What makes them different is that SEs occupy a unique space within the economy where, as businesses, they are driven by the need to be financially sustainable but, compared with a normal, for-profit organisation, they use economic surpluses to drive social and environmental growth. Additionally, SEs are distinguishable from other non-profit or charity organisations because they trade in the competitive marketplace. All these characteristics have a major implication in the organisational behaviour of Social Enterprises. Analysing these behaviours would have been a massive PhD task, thus, I decided to explore this behaviour more specifically under the knowledge-based theory of the firm, and identify how Social Enterprises can obtain tangible benefits by managing their most intangible resource: knowledge.

Under the growing pressures of complexity and globalisation, enterprises that can efficiently capture the knowledge embedded in their organisations and distribute it to their operations, productions and services, will have a competitive, cost and performance advantage over their competitors (Drucker, 1991; Kogut and Zander, 1992).  However, there is still a lack of empirical evidence from small businesses and social economy organisations that have organic structures and cultures that may foster knowledge capabilities and innovation.

Having started my PhD research in 2010, I have already identified a significant body of literature that suggest that Social Enterprises play an important role in developing the social economy sector by their strong knowledge and experience-sharing philosophy (Horst, 2008). This can be explained by their closer relationship with customers and their needs, their utilisation of local resources (physical and social) and the creation of synergies between social and environmental objectives within the limits of the economic objectives. However, it is these synergies that might result in a growing tension within Social Enterprises that restrain the development of knowledge capabilities.

For instance, an important element when developing knowledge capabilities within an organisation is their people and their motivations to share knowledge. Literature has suggested that the tension between social and economic orientation of the SE can cause employees to feel they are losing their initial motivations, resulting in decreasing performance, loss of interest or, at worst, actually leaving the SE.

Another component of knowledge capabilities is technology. Although there is limited research on the state of technology capabilities in SEs, it can be inferred that SEs use technology in a general way to manage their information, but that these systems are not integrated or sufficiently developed to support decision-making, and operation and production management. Possible reasons for this can be associated with financial restrictions and a limited number of skilled staff.

A third component is organisational structure. In this, SEs have the potential for developing knowledge capabilities because of their participatory and democratic structures that might facilitate collaboration and sharing of knowledge across the organisation.

A last component, and probably the one that attracts my attention, is organisational culture.  The most important culture characteristic of Social Enterprises is associated with its social mission and ethical practices, which stimulate employees, both paid and volunteers, to work harder and unite with the organisational mission. Nevertheless, there are other aspects of a SE that could affect its organisational culture. For instance, the scarcity of resources might restrict the SE options to invest in organisational learning, transferring the responsibility of supplying knowledge to external authors, such as government, partnerships or social networks.

All these initial conclusions are drawn from the literature and expert consultation. It is during the exercise of my research that each separate element of knowledge capabilities will be assessed within the UK context of Social Enterprises. The research follows a mixed methods approach with a first quantitative phase that has already collected 250 responses from senior members of Social Enterprises in UK to a survey about their current KM activities. The results obtained by analysing these data will shape the second phase, which is a qualitative study based on interviews and case studies. Optimistically this research will support my initial hypothesis that Social Enterprises are knowledge-based organisations and, demonstrate that, by developing their knowledge capabilities, they can help to alleviate the social and environmental problems in our societies.

References

Drucker, P. F., (1991). The New Productivity Challenge. Harvard Business Review. 69, 6, 69-79.

Horst, D. V. D., (2008). Social enterprise and renewable energy: emerging initiatives and communities of practice. Social Enterprise Journal. 4, 3, 171-185.

Kogut, B. and Zander, U., (1992). Knowledge of the firm, combinative capabilities, and the replication of technology. Organization Science. 383-397.

María Granados is a Colombian PhD student at University of Westminster (UK) researching how Social Enterprises can enhance their performance and achieve their economic, social and environmental objectives, by managing effectively their knowledge. Maria has an Undergraduate and Master’s degrees in Industrial Engineering in Colombia. Professional expertise carried out for five years in Human Resources Management, specifically in Developing and Training Management. Third sector expertise in organisational development for Non-profit Institutions in Colombia and youth and civic programs with the European Commission URBAL. Recently, research expertise on Knowledge Management and socio-technical evaluations.

Email contact: m.granados_ortiz@my.westminster.ac.uk

Regarding the area of interest of this post, the creation of cooperative societies, has been recognized by the European Union as a field to enhance in the future Treaties. The European Commission highlights the importance of the creation of cooperatives for three main reasons: 1) the cooperatives may be a means of building or increasing the economic power of Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) in the market; 2) the cooperative is a means of providing high quality services to people that would otherwise not be able to access them because their supply is not attractive to profit driven companies; and 3) the cooperatives help to build  a knowledge-based society and act as schools of entrepreneurship and management for those who might not otherwise have access to positions of responsibility (COM (2004) 18 of 23.2.2004).

