Theory of Social Enterprise and Pluralism

Social Movements, Solidarity Economy, and Global South

Philippe Eynaud, Jean-Louis Laville, Luciane dos Santos, Swati Banerjee, Flor Avelino, Lars Hulgård, Philippe Eynaud, Jean-Louis Laville, Luciane dos Santos, Swati Banerjee, Flor Avelino, Lars Hulgård

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000012156
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Unternehmertum

In the past decades, social enterprise has been an emerging field of research. Its main frameworks have been provided by Occidental approaches. Mainly based on an organizational vision, they give little or no room to questions such as gender, race, colonialism, class, power relations and intertwined forms of inequality. However, a wide range of worldwide hidden, popular initiatives can be considered as another form of social enterprises based on solidarity, re-embedding the economy as well as broadening the political scope. This has been shown in a previous book: Civil Society, the Third Sector, and Social Enterprise: Governance and Democracy.

Thus, to be more than a fashion or a fictitious panacea, the concept of social enterprise needs to be debated. Southern realities cannot be only understood through imported categories and outside modeled guidelines. This book engages a multicontinental and pluridisciplinary discussion in order to provide a pluralist theory of social enterprise. The book will be of interest to researchers, academics and students in the fields of social entrepreneurship, social innovation, development studies, management studies and social work.

Part 1

Opening Dialogue for a New Conceptual Framework

1 Social Enterprise: Is It Possible to Decolonise This Concept?

Luciane Lucas dos Santos and Swati Banerjee

Introduction

It seems that Teasdale (2011) was right when saying that social enterprise has been a fluid concept notably disputed by different actors over time—namely scholars, policymakers and organisations. In fact, it was he who, referring to the diversified organisational types named as social enterprise in England, pointed out the possibility that we are in the face of a mythical beast. What he seems to claim is that the idea of gathering mismatching narratives under the same name (cooperatives, community enterprises, social business and voluntary organisations), wagering on different solutions to address social problems, is likely to make us believe in a fictional panacea. Having in mind that economic initiatives are used to following the model supported by funding, that the state plays a pivotal role in establishing the trends, and that organisations simultaneously try to shape public policies, Teasdale (2011) recalls that discourses in social enterprises are surrounded by political meanings and disputes.

Despite all the efforts over the past decades to find a common ground between different perspectives and models (Defourny and Nyssens, 2006, 2008; Galera and Borzaga, 2009; Hulgård, 2014; Laville and Nyssens, 2001; Laville et al., 2006) and so reduce the vagueness of this concept, social enterprises could be said to remain under a dynamic process of change and contest. It is also noteworthy that even when social enterprises come closer to effective democratic control and collective ownership—that is, the most emancipatory format may be assumed—they seem not to be consistent enough to handle the political embeddedness of popular everyday economies. If it is undeniable that there is a connection between third-sector organisations and public policies in this regard (Laville et al., 2006), it is also true that there is a vast range of worldwide hidden, women-led popular initiatives which have re-embedded the economy and broadened the scope of “the political”. This short, theoretical introduction aims to briefly discuss some epistemological and political limits of the all-encompassing concept of social enterprise, proposing a more challenging framework capable of shedding light on silenced community-based forms to face social inequalities. Some questions could be brought to the scene: to what extent may the idea of economic initiatives governed by the people who created them (Defourny, 2001, apud Defourny and Nyssens, 2006) be applied to collectivities themselves? To what extent are they allowed to deviate from the outside-modelled development guidelines?

Drawing on postcolonial theories in the field of economics and in the concept of “coloniality of power” proposed by the Peruvian sociologist Quijano (1992)—according to which populations worldwide have been classified in racial and ethnic terms—we question if the current models of social enterprise, in the context of a heterogeneous Europe, can really constitute an antidote to social inequalities in the broadest sense. For the ongoing processes of racialisation of class, gender and national identities, social inequalities are not to be taken as merely economic inequality. In other words, economic asymmetries are triggered and deepened exactly because of different intertwining forms of inequality. In this sense, this introduction sets out to answer two main questions: 1) Is it possible for social enterprise as a concept, regardless of its concern with social goals, to be immersed into a process of colonisation of imagery?¹ 2) In the case of a positive answer, can we decolonise social enterprises?

Before proceeding further, it is worth highlighting that this short introduction is grounded on the challenges and limits identified in the social and solidarity initiatives in the Global South. By stressing some of them, we aim to discuss to what extent these concerns help us understand the need for broadening the current scope of social enterprises.

