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Nonprofit Organisationen (fortan NPO) geniessen in der Managementliteratur oft einen zweifelhaften Ruf. An Effizienz mangle es ihnen; ihre Dienstleistungen seien zu wenig kundenorientiert; der Wettbewerbsgedanke sei zu schwach ausgeprägt; und ihre Leistungen werden gegenüber Stakeholdern nicht ausreichend transparent gemacht. Wo Neuerungen unausweichlich erscheinen, scheut sich die Managementliteratur nicht, gleich selber ein Pharmakon (d.h. eine Medizin; Derrida, 1981) anzubieten: ‚Managerialism'. Während ‚Managerialism' (und das damit verbundene ökonomische Gedankengut) oft als Euphemismus für die Aushöhlung von NPO (Eikenberry & Kluver, 2004) oder Institutionen der öffentlichen Hand (du Gay, 2000) anhand von ‚Best-Management' Praktiken gesehen wird, nimmt der vorliegende Beitrag eine affirmativere Sicht ein. Konkret geht es um die Überprüfung der mimetischen Übertragbarkeit des ‚Managerialism' auf NPO am Beispiel des Stakeholder-Managements. Dies beinhaltet zum einen die Problematisierung der Repräsentation von ‚Managerialism' als neutrale (d.h. unideologische), unausweichliche Notwendigkeit zur Effektivitäts- und Effizienzsteigerung von NPO. Kritisch hinterfragt wird zudem die dem ‚Managerialism' zugrunde liegende Annahme der transzendentalen Allgemeingültigkeit von Managementmethoden (Hübner, 2007). Zur Fundierung dieser Kritik wird aufgezeigt, dass es sich beim ‚Managerialism' um eine neo-liberale Form der Gouvernementalität (Lemke, 2002) handelt, welche mit einer tief greifenden Umstrukturierung der Praxis und Wertebasis von NPO einhergeht. Über die Bereitstellung einer Rationalität, welche sowohl den Telos von NPO (d.h. Performativität; Lyotard, 1984) sowie die adäquaten Mittel zu dessen Erreichung festlegt, fungiert "Managerialism' als ein in sich geschlossenes Denk- und Regierungssystem zur Festschreibung einer technokratischen und rationalistischen Sichtweise von (sozialer) Organisation und damit zu einer stärkeren Gewichtung ökonomischer im Gegensatz zu sozialen und politischen Zielen im Umgang mit den Stakeholdern von NPO. Die sich aus der Regierungsform des "Managerialism' (potentiell) für das NPO Stakeholder-Management ergebenden Probleme werden unter Rückgriff auf theoretische Überlegungen und empirische Befunde erläutert.
Übergeordnetes Ziel des Beitrags ist, ein Bewusstsein dafür zu schaffen, dass der Umgang mit Stakeholdern stets mit der Gleichzeitigkeit von ökonomischen Sachzwängen und ethischen Verantwortlichkeiten einhergeht. Ein rein "managerialistischer' (d.h. instrumentell-strategischer) Umgang mit Stakeholdern würde damit insofern zu kurz greifen, als die Präsenz des Nicht-Ökonomischen (allen voran die ethische Beziehung zum Anderen) vorsätzlich marginalisiert würde. Über die "ethischen" Arbeiten Jacques Derridas wird gezeigt, dass Stakeholder-Management ein paradoxes (und kein algorithmisches) Unterfangen darstellt, welches unausweichlich mit der Erfahrung der Unsicherheit verbunden ist. Durch die Betonung des Konzepts der Verantwortung wird der Grundpfeiler gesetzt für eine Form des Stakeholder-Managements, welche sich ihrer Ambivalenzen und Limiten bewusst ist (respektive kontinuierlich vor Augen zu führen versucht). Zur praktischen Verortung der Aporia (d.h. des unüberwindbaren Widerspruchs) zwischen Performativität und Verantwortung für das NPO Stakeholder-Management wird schliesslich auf Derridas (1999) Konzept der Unentscheidbarkeit rekurriert. Die dem Stakeholder-Management inhärente Unentscheidbarkeit, so das Argument, zieht nicht eine Paralyse von NPO nach sich, sondern evoziert eine unmittelbare Obligation ("act now!') gegenüber dem singulären Anderen, verbunden mit dem paradoxen Imperativ "entscheide dich, auch wenn deine Entscheidungen nie vollumfänglich verantwortlich sein können!". Der Beitrag schliesst mit einem kurzen Erfahrungsbericht eines praxisorientierten Forschungsprojekts. Im Zentrum steht die Darlegung eines Leitfadens zur Identifikation, Relevanzbestimmung und Involvierung von Stakeholdern von NPO. Über den Leitfaden wird dabei die Frage adressiert, wie der Singularität und Einzigartigkeit konkreter Relationen und der darin implizierten Verantwortung in praktischer Hinsicht genüge getan werden kann, ohne dabei die ökonomischen Sachzwänge von NPO aus den Augen zu verlieren. Der Leitfaden kolportiert im Sinne eines regulativen Ideals die Botschaft, dass NPO Stakeholder-Management nicht auf die mechanistische Anwendung von Regeln und Technologien reduziert werden kann und dass NPO - um sich als verantwortliche Akteure zu qualifizieren - in der Pflicht stehen, den chronisch prekären Drahtseilakt zu wagen zwischen ökonomischer Rationalität und der Verantwortung gegenüber dem Anderen. Stakeholder-Management als Praxis verantwortlicher Entscheidungen impliziert somit die Kultivierung von Toleranz gegenüber der Erfahrung des Unfassbaren und des Ungenügens (Derrida, 1995).