In Spain, more than 200 worker cooperatives were annually created between the years 1995 and 2010 (Díaz-Foncea and Marcuello, 2010), which places this country above other countries in the European area such as France (where according to Perotin, 2006, 138 worker cooperatives were created per year between 1971 and 2002), United Kingdom (where 132 workers cooperatives were created per year between 1976 and 1985, according to Podivinsky and Stewart, 2007) or Israel (where 22 cooperatives were created per year between 1951 and 1988, according to Russell and Hanneman, 1992). Regarding the results of my dissertation, which is focused on the Spanish context, factors that positively affect the creation of the cooperative societies are related to the unemployment rate, the cooperative culture in the community, the salary level and the educational level. Other studies in this area (Perotin, 2006; Staber, 1993; Russell and Hanneman, 1992) found similar results.

Comparing these results with those obtained for the capitalist firms, the rate of unemployment and wage levels obtained opposite results (negative influence on the creation of capitalist firms), in the same way that the existence of a strong sector services in the economy, the high population density and the arrival of periods of economic crisis like the present. Instead, these businesses are particularly driven by the growth of GDP, which has a positive influence. These results demonstrate that the factors that encourage the creation of cooperatives are different from those of other type of firms, and, moreover, these factors are not linked to periods of economic recession, but rather that the capitalist enterprises are the ones more affected by an unfavorable economic situation.

However, one should not confuse the creation of cooperatives with the promotion of the cooperative movement. In the Spanish case, where the legal form of cooperative society exists with full commercial capabilities in itself, we found that the main reason for creating a cooperative is not the intention of doing other way of business according to the cooperative principles  (more collaborative, democratic, etc.), but the main reason is the recommendation of the legal consultancy. This recommendation is based on both the exploitation of the subsidies that the cooperatives receive from the Administration and the advantages of the legal regulation, more lax than in the case of capitalist firm.

For these reasons, increased public awareness is needed about the goodness of the features of cooperatives and about their benefits for society as a whole. Another way of doing business is needed to give a coherent and efficient response to the crisis (in plural) in which we live. This year 2012 is a good time for this, using the activities prepared for the International Year of Cooperatives.

International Year of Cooperatives Video Clip 2012

References

COMMISSION OF THE EUROPEAN COMMUNITIES (2004): Communication from the Commission to the Council and the European Parliament, The European Economic and Social Committee of Regions: on the promotion of co-operative societies in Europe, Brussels, 23/2/2004 COM (2004) 18. Available at http://bit.ly/zRqPgl.

Díaz-Foncea, M. and Marcuello, C. (2010): La creación de sociedades cooperativas en España y Aragón: Un enfoque desde la oferta, XIII Jornadas de Investigadores en Economía Social y Cooperativa, CIRIEC – España, Zaragoza, España.

Gui, B. (1991). The Economic Rationale for the ‘Third Sector’. Non-profit & other Non-capitalist  Organizations. Annals of Public & Cooperative Economics 62(4), 551-572.

Hansmann, H. (2000). The Ownership of Enterprise. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Perotin, V. (2006): Entry, exit and the business cycle. Are cooperatives different? Journal of Comparative Economics 34, 295–316.

Podivinsky, J. M. and Stewart, G. (2007): Why is labour-managed firm entry so rare? An analysis of UK manufacturing data, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 63, 177–192.

Millán Díaz-Foncea is a PhD student at the University of Zaragoza, in Spain. The objective of the his thesis is to analyze the key factor of emergence of cooperative societies from a regional and dynamic perspective and to study the socio-demographical, psychological and motivational characteristics of cooperative entrepreneurs. This is one will be carried out from literature about institutional and financial factors, as well as difficulties of collective decision-making and scarcity of incentives by workers. The empirical analysis is focused in Spain from 1950 to 2008. Email contact: millan @unizar.es

But what make the heart of those social enterprises? Human beings! They are at the heart of any organization but maybe more strongly in social enterprises. Indeed, social enterprises are brought, by their purpose, to produce services rather than the goods, the workers being then the often unique image of the organization (Davister, 2006, 2010; Laville & Sainsaulieu, 1997; Borzaga & Solari, 2001). Moreover, the specific governance and the actors’ diversity (volunteers, people in socio-professional integration, associate personnel…) require different organizational models and specific management.