What May Social Enterprises Have to Do With Economic Coloniality? Economic Democracy and Epistemologies of the South

Economic coloniality² (Lucas dos Santos, 2017) can be understood as a naturalised pattern of power which particularly affects the social imagery and the material life of subaltern³ groups—whether they be in the South or in the South of the North—making them believe in a supposedly universal, evolutionary parameter of development. According to this measure, used to compare the performance of individuals, social groups, economies or translocal communities, some groups should be viewed as progressive and others as backward. As demonstrated by Zein-Elabdin and Charusheela (2004, p. 2) in the field of economics, this “ruler” has been built from a particular narrative of development and used to justify the idea of an “ontological precedence” of Western societies. The most immediate consequence, in symbolic and economic terms, is that other perspectives of living, organising material life and placing value have been viewed and treated as irrelevant, not to say utopian or meaningless, especially when poverty is the problem being raised.

Since some criteria to evaluate economic inequality are universalised instead of being framed within a situated intersectional analysis (Yuval-Davis, 2011), economic coloniality may become a ghostly presence capable of undermining, in different ways, the purpose of some promising economic initiatives focused on poverty and unemployment—social enterprises amongst them. To explain how this approximation has occurred and in what way it is possible to deviate from it, we attempt to demonstrate, through the concept of economic democracy under the epistemologies of the South framework (Santos, 2014), what is at stake when some buzzwords gain prominence and replicability on the economic and political stage. In this regard, we argue that five absences⁴ in the running of social enterprises and other economic initiatives can point out the lack of economy democracy and, in doing so, evince a (neo)colonial perspective.

An Excessive Concern About Technical Answers and Performance

In the light of a renewed “architecture of democracy”, as proposed by Laville (2018), it can be said that economic democracy cannot be reached in the absence of some relevant conditions. For example, there is no economic democracy without the proper recognition of different rationalities and rhythms concerning the communities’ material life, even if they are not in agreement with the widespread perspective of performance and innovation. Although innovation may really boost tailored solutions for social problems all over the place, it is not uncommon for these solutions to result from a singular or a very small group of entrepreneurial minds from inside or outside the community. What we have seen is the same myth of the individual creative genius that has fed the field of (Western) art, “the golden-nugget theory of genius” (Nochlin, 1973, p. 198). For the best match between social impact and economic feasibility, solutions designed by the very collectivities, being likely to take more time, have been despised and replaced by quicker technical answers to achieve previously defined goals. This excessive concern about performance should be scrutinised more carefully since it brings to the scene universalised criteria towards what is a good result to be achieved.

The Underrepresentation of Subaltern People in Decision Processes

A second absence to be considered has to do with the real conditions of participation in decision processes. A broadened perspective towards participation should thus be fostered if we are really interested in economic democracy, bearing in mind that marginalised groups have different conditions of negotiating meanings and communicating points of view and disagreement. A very relevant contribution with regard to this issue was given by Spivak (1988) and Rajan (1993), who both questioned the very conditions for subaltern people, particularly subaltern women, to voice their views without being interpreted or edited. This common mistake can be made by activists and scholars in the rush to safeguard subaltern groups’ points of view. Nonetheless, it certainly applies to different perspectives of social enterprises, particularly social businesses, profit-oriented businesses connected with welfare and voluntary organisations with social goals, to name but a few. This underrepresentation cannot be solved through public inquiry but instead through more participative processes, which take time and go against, for the most part, the funders’ timings.

A Vision of a Pacified Civil Society Too Centred on Organisation

It leads us to the third absence. Boosting economic democracy requires being attentive to the diversified ways subaltern groups in the South (or in the South of the North) can communicate a message, not properly sent by words. There are different ways of participating, but we have been focused on the voicing of views, ignoring that a history of muzzling can affect the symbolic conditions of expression. Silence, for instance, can be a very effective way of communicating scepticism and disagreement regarding public policies or local development projects. This silence, in turn, can just be properly understood in a community if there is time for confidence as well as a real desire to understand the context rather than targeting outside-modelled goals. Because of funding pressures and sponsors’ guidelines, social enterprises have been lacking this time for thought, permanent consultation (instead of technical diagnosis) and collective participation. Of course, this situation varies according to the context but it cannot be ignored.

