Pascal Dey

The politics of narrating social entrepreneurship

Purpose - Responding to recent pleas both to critically analyze and to conceptually advance social entrepreneurship. The purpose of this paper is to examine how the political “unconscious” operates in the narration of social entrepreneurship and how it poses a limit to alternative forms of thinking and talking. Design/methodology/approach - To move the field beyond a predominantly monological way of narrating, various genres of narrating social entrepreneurship are identified, critically discussed and illustrated against the backdrop of development aid. Findings - The paper identifies and distinguishes between a grand narrative that incorporates a messianistic script of harmonious social change, counter-narratives that render visible the intertextual relations that interpellate the grand narration of social entrepreneurship and little narratives that probe novel territories by investigating the paradoxes and ambivalences of the social. Practical implications - The paper suggests a minor understanding and non-heroic practice of social entrepreneurship guided by the idea of “messianism without a messiah.” Originality/value - The paper suggests critical reflexivity as a way to analyze and multiply the circulating narrations of social entrepreneurship.

Nine Verbs to Keep the Social Entrepreneurship Research Agenda ‘Dangerous’

Abstract This paper critiques and re-imagines current research approaches to the field of social entrepreneurship. Taking a theoretical view of research as ‘enactment’, this paper explores research as a constitutive act and explores a range of ways of relating with and constructing the subject of inquiry. Three models of enactive research are presented, each based on three verbs which denote the contours of a ‘dangerous’ research agenda for social entrepreneurship. These include: (a) ‘critiquing’ approaches to research through denaturalizing, critically performing and reflexivity; (b) ‘inheriting’ approaches through contextualizing, historicizing and connecting; and (c) ‘intervening’ approaches through participating, spatializing and minorizing.

Therapist Sensitivity Towards Emotional Life-career Issues and the Working Alliance with Suicide Attempters

This study investigated the usefulness of an action theoretical model of suicide in interviewing suicide attempters. Eighteen interviews were video-recorded and transcribed. The patients’ narratives were reconstructed and life-career issues relevant for the patients suicidality formulated. Skin conductance response was used to determine narrative content associated with actualized emotions. Scores of the patients’ ratings of helping alliance experienced in the interview were positively associated with the therapists’ sensitivity towards emotionally relevant life-career issues. Furthermore, relationship satisfaction was related to a narrative interviewing style. We conclude that working alliance in clinical interviews with suicide attempters can be improved when the interviewer uses apatient-oriented approach aimed at understanding the patients suicidality in the context of personal life-career, or identity issues.

The tactical mimicry of social enterprise strategies: Acting ‘as if’ in the everyday life of third sector organizations

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.

Emancipation and/or oppression? Conceptualizing dimensions of criticality in entrepreneurship studies

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to use the attribute “critical” as a sensitizing concept to emphasize entrepreneurships role in overcoming extant relations of exploitation, domination and oppression. It builds on the premise that entrepreneurship not only brings about new firms, products and services but also new openings for more liberating forms of individual and collective existence. Design/methodology/approach – Honing in on Calas et al.s (2009) seminal piece on critical entrepreneurship studies, and building on Laclaus (1996) conceptualization of emancipation as intimately related to oppression, the paper explores different interpretations of emancipation and discuss these from a critical understanding of entrepreneurship. The paper then employs these interpretations to introduce and “classify” the five articles in this special issue. Findings – The editorial charts four interpretations of emancipation along two axes (utopian-dystopian and heterotopian-paratopian), and relates these to vari...

Intermediary Organisations and the Hegemonisation of Social Entrepreneurship: Fantasmatic Articulations, Constitutive Quiescences, and Moments of Indeterminacy

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.

Destituent entrepreneurship: disobeying sovereign rule, prefiguring post-capitalist reality

Abstract This article introduces ‘destituent entrepreneurship’ as a way of imagining the political thrust of entrepreneurship under conditions of crisis. Taking its cues from Giorgio Agamben’s work on destituent power, and from theories of prefigurative praxis by other thinkers, this analysis uses the occupied-enterprise movement in Argentina as an illustrative case to cultivate sensitivity for the more radical possibilities of entrepreneurship as they emanate from the free-floating conflictual energy at the heart of society. Specifically, refracting destituent entrepreneurship into its essential components, we highlight, first, how laid-off workers redefined themselves as resistant entrepreneurs who counter-acted the fraudulent close-down of their enterprises by reclaiming their right to work. Second, we point out how the reclaimed enterprises created new opportunities not only for creating income, but for prefiguring post-capitalist realities rooted in self-organized and dignified work, democratic decision-making and the creation of a common people. The key contribution this article makes is to alert us to how entrepreneurship under conditions of crisis is less a matter of necessity alone, i.e. making a living in hard times, but an opportunity to redefine the realm of economic practice by one’s own rules.

An Uncommon Wealth . . .Transforming the Commons With Purpose, for People and Not for Profit!

The overemphasis on individualism in much normative entrepreneurship discourse belies the powerful role played by local level and communal forms of barter, culturally based collectivist models of organization, social enterprise, and other forms of co-investment. Following Rindova et al., we argue innovation in entrepreneurship can be an emancipatory process with broad change potential to bring about new economic, social, institutional, and cultural environments. New forms of productive social relations and cooperative effort generate new ways of liberating individual and collective existence. However, the dark side of entrepreneurialism also casts its shadow over the pursuit of an idealized commons. Romanticizing forms of collective entrepreneurialism as a means for elevating vulnerable groups may have contrary effects, especially for those already socially and economically marginalized. Theorizing entrepreneurship from a critical perspective, we draw on Laclau’s emancipation–oppression dualism. We explore the contradictions and potentialities of locally based communal entrepreneurship as expressions of a dynamic tension, which is simultaneously both transformative and exploitative in orientation.

Discourse analysis as intervention: a case of organizational changing

This book offers a lively illustration of the dynamic relationship between discourse and organizational psychology. Contributions include empirically rich discussions of both traditional and widely studied topics such as resistance to change, inclusion and exclusion, participation, multi-stakeholder collaboration and diversity management, as well as newer research areas such as language negotiations, work time arrangements, technology development and change as intervention.

Probing the power of entrepreneurship discourse: an immanent critique

This book offers a lively illustration of the dynamic relationship between discourse and organizational psychology. Contributions include empirically rich discussions of both traditional and widely studied topics such as resistance to change, inclusion and exclusion, participation, multi-stakeholder collaboration and diversity management, as well as newer research areas such as language negotiations, work time arrangements, technology development and change as intervention.