infonet-economy

SYNOPSIS

In general terms, the present text seeks to investigate the narrative of a Swiss social entrepreneur who is currently setting up a company in Brazil. Where deploying a discourse analytic procedure to bring to light the discourses being used to make sense of his everyday activities, my main concern is to gain a deeper understanding of the identity performances which become (im)possible in the context of his enterprise carried out at the boundary between the ‘Third' and ‘First World'. Following Edward Said's (1978) notion of ‘Orientalism' - which implies that the non-European will always be envisioned as somewhat eccentric, backward, sensual, and therefore inferior - it is anticipated that the articulation of self and other from the viewpoint of a western social entrepreneur inevitably bears the risk of reifying the polarity of colonial discourse, i.e. the superior west versus an inferior rest. Hence, while social enterprises are commonsensically being portrayed by academics, journalist, politicians alike as ‘moral agents', this investigation will venture into ‘if' and ‘how' the discursive account of the social entrepreneur rhetorically achieves to retain that very impression.
Based on a deconstructive reading of the entrepreneur´s story I will contend that the narrative neither supports the view that the ‘master - slave' dichotomy of colonial discourse is simply carried forward into the present, nor that a purely non-derogatory image gets revealed. Instead, it will be pointed out that the narrative of the social entrepreneur exhibits an incremental discursive ambivalence, i.e. a concomitance of subjugation and adoration of the Other. The ontological consequences of this polarity will be evaluated by means of Billig et al.'s (1988) concept of 'ideological dilemma' and Bhabha's notion of 'hybridity' (1994). Both these ideas are invoked to conclude that ambivalence is, first, a "natural' feature of human everyday arguing and thinking and, second, blurs the boundaries between what is properly self and what is distinctively other - which in turn creates a political space in which any claim of enduring authority and domination is deemed impossible.