At the present time, the social enterprise sector is undergoing important changes: diversification of social demands, increased complexity of legal and institutional frameworks, transformation of public funding ways (contractualisation, setting up competition between providers in a quasi-market) (Dees & Elias, 1998; Mertens, 2010). At the same time, we may observe a professionalization of social enterprises (Bode et al., 2006; Comeau & Davister, 2008; Davister, 2010; Petrella & Richez-Battesti, 2010). The movement toward professionalization, which is affecting the entire sector of social enterprises, is bringing along with it other changes that may be observed particularly with regard to evolutions in human resources management practices (Davister, 2010): increasing formalization of procedures, developments of senior staff training, replacement of volunteer positions with salaried positions, a changeover from a militant attitude on the part of directors toward a managerial attitude, etc.

In this context, my research project consists of studying the processes of the professionalization of human resources management in social enterprises. In particular, this research aims to understand in what ways, how and under what conditions the specific aspects of social enterprises have an impact on the practices leading toward professionalization of their human resources management. Will this professionalization take the form of a simple repetition of what has been done before or are other pathways conceivable? And under what conditions might this take place?

Thus the central debate is indeed conducted around a series of two-sided questions. On the one hand, increasing pressure exercised by the context (conditions of intervention on the part of public authorities, demand for profitability, legal frameworks, social norms, entering into competition, etc. ) may favor the adoption on the part of social enterprises of practices of human resources management and change management similar to what has been observed in classic private businesses (Méda, 1999; Laville, 2000; Demoustier, 2000; Laville & Nyssens, 2001; Bidet, 2003; Bode et al., 2006). In other words, is there in social enterprises a process of “institutional isomorphism” such as that observed in many other socioeconomic contexts (Powell & DiMaggio, 1991), including the field of “nonprofit” organizations  (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983; Bode et al., 2006; Evers & Laville, 2004)? And what are the factors that have caused this process to appear? On the other hand, the specific aspects that characterize social enterprises (democratic governance, social purpose) and their human resources (volunteers, people in socio-professional integration, associate personnel) push them to show that they can be innovative in terms of human resources management (Borzaga & Solari, 2001; Comeau & Davister, 2008; Meyer, 2009). This research is thus intended to test the capacity for innovation of social enterprises and to understand what factors allow them, outside of conventional models (Pichault & Nizet, 2000), to develop new modes of human resources management, or to manage “in a different way” the professionalization of human resources management. If you are interested in the theoretical frameworks of my research, feel free to contact me.

As you can see, I could speak for hours about that topic. I think this is a quite good reason to start a PhD. Without falling in an idealistic approach, my passion for that topic and the feeling that there is a need there made me take that decision and I must say, I am quite happy with it!

References

Bidet, E. (2003), « L’insoutenable grand écart de l’économie sociale: isomorphisme institutionnel et économie solidaire », Revue du MAUSS, n°21, 162-178

Bode, I., Evers, A. & Schulz, A. (2006), “Work Integration social enterprises in Europe: can hybridization be sustainable?” , in: Nyssens, M. (Ed.), Social Enterprise, at the Crossroads of Market, Public Policies and Civil Society, London & New York, Routledge, 296-309

Borzaga, C. & Solari, L. (2001), “Management challenges for social enterprises”, in: Borzaga, C. & Defourny, J. (Eds.), The Emergence of Social Enterprise, London, Routledge, 1-28

Comeau, Y. & Davister, C. (2008), « La GRH en économie sociale : l’inclusion des travailleurs en tant qu’innovation ‘socialement responsable’ », Revue internationale de psychosociologie, 33, vol. XIV, 203-223

Davister, C. (2006), « La gestion des ressources humaines en économie sociale », Les cahiers de la Chaire Cera, vol. n°1, Liège.

Davister, C. (2010), « La gestion des ressources humaines », in : Mertens de Wilmars, S. (Ed.), La gestion des entreprises sociales, Liège-Belgium, EdiPro, 287-366

Dees, J.G. & Elias J. (1998), “The challenges of combining social and commercial enterprise”, Business Ethics Quarterly, vol. 8, n° 1, 165-178

Demoustier, D. (2000), « Les organisations d’économie sociale, acteurs de la régulation socio-économique ? », RECMA-Revue internationale de l’économie sociale, 275-276

DiMaggio, P. J. & Powell, W. W. (1983), “The iron cage revisited: institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields”, American Sociological Review, vol. 48, n° 2, 147-160

Evers, A. & Laville, J.-L. (Ed.) (2004), The third sector in Europe, Cheltenham, Edward Elgar.

Laville, J.-L. (2000), « Le tiers secteur. Un objet d’étude pour la sociologie économique », Sociologie du travail, vol. 42, 4.

