infonet-economy

Using England as a paradigmatic case of the ‘enterprising up' of the third sector through social enterprise policies and programs, this article sheds light on practitioners' resistance as enacted through dramaturgical identification with government strategies. Drawing from a longitudinal qualitative research study, which is interpreted via Michel de Certeau's theory of the prosaic of the everyday, we present the case study of Teak, a charitable regeneration company, to illustrate how its Chief Executive Liam ‘acted as' a social entrepreneur in order to gain access to important resources. Specifically, we establish ‘tactical mimicry' as a sensitizing concept to suggest that third sector practitioners' public identification with the normative premises of ‘social enterprise' is part of a parasitical engagement with governmental power geared toward appropriating public money. While tactical mimicry conforms to governmental strategies only in order to exploit them, its ultimate aim is to increase potential for collective agency outside the direct influence of power. The contribution we make is threefold: first, we extend the recent debate on ‘productive resistance' by highlighting how ‘playing the game' without changing existing relations of power can nevertheless produce largely favorable outcomes. Second, we suggest that recognition of the potentiality of tactical mimicry requires methodologies that pay attention to the spatial and temporal dynamics of resistance. Finally, we argue that explaining the normalizing power of ‘social enterprise' without consideration of the non-discursive, mainly financial resources made available to those who identify with it, necessarily risks overlooking a crucial element of the dramaturgical dynamic of discourse.

Extract (from introduction)

Social enterprise in the UK represents a deeply political phenomenon (Di Domenico et al., 2009; Nicholls & Cho, 2008, Teasdale, 2012). According to Alex Nicholls (2010), during the period of New Labour government (1997-2010) the UK instigated the most developed institutional support structure for social entrepreneurship in the world. Despite social enterprise being widely associated with New Labour and the Third Way, UK policy makers in the new Conservative led coalition government of 2010 continued to provide both rhetorical and policy support to the idea of social enterprise as part of its Big Society philosophy (Hogg & Baines, 2011). The Big Society is partly a strategy designed to contrast with New Labour's big state (Alcock, 2010). But it also draws upon a more conservative strand of political thought which mythologizes a golden past whereby voluntary organisations, co-operatives and mutuals supposedly delivered welfare services effectively and without the need for government intervention (Teasdale, Alcock & Smith, 2012). Hence the Big Society is an "endorsement of the positive and proactive role that voluntary action and social enterprise could play in promoting improved social inclusion and ‘fixing Britain's broken society'" (Alcock, 2010. p. 380).

With this as a backdrop, it becomes arguably that government has for some time already used social enterprise to address its most pressing social problems. On a more political note, one could identify social enterprise within a broader shift toward what can be called post-welfarist regime of the social which advances, while ideologically justifying, the roll-back of the state in its role as a provider of public services. In it is this context that Leandro Sepulveda (2009) has made a very precise, and provocative observation: ""Social enterprised' as opposed to "privatised' public services becomes ideologically more appealing for many and politically less controversial and/or confrontational" (p. 3). Importantly, claiming that social enterprise is linked to post-welfarism, this is not meant to say that social enterprise is necessarily a bad thing. However, where social enterprise is so evidently part of state-orchestrated, top-down forms of social reform, it clearly becomes a pertinent object for critical inquiry.

Of late, social enterprise has been portrayed as a ‘muscular discourse' which ostensibly transforms, by dint of ideological force, third sector organisations and practitioners into economic agents. This paper argues that such a critique chiefly ignores that ‘social enterprise' does not automatically and indeed not fully determine third sector organisations. Asserting that discourse, rather than being imposed on the individual, implies a subject who affirms its power, we argue that discursive conceptualisations of ‘social enterprise' are incomplete without empirical studies focusing on the actual reception of its call in concrete (linguistic) situations. Drawing from a longitudinal research study in the UK third sector, we use Pêcheux's work on dis/identification to illustrate processes of identification, counter-identification and disidentification which refer to how third sector practitioners, to a greater or lesser extent, endorse or reject the discursive invocation. By placing the complex identity work of practitioners at the heart of our study, the article aims to develop a fuller, more ambiguous and politicised understanding of processes of dis/identification, pinpointing how the different patterns perpetuate or transgress respectively the broader (discursive) context in which they are enacted.

