth, the legacy of government sponsorship and funding of social enterprises is ambiguous to say the least. If a culture of financial dependence on government is established at the commencement of a venture, then it will shape the culture of the project from then on, and will rarely develop a genuinely market-based culture.
It may be that these developments will be worked through and offset over time by a more refined and developed social enterprise movement. I hope so.
Vern [email protected]
Spot on Geoff..... social enterprise is more than the third sector saddled up to deliver public sector contracts and more than public sector teams rebadged... these are valid, but folks earning their living whilst living their purpose is where it is really at!