infonet-economy

The concept ‘social entrepreneurship' is virtually proliferating like a virus, elating and inspiring people in such diverse spheres as politics, the media, the non-profit sector as well as academia. Despite the rather young pedigree of the term, social entrepreneurship today is predominantly construed as a positive sign, a genuine ‘hurray word', so to speak. In an effort to gain a deeper sense of its positive, not to say enthusiastic, connotation as well as its historical evolvement, this book endeavors to investigate the social construction of social entrepreneurship in three distinct contexts: business school teaching, management research and development aid. While shedding light on three areas of knowledge production which have been and still are evidently influential in denoting and circulating the meaning of social entrepreneurship, the objective of this book is not only to reveal that social entrepreneurship may be conceived as a power-based reality construction, but to investigate critically the limitations and totalitarian threats related to prevailing enunciations and to ask whether and how the sign ‘social entrepreneurship' could be extended beyond its current confines.
The book is divided into three parts. The first part sheds light on the commodification of social entrepreneurship through management (MBA) education and its determination (and thus delimitation) in the context of management research. The second part is a discursive investigation of development aid practitioners, endeavoring to investigate if and to what extent the lexis of entrepreneurship, and managerialism at large, has come to penetrate the non-governmental sector. The third part suggests novel lines of flight (i.e. meanings) that take into account and counteract the fact that social entrepreneurship is as yet mainly orchestrated by economic rationalities and, by implication, limited in its potentially infinite semantic. Whereas the book trades heavily on philosophy, the three parts also take into account works from other academic traditions, such as, for instance, (social) psychology, (business) ethics and sociology, in order to illuminate and reflect upon social entrepreneurship from various angles and, most importantly, to probe understandings of social entrepreneurship which are new to its hotbed: organization and management science.