Social enterprise has been criticized for discursively transforming third sector organizations and practitioners into economic agents. Such a critique too readily construes the discourse of social enterprise as a deterministic force that encroaches on all aspects of organizational and individual identity. We reintroduce
a sense of agency to discursive conceptualizations through an empirical study focusing on whether and how social enterprise infiltrates the third sector at the level of the subject. Drawing from a qualitative study in England, we use Pêcheux's three-part model of dis/identification as an explanatory schema to conceptualize the ways third sector practitioners endorse or reject the inherent norms and principles of social enterprise. The discussion covers how processes of identification, counter-identification, and disidentification, respectively, perpetuate or transgress the discourse of social enterprise and highlights the implications for future research in this developing field.

Post-Foucauldian governmentality studies (PFGS) assert that Foucault-inspired work on governmentality privileges the discursive level of governmental techniques - such as social policies - whilst ignoring the empirical reality of governing. To retain its explanatory value, so the argument goes, governmentality studies need to be complemented with empirical studies of the actual practices of those being governed. This article challenges PFGS on the basis of how it tends to interpret people's deviance from the stated objectives of discursive governmentality as an indication that governing forms a perpetually failing operation. Turning this logic on its head, we purport that although governmental techniques often fail to produce their designated aims, this apparent failure eventually forms a constitutive, if disavowed, element of governing. To substantiate this claim, we offer a rereading of research dealing with how social enterprise policies are dealt with by practitioners in the UK third sector. Pinpointing how practitioners deviated from the normative demands of existing social enterprise policies, it gets discussed that they inadvertently acted in accordance with the broader governmental objective of using the third sector to ameliorate social problems. Based on these insights, it gets suggested that the intertwined relationship between deviance and government's ignorance thereof forms the linchpin of the ‘art of governing', since only if individuals are unofficially allowed to deviate from what social policies explicitly demand does it become possible to harness the creative potential immanent to those being governed.

The rapid rise of alternative organisations such as social enterprises is largely due to the promotional activities of intermediary organisations. So far, little is known about the affective nature of such activities. The present article thus investigates how intermediary organisations make social entrepreneurship palatable for a broader audience by establishing it as an object of desire. Drawing on affect-oriented extensions of Laclau and Mouffe’s poststructuralist theory, hegemonisation is suggested as a way of understanding how social entrepreneurship is articulated through a complementary process of signification and affective investment. Specifically, by examining Austrian intermediaries, we show how social entrepreneurship is endowed with a sense of affective thrust that is based on three interlocking dynamics: the articulation of fantasies such as ‘inclusive exclusiveness’, ‘large-scale social change’ and ‘pragmatic solutions’; the repression of anxiety- provoking and contentious issues (constitutive quiescences); as well as the use of conceptually vague, floating signifiers (moments of indeterminacy). Demonstrating that the hegemonisation of social entrepreneurship involves articulating certain issues whilst, at the same time, omitting others, or rendering them elusive, the article invites a counter-hegemonic critique of social entrepreneurship, and, on a more general level, of alternative forms of organising, that embraces affect as a driving force of change, while simultaneously affirming the impossibility of harmony and wholeness.

The global recession has markedly increased the possibilities for imagining alternatives to the status quo. In this article we take a closer look at social entrepreneurship to gain a minute understanding of the sort of utopia the concept conveys. Taking its cues from utopian studies and affect-oriented theorizing on hegemony, this paper investigates the articulatory practices of social entrepreneurship support institutions to illuminate how social entrepreneurship is established as a desire for a better way of co-existence. Charting the discursive and fantasmatic mechanisms which render articulations of social entrepreneurship either hegemonic or marginal, our findings suggest that semantic vagueness and ambiguity, in conjunction with fantasies of inclusiveness and business acumen, and a pointed focus on pragmatic solutions form key ingredients for dominating the field of discursivity. Pinpointing how the hegemonic articulation of social entrepreneurship deliberately forecloses political interventions into the socio-political edifice, the paper concludes that the utopian moment of social entrepreneurship is essentially anti-political: although satisfying the longing for a (impossible) state of future fullness, SE conflates the realization of future possibilities with the application of well-established, micro- or macro-level formula, which effectively eschew a more radical and daring break with existing parameters of the ‘possible'.