Research on social entrepreneurship has taken an increasing interest in issues pertaining to ideology. In contrast to existing research which tends to couch ‘ideology’ in pejorative terms (i.e. something which needs to be overcome), this paper conceives ideology as a key mechanism for rendering social entrepreneurship an object with which people can identify. Specifically, drawing on qualitative research of arguably one of the most prolific social entrepreneurship intermediaries, the global Impact Hub network, we investigate how social entrepreneurship is narrated as an ‘ideal subject’, which signals toward others what it takes to lead a meaningful (working) life. Taking its theoretical cues from the theory of justification advanced by Luc Boltanski and his co-authors, and from recent affect-based theorizing on ideology, our findings indicate that becoming a social entrepreneur is considered not so much a matter of struggle, hardship and perseverance but rather of ‘having fun’. We caution that the promise of enjoyment which pervades portrayals of the social entrepreneur might cultivate a passive attitude of empty ‘pleasure’ which effectively deprives social entrepreneurship of its more radical possibilities. The paper concludes by discussing the broader implications this hedonistic rendition of social entrepreneurship has and suggests a re-politicization of social entrepreneurship through a confronting with what Slavoj Žižek calls the ‘impossible’.

In the field of social entrepreneurship research there are only few inquiries which approach language in terms of its symbolic violence. That is to say that language has not been properly addressed as a strategic means for governing social entrepreneurship by (a) endowing the concept with a particular societal utility function and by (b) providing a grid of intelligibility for the ‘conduct' of practicing social entrepreneurs. Departing from the assumption that violence is not some extra-linguist social reality but inherent to systems of dominant meaning, the present contribution elaborates on how language favours a particular way of thinking about social entrepreneurship and, most importantly, how this linguistically mediated rationality forms the basis of a strategy for governing community affairs. The objective of the contribution is threefold. First, it aims at kindling an understanding of the symbolic power of language, showing how the meaning of social entrepreneurship is scripted according to the changed social conditions of advanced liberal societies. In doing so, it is demonstrated that social entrepreneurship is rationalized according to a neoliberal political rationality. The neoliberal signification of social entrepreneurship is reflected historically so as to show how social entrepreneurship gets employed in transforming the question of societal responsibility by inscribing ideas of efficiency, management savvy and entrepreneurship into the body of the social. Second, and related to the first point, the contribution seeks to adumbrate language's violence as epitomized in the process of subjectivation (i.e. the discursive creation of subjects). This entails highlighting how the rationality of social entrepreneurship hails individuals in the social domain to adopt a responsible stance and an entrepreneurial attitude towards the alleviation of social problems. Social entrepreneurship thus gets depicted as a government technique which no longer sees the state as being responsible for the creation and safeguarding of societal equilibrium, but which relies on the normalization of the figure of the entrepreneur of one's self and hence on the imperative that individuals must relate to, and constantly improve their own bodies as a means of social value creation. The third part, then, discusses the limits of individual self-governance ("conduct of conduct') according to the managerial signification of social entrepreneurship. To this end, it is suggested that practicing social entrepreneurs are never fully dominated by strategic discourse, and that one must not underestimate the transgressive capacity of individuals in the process of their self-narration. To substantiate this theoretical claim, available discursive investigations are invoked to illustrate both how strategic discourse engenders conflicts and tensions within the field of practice and how practicing social entrepreneurs apply transgressive strategies in the narration of their own existence. Each of the three parts concludes with a brief summary of the main implications deriving for the research agenda of social entrepreneurship.

