infonet-economy

Concurring with Barthes (1967) that no language can ever be ‘non-rhetorical', I spotted an opportunity to illuminate the current enunciation of social entrepreneurship in academic texts, and to delineate how science gets to persuade the audience of the sincerity of its utterances (Watson, 2000). As Michel Foucault (1984) pinpointed, interpretations represent a ‘violent or surreptitious appropriation of a system of rules, which in itself has no essential meaning', but which tries to ‘impose a direction, to bend it to a new will, to force its participation in a different game, and to subject it to secondary rules' (p. 86). By extension thereof, the ensuing investigation will pay prime attention to how texts being deemed ‘academic' are organized so as to rhetorically ward off potential counter-arguments (Billig, 1987; 1989). For the present purpose, I strongly identify rhetoric with Derrida's (1976) deconstructive endeavor in that rhetorical analysis irrevocably entails a sensitivity for the indeterminacy of the sign ‘social entrepreneurship'. In other words, by virtue of highlighting the rhetorical dynamic of the respective texts, I will try to invoke a space for the tactical other of social entrepreneurship, i.e. ‘the residue of indeterminacy which escapes the system' (Sipiora & Atwill, 1990, p. 3). Obviously, instead of grounding social entrepreneurship within a specific theoretical or methodological space, my analysis seeks to evoke a productive crisis, or a ‘rupture' to use Derrida's (1966) wording, in which novel cultural interpretations may become possible. To lay open social entrepreneurship texts' rhetorical dynamic, that is, to expose the binary systems which warrant stability, and to problematize the field's consensus will thus (hopefully) become a transparent strategy for making language the object of its own scrutiny. Following Derrida (1992), it is important to note that this deconstructive reading is not necessarily an exclusively negative act (Critchley, 1999), but rather a response to, and affirmation of, political struggles against systems pledged to presence. As such, the process of dismantling or, more precisely, deconstructing the rhetoric of scholarly texts on social entrepreneurship serves the aim of laying bare the instability of these texts, and to set in motion some creative playfulness. The last part of this chapter is therefore devoted to making suggestions for the prospective research agenda of social entrepreneurship. Regarding the enrichment of the prevailing "regimes of truth', if not to say truisms, I will argue for a proliferation of deconstructive analysis as well as for the endorsement of new representational practices. New groundings of social entrepreneurship will further be advocated with regress to Lyotard's (1984) work on paralogy (i.e. movements which go beyond or against common reason) as well as to Derrida's (1995; 1997; 1999) writing on aporia (i.e. paradoxes) and undecidability.