Citation
Doherty, B. (2015), "The state of social enterprise research 2015", Social Enterprise Journal, Vol. 11 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/SEJ-09-2015-0025
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
The state of social enterprise research 2015
Article Type: Editorial From: Social Enterprise Journal, Volume 11, Issue 3
I am delighted to introduce to you the Social Enterprise Journal’s (SEJ) third edition of 2015 published by Emerald Group Publishing. First, I would like to thank the journal board, the selected reviewers and, of course, the authors for the papers enclosed. We have a number of leading social enterprise (SE) scholars featuring in this second issue including Dennis R. Young and Kai Hockerts.
Now to the papers for this issue of SEJ: The first paper is an excellent paper by Dennis R. Young and Choony Kim (Georgia State University) titled Can Social Enterprises Remain Sustainable and Mission Focused, Applying Resilience Theory. This is the first time in SEJ that resilience theory has been used to investigate SE. Furthermore, a more interdisciplinary view of resilience is applied utilising both the engineering and ecological perspectives on resilience. This paper is an excellent contribution to SEJ. The second paper by Kai Hockerts (Copenhagen Business School) is titled The Social Entrepreneurial Antecedents Scale: A Validation Study. This quantitative study develops and validates measures of four constructs that have often been identified as antecedents of social entrepreneurial behaviour: empathy with marginalized people, a feeling of moral obligation to help these, a high level of self-efficacy concerning the ability to effect social change and perceived availability of social support. This paper is a very important contribution to the literature and has the potential to be a very important tool for educators in this field.
The third paper is co-authored by Sara-Anne Munoz, Jane Farmer, Rachel Winterton and Jo Barraket and is titled The Social Enterprise as a Space of Well Being: An Exploratory Case Study. The paper using an Australian case study advances our understanding of how SEs may be linked to health and well-being. The fourth paper by Steven Pinch and Peter Sunley (University of Southampton) titled Social Enterprise and Neoinstitutional Theory: An Evaluation of the Organizational Logics of SE in the UK. This is an excellent paper that argues that neoinstitutional theory can provide insights into the conflicts between social ends and economic means within SEs. Tensions between these differing institutional logics may be seen as a manifestation of ambiguity and incoherence in an organizational field that is, despite many recent regulative and normative changes, still weakly institutionalized in the UK.
The fifth paper co-authored by Barbara Imperatori (Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore Milan) and Ruta Dino (SDA Bocconi School of Management Milan)) is titled “Designing a social enterprise. Organization configuration and social stakeholders’ work involvement”. This paper draws on organization studies and stakeholder theories; this study examines the organizational configuration that enables the SE to succeed by combining social and economic imperatives in a sustainable way.
The 7th International Social Innovation Research Conference (ISIRC) 2015 has just finished. ISIRC took place at The University of York and brought together 140 scholars (established and emerging) and leading practitioners from 18 countries around the globe to discuss the role of innovation in SE, social movements, not-for-profits, state actors and the broader social economy. This is an interdisciplinary conference with conference streams in: health and well-being, regional and geographical aspects, growth and scaling, social investment, politics and ethics, science and technology, food poverty and security (food banks, etc.), critical theory and hybridity and governance, international trade and environmental innovation and economic underpinnings of social innovation. Furthermore, we were fortunate to have a leading range of keynote speakers including; Professor Tom Lumpkin (The Chris J. Witting Chair in Entrepreneurship, Syracuse University, USA), Professor Alex Nicholls (Professor of Social Entrepreneurship, Said Business School, Oxford University), Dr Helen Haugh (University of Cambridge, Judge Business School and Centre for Social Innovation), Professor Jacques Defourny (University of Liege) – “Social enterprise models in a worldwide comparative perspective”, Professor John Thompson (Anglia Ruskin) who discussed the case of heritage railways and Dr Diane Holt (Essex Business School) – “Institutional influences on social entrepreneurship and social innovation in Africa”.
Utilising Beckert’s model of market creation, Alex Nicholls provided a new model to show the social order of markets and how they could create social value. Tom Lumpkin called for more work to show the societal level impact of social innovation. Helen Haugh reported on work on social innovation from the Academy of Management and the need for more work on theorising social innovation through the lens of paradox, hybridity and temporal framing. Diane Holt showed the need for more work on social innovation in contexts such as the informal economy in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Next year’s conference will take place at Glasgow Caledonian University hosted by our Associate editor Simon Teasdale, mailto:simon.teasdale@gcu.ac.uk, who currently also has a call for a special issue of SEJ titled Social Enterprise as Lived and Practiced: The Methodological Potential of Ethnography.
The call for papers explains that SE, as a field of study, has provoked scholarly engagement ranging from spontaneous celebration to critical engagement. However, we lack a deep understanding of how the optimistic and politically powerful, yet ambiguous and elusive ideal is lived in social practice. Ethnography, ethnomethodology and workplace studies offer the methodological potential to carve out local experimental practices of social problem-solving and to capture the ways managers, staff and/or target groups reflect on their engagement in entrepreneurial activities. Such insights are essential for developing multilayered, contextualized views on SE, understanding the temporal, spatial and cultural dynamics of social entrepreneurship and taking sufficient account of the effects of social entrepreneurial policies on vulnerable target groups.
Ethnography also offers the potential to move the debate around SE beyond idealized concepts and managerial views. As emerging from the field of anthropology, ethnography has been used to study, in particular, the social realms of colonized, deprived and marginalized groups of people. It has proven analytical strength in unravelling the contradictory, paradoxical aspects of human practice and the subtle workings of power. SE – as an organizational form comprising competing logics of social inclusion and management practice – demands an appropriate set of methods that makes room for complexity and counter-discourse that considers SE within its wider (political) context and that attends to the longitudinal and spatial dimensions of organizational behaviour which, to date, have been neglected in much of the academic literature. Potential questions which might be studied from an ethnographic perspective include: What are the long-term effects of social entrepreneurial practices? How do organizational actors sustain their social values in times of economic pressure? Which hopes and expectations motivate clients to participate in social entrepreneurial projects and how do they experience “personal improvement”? Under what circumstances do these initiatives fail or succeed?
Ethnographic participation in these local worlds involves abandoning the (impossible) role of detached observer and becoming involved in the everyday practice of running, working with or being a client of a SE. This special issue of SEJ is interested in methodological and empirical work pursuing an ethnographic approach to SE. We welcome all forms of in-depth inquiry including, but not limited to: methodological reflections and empirical contributions in the form of a single case study, a multisited ethnographic framework, or an autoethnography of being a SE practitioner. Expressions of interest in the form of an abstract to the special issue editors: 30th November 2015 and full papers for review: 18 July 2016.
See more at:
2. Stefanie Mauksch: mailto:stefanie.mauksch@uni-leipzig.de
3. Mike Rowe: mailto:Michael.Rowe@liverpool.ac.uk
4. Simon Teasdale: mailto:simon.teasdale@gcu.ac.uk
Kind regards
Bob Doherty
The York Management School, University of York, York, UK