Tim Curtis

Finding that grit makes a pearl: a critical re-reading of research into social enterprise

Purpose – The paper seeks to explore the implications of a critical approach to theory and method in the study of social enterprises and social entrepreneurship.Design/methodology/approach – The paper presents a re‐reading of the findings in a major case‐study based research programme. The author reflexively re‐evaluates the findings and compares them to different theoretical traditions to identify whether these theoretical lenses shed further insight on the raw findings.Findings – The analysis indicates that the theoretical perspectives of “contractualism”, “managerialism” and “agencification” are good explanatory frameworks for the data produced in the research but so too are “militant decency”, “social movements” and “post‐liberal” theories. As well as illustrating the limits of knowledge, the exercise also indicates that the apparent weakness and failure identified in the case studies are evidence of a “recalcitrance and resistance” that is essential to the emerging identity of the social enterprises....

The social economy of trust: social entrepreneurship experiences in Poland

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the notion, and dynamics, of trust between social enterprises and the public sector in two different cultural contexts. The strategy was to ask very simple and broad questions of a number of people in the social enterprise/public sector nexus, and allow them to talk. This talk was recorded and analysed for patterns and insights. This paper looks in detail at one of the insights derived from this wealth of data and makes a startling claim, one that needs further investigation and thought, that in social enterprises, trust precedes performance.Design/methodology/approach – The research is based on grounded theory and comprises a series of semi‐structured interviews based on a common framework undertaken in two countries – the UK and Poland. The interviews were transcribed and then coded by the two teams independently and key insights recorded.Findings – The research indicated an unsolicited pre‐occupation with trust relationships between the social enterpris...

‘Newness’ in Social Entrepreneurship Discourses: The Concept of ‘Danwei’ in the Chinese Experience

Abstract It has been suggested that the concept of danwei functions as a key structural element within Chinese urban society (R. Sévigny, S. Chen, and E.Y. Chen, 2009, Personal experience of schizophrenia and the role of danwei: a case study on 1990s Beijing, Cult Med Psychiatry, 33, 86–111). However, the relevance of the danwei to social entrepreneurship in China has not yet been identified let alone fully mapped out. Instead, the discourse relating to social entrepreneurship in China has typically been driven by Anglo-American models of entrepreneurship that emphasize novelty, whilst marginalizing the more established traditions of social movements within Chinese society. This has potentially significant implications for the concept, and project, of social entrepreneurship in China. In addition, western notions of social entrepreneurship can be enriched by the consideration of ‘oriental’ categories ofthought. This paper shows how the concept of social entrepreneurship tends to ‘evolve in its specific environment’ (J. Defourny and S.-Y. Kim, 2011, Emerging models of social enterprise in Eastern Asia: a cross-country analysis, Social enterprise journal, 7 (1), 86–111) and suggests that the evolution of the discourse and meanings of social entrepreneurship is rarely politically neutral or uncontested.

Institutional entrepreneurship in the Ethiopian coffee industry

This paper explores the underlying public entrepreneurship in the coffee industry in Ethiopia. It investigates the concept of political innovation in a public sector entrepreneurship agenda, in the context of work exploring the employment of entrepreneurship by the state as a economic and social development strategy in post-socialist countries such as China (Curtis, 2011) and Poland (Curtis et al., 2010). The case study confirms other research on post-socialist economies but indicates the risks of participation in commodity markets, rather than shaping long-term markets (Mazzucato, 2011), and being subjected to the turmoil of unregulated markets, rather than mastering of them.