Social entrepreneurship in the third sector is largely represented as an indispensable response to declines in government subsidies and private donations. This contribution uses ideology critique to turn this logic on its head: summoning the heroic and monumental, iconic representations conceal that social entrepreneurship might be less a "necessity" than an ideological justification of a post-welfarist regime of the third sector. Probing the margins of this ‘New Spirit of the Third Sector', a discourse analysis of Swiss non-profit practitioners gets presented that pinpoints the cleavage between the fantasy of social entrepreneurship and the disruptive potential of local meaning making practices. It gets argued that interpretive research in general and discourse analysis in particular offer distinctive insights into how the ideology of social entrepreneurship gets "consumed" and transgressed by practitioners, which is why it should get to play a more significant role in prospective research endeavors.

Wissenschaftlicher Schlussbericht SNF

READING REHEARSAL:

INTRODUCTION
The proliferation of social entrepreneurship narratives being broadcasted on television and published in newspapers, practitioner books and scientific journals epitomizes one of the very latest fashion trends that has penetrated researchers', politicians', and journalists' discourse in equal measure. It is thus noticeable from a cursory glance at the available academic literature that social entrepreneurship gets grounded in such diverse realms as developmental aid work (Fowler, 2000), the voluntary and community sector in the United Kingdom (Pharoah and Scott, 2002), the development of economic communities within the United States (Wallace, 1999), the enrichment of women's work in Sweden (Pestoff, 2000), the promotion of health services in Europe (Catford, 1998, de Leeuw, 1999), non-profit organizations (Mort et al., 2003) or the welfare system more generally (Thompson, 2002). Of utmost importance to me was the recognition that the corpus of texts produced a unanimously positive image of the subject matter. Given, for instance, that many texts stress the univocally positive effects of social enterprises, while providing selective and/or anectotal illustrations of their ‘heroic deeds' (e.g. empowerment (Pestoff, 2000), social transformation (Alvord et al., 2002), regeneration (Thompson, 2002), creation of social benefits (Fowler, 2000), increase of social capital (Leadbeater, 1997), or community economic development (Wallace, 1999)), I was charmed to believe that there was no other option than holding the matter in awe. Hereon I started to deliberate why and how social entrepreneurship was granted such a self-evidently good image? While doggedly refusing to join the approving choir of academics who endlessly rehearsed their hymn of praise, I opted for what I here call an "abnormal path of science', i.e. a stream of reasoning which puts centre stage the question how texts "seduce' the reader into one possible interpretation of a situation over a (theoretically) infinite set of alternative possibilities (Westwood and Clegg, 2003). Taken the paramount plausibility, trustworthiness and assumed objectivity ascribed to academic statements (Alveson and Willmot, 1996), I deemed essential a study which puts prime emphasis upon the ways in which the scholarly community has appropriated the term "social entrepreneurship', and how those constructions serve particular stakes and interests while eliding others. In the adept's mind this might have a familiar ring. Granted, the position that I am aspiring to here is that academic discourse rests on skilfully crafted rhetoric, nothing more, nothing less. So, if you (not WE, because I truly enjoy this vista) "like it or not, we live in a rhetorical word.' (van Maanen, 1995, p. 687).

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.

In lieu of an abstract, here a brief extract from the introduction:

... in this chapter I ask how individuals targeted by the discourse of entrepreneurship either identify with or resist it. This question is investigated in the realm of development aid, a context in which discussions of entrepreneurship and business savvy have acquired increasing prominence over the last decades. Rendering non-governmental organizations (NGOs) the focal attention of this chapter seems timely in view of how these organizations have stirred controversy with regard to their effectiveness and legitimacy (notably in the realm of development aid), which was followed by suggestions to align them more closely with the principles and values of the private sector. Further, investigating the extent to which the normative desideratum of ‘entrepreneurship’ is received by development NGO practitioners bears critical currency in the way it exposes possible limits and dangers associated with this discourse (Ainsworth and Hardy, 2008). However, unlike forms of critique which aspire to challenge the discourse of entrepreneurship from a position of exteriority, for example from the transcendental vantage point of moral philosophy, the present critique is conducted from within the coordinates of the entrepreneurship discourse. Framing it as an ‘immanent critique’ (from Latin immanere, ‘to dwell in, remain in’), I subject the discourse of entrepreneurship to critical scrutiny not via universal judgment of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ but by attending to the viewpoints of those being addressed or ‘hailed’ as entrepreneurs.