Despite the previously mentioned problems, social enterprises, at least in a European framework, are expected to “deepen the political dimension beyond participative governance”, being given more attention to the specific contexts in which they appear (Coraggio et al., 2015, p. 235). Besides, “an ideal-type of social enterprise from a solidarity economy perspective” (Coraggio et al., 2015, p. 235) has taken shape, representing a promising reinforcement in terms of “political embeddeness”. This concept refers, broadly speaking, to the way social enterprises can influence public policies and reconnect the political and the economic. Grounded on a Polanyian perspective, it helps us understand the role played by institutions “in the constitution of a democratic framework for economic activity” (Laville et al., 2006, p. 278). Hence, they are not pawns held hostage by the invisible hand of the market. The idea of political embeddedness evinces the relationship between economy and democracy (Laville et al., 2006) and demonstrates that institutions contradict all the time the common belief of a self-regulated market. Besides, the co-existence of different institutions, playing specific roles relative to economic principles, emphasises the plural aspect of the economy. Briefly stated, market is not alone in the shaping of the economy and different institutions have continuously re-embedded the economy in the social and political orders, against the myth of market self-regulation.

Notwithstanding the relevance of this reflection—that of political embeddedness fostered by social economy institutions—we argue that the sense of a plural economy, as proposed by Laville (2003), has scope to be still enlarged through new frameworks brought by some community economies from the (heterogeneous) South. These challenging economic logics can stimulate a broadened epistemological debate concerning two issues: the visibility of other principles in comparison with economic exchanges (reciprocity, redistribution and householding), and the connection between autonomy and political embeddedness. In the latter, the multiple ways in which this political can be thought in the South amplify what we have considered political embeddedness so far in Western contexts. An example of the first issue is the redistribution of resources made by indigenous women in their communities instead of that promoted by the State. It is a kind of community mechanism of regulation, normally despised for belonging to the private dimension. An example of the second issue is the case of exchange fairs in Brazil, usually organised by peripheral women with scant material resources. By constituting a collective stock in a situation of individual scarcity, peripheries’ exchange fairs promote a kind of indirect redistribution of the resources according to the members’ needs (by means of a social currency). These two examples of community economies evince the possibility of a hybridisation between the principles of householding and redistribution, calling the attention to the role played by women in re-embedding the economy, even in informal contexts. But these forms of embeddedness, be in the social fabric or in political policies (case of the State supporting solidarity economy in Brazil and other countries of Latin America), are usually silenced if there is no organisation behind them. What we aim to emphasise here is the following: 1) approaches focused on organisations are not likely to capture these kinds of small-scaled practices led by informal groups of women; 2) popular solidarity economy and other forms of community economies make more visible other principles of economic integration such as reciprocity, redistribution and householding, as well as the way they are mutually reinforcing.

In this sense, the current limits of “the political” in our debates on social and solidarity economy (SSE) should be tabled. Social enterprises, despite the differences between the Anglo-American and the European versions, still need to amplify their capacity of political embeddedness, by going beyond the capacity for social economy and third-sector institutions to reduce the impact of the market and influence the State. Given that a “layered civil society” (Santos and Rodriguez-Garavito, 2003, pp. 24–25) has been consolidated not solely in the South but also in the invisible South of the Global North, it can be said that civil society in Western SSE literature has been overestimated as an all-encompassing concept. There are voices being silenced because of their requests. It is time to question minorities’ presence in the public sphere as well as their conditions of symbolic production, that is, the condition of negotiating meanings in the public space. To what extent have subaltern people in the South or in the South of the North been allowed to effectively express themselves? In the footsteps of Santos (2012), who has pointed out the flimsiness of the Habermasian modern public sphere concept to handle the “incivil civil society” (Santos and Rodriguez-Garavito, 2003), constituted by permanently marginalised groups, we argue that both citizens’ autonomy and the appreciation of subaltern narratives are keywords to really face inequalities.

A Lack of Attention to Gender Issues

The fourth absence which may compromise the encounter between a wider sense of economy and a “high-intensity democracy” (Santos, 2005, p. 337) is the gender issue. Economic democracy is directly connected with overcoming gender asymmetries and considering women’s contribution to economic integration principles. Because of the market dominance in our economic imagery, the role that subaltern women have played in terms of reciprocity, redistribution and householding remains residual in our debates, whether in economics, in feminist economics or even in social economy. In solidarity economy, the situation may be a little different, but it is far from achieving the expected level. Despite women being the majority of workers on popular and solidarity economy in the South, theoretical debates on this theme are not informed by a feminist perspective, which could provide a set of contributions: from different readings of what is economy to the recognition of the domestic domain in daily provisioning (Hillenkamp, 2013; Lucas dos Santos, 2018), from the assumption of caretaking as economy logics brought by women to popular markets and solidarity economy initiatives.

A Deficit of ...