Dominic Chalmers

Social innovation: An exploration of the barriers faced by innovating organizations in the social economy

Social and community-based organizations are increasingly viewed as wellsprings of valuable social innovations. Government policies, most notably David Cameron’s Big Society initiative, have entrenched the concept of localism across the UK, and the move towards smaller government has placed the onus on communities to creatively tackle their own problems. While antecedent research on social innovation has largely concentrated on success stories, few have stopped to consider the profound nature of this shift and the operational obstacles it may pose for small resource-constrained organizations. This article seeks to contribute to current debates on social innovation by critically reviewing extant literature and proposing a model of ‘open’ social innovation. Furthermore, it serves as a tool to stimulate further discussion around the ‘opening up’ of the social innovation process and raises some timely questions about the efficacy of localism policy measures.

Innovating not-for-profit social ventures: Exploring the microfoundations of internal and external absorptive capacity routines

Research into the phenomenon of social innovation has long focused on what it is and why people become engaged in this form of behaviour. However, another piece of the theoretical jigsaw requires understanding how this type of innovation is enacted by organisations. This article looks at the means by which not-for-profit ventures pursuing socially innovative activities develop the necessary capabilities to innovate. The multidimensional theoretical construct of absorptive capacity and the evolutionary economics concept of organisational routines are used to analyse 14 case studies of innovative not-for-profit ventures in Australia and the UK. The results show that these organisations have a unique mediating function in the social innovation process by configuring internal and external absorptive capacity routines to combine user and technological knowledge flows. The article concludes by proposing some research directions for those taking forward the study of social innovation.

Institutionalizing Women’s Enterprise Policy: A Legitimacy-Based Perspective

Despite efforts to increase the quantity and quality of women-owned businesses, enterprise policy has enjoyed only modest success. This article explores the role of legitimacy in these outcomes by examining how and when individual stakeholders evaluate and then influence the legitimacy of women’s enterprise policy. We draw on 45 interviews with actors in the UK enterprise policy ecosystem and an ethnographic study of the policy process. We present a multilevel model of two opposing legitimacy processes: a legitimacy repair loop and a delegitimizing loop. In doing so, we provide a novel perspective on policy institutionalizing.

Renew or regress : maintaining a forum for radical entrepreneurship scholarship

In September 2016, the esteemed New York University Professor Paul Romer (2016) published an excoriating critique of his own academic discipline, entitled “The Trouble With Macroeconomics”. He identified a “general failure mode of science” in which a scholarly community can stagnate or even regress owing to insularity and the marginalisation of non-mainstream thought. He took specific aim at complex theoretical modelling in econometrics that has become so abstracted as to have untethered from reality. Often, he argues quite scathingly, the resultant “post-real” theory has failed to reflect the broad scope of human motivations or behaviours it proposes to explain. Romer concludes that any field with a reliance on abstract mathematical modelling is prone to such failure, a fact underlined by the Bank of England’s chief economist Andy Haldane who acknowledges that “the economics profession is to some degree in crisis” (Wallace 2017: 1). So, where does this leave the field of entrepreneurship, and what lessons can the research community take from the apparent demise of macroeconomics? Firstly, we conclude that the scholarly field meets Romer’s conditions for being susceptible to ‘failure’ in that it is largely mathematically based, with van Burg and Romme (2014: 372) finding that “most entrepreneurship studies published in leading journals draw on positivism, by emphasizing hypothesis testing, inferential statistics, and internal validity”. Furthermore, there is strong group identification within the discipline, with many entrepreneurship scholars appearing to hold a passionate belief in entrepreneurship as something that should be advocated and propagated in a way other social scientists are simply not inclined to do for their subject.

Missing the Point? Finding Contextual Detail in Entrepreneurship and Small Firm Scholarship

The trajectory of entrepreneurship scholarship can be characterized by a trend towards functionalist approaches. This has arguably led to findings that trade the contextualization of entrepreneurial processes for abstracted theoretical generalizations. We propose a methodological response that draws on ethnomethodology and conversation analysis to form the theoretical basis of a more nuanced empirical conception of the entrepreneur in situ. Our approach addresses current epistemological concerns in entrepreneurship scholarship by prioritizing the practical knowledge and reasoning skills of the entrepreneur. Additionally the proposed methodology provides a solution to an analytical problem confronting scholars who must select from myriad potentially relevant contexts to incorporate into analysis. We conclude our article by identifying some research opportunities that are enabled through adoption of an ethnomethodology/conversation analysis perspective. We hope that scholars may expand upon, complement and challenge current conceptualizations of entrepreneurial behavior through this method.