Laville, J.-L., & Nyssens, M. (2001), The social enterprise: towards a theoretical socio-economic approach, In C., Borzaga & J., Defourny (Eds.), The Emergence of Social Enterprise (pp. 312-332), London, Routledge.

Laville, J.-L. & Sainsaulieu, R. (1997), « Les fonctionnements associatifs », In Laville, J.-L. & Sainsaulieu, R. (Ed.), Sociologie de l’association, des organisations à l’épreuve du changement social (pp 271-303), Paris: Desclée de Brouwer (coll. Sociologie Economique).

Méda, D. (1999), Qu’est-ce que la richessse ?, Paris, Aubier

Mertens, S. (Ed.). (2010), La gestion des entreprises sociales, Liège, Belgium: EdiPro.

Meyer, M. (2009), « Innovations en GRH pour une double performance : le cas des entreprises d’insertion par l’économique », Innovations, n°29, 87-102

Pichault, F. & Nizet, J. (2000), Les pratiques de gestion des ressources humaines. Approches contingente et politique, Paris, Seuil, Collection “Points/Essais Sciences humaines”

Petrella, F. & Richez-Battesti, N. (2010), « Régulation de la qualité dans les services à la personne en France : l’économie sociale et solidaire entre innovation et isomorphisme ? », Management & Avenir, n°35, 273-292

Powell, W. W. & DiMaggio P. J. (1991), The new institutionalism in organizational analysis, London, The University of Chicago Press

Charlotte Moreauis a PhD student at the Centre for Social Economy and the LENTIC (HEC Management School – University of Liege, Belgium).She is researching in human resource and change management in social enterprises and institutional theory. Specifically, the title of her PhD in management science, beginning at October 2011, is Professionalization of human resources management in social enterprises: Isomorphism or innovation? 

Email: charlotte.moreau@ulg.ac.be

Research indicates that poverty is increasingly becoming an urban concern in the developing world (Haddad et al., 1998). According to Mougeot (2006), poverty is accompanied by limited and poor-quality water/housing, limited education and low-paid hazardous work. What is more, the urban poor are vulnerable to food insecurity due to the high food price rise.

To respond to these acute urban problems, urban agriculture is emerging strongly as an important survival strategy for the urban poor in Addis Ababa. In total, it was estimated by the Urban Agriculture Department in each sub-city studied in 2008/9 that 20 to 30% of the food produced in the city is produced by urban and peri-urban individual and cooperative farmers and gardeners.

In exploring the role of urban agriculture cooperatives with social enterprise objectives, I employed primary data from farmers and stakeholders of two sub-cities of Addis Ababa (Yeka Sub-city and Lafto Sub-city) and secondary data on urban agriculture practice. Data were obtained from field surveys from among households and members of the Mekanissa, Saris, and Furi Vegetable Producers’ Cooperative and Kebena Bulbula Cooperative. These two were selected for their long experience and wider potential for Urban Agriculture from the five vegetable producers’ cooperatives which occupied about 1.25% (about 274 hectares) of the urban land in Addis Ababa.

I described and analyzed the data as related to urban agriculture roles in securing food and sustaining environment to alleviate poverty. The survey points out that, for the increasing urban poverty and ‘economic crisis’ which has become a permanent situation for a large part of the Addis Ababa population, urban agriculture constitute important means to survive by providing a substantial part of family food and income together with environment protection.

In the Ethiopian context, from the seven principles that cooperatives subscribe (voluntary and open membership; democratic member control; member economic participation; autonomy and independence; education, training and information; cooperation among cooperatives; and concern for community), the first four are considered core without which a cooperative would lose its identity; they guarantee the conditions under which members own, control and benefit from the business. The education principle is a commitment to make membership effective and so is a precondition for democratic control, while cooperation among cooperatives is a business strategy without which cooperatives remain economically vulnerable. The last principle signifies corporate responsibility, and it pertains to other concerns that the cooperative movement is promoting such as reducing poverty, improving social services, and protecting environment.

The urban agriculture cooperatives play an important role in food production and distribution. They help the producers in food security by giving incentives to small and subsistence farmers to contribute in food production. Through economies of scale in obtaining training, credit for farm inputs, and irrigation services, cooperatives enable the farmers to improve their productivities. With improved marketing, they also help the farmers to obtain better prices.

According to the data, out of the 54,000 hectare surface area of Addis, 18,174 hectare (33.6%) is agricultural land possessed by 25 farmers’ associations/cooperatives in the periphery of the city. The larger proportion of this is farmland covering 12,202 hectares, followed by grazing land (2,943 hectares) and other horticultural strips along streams (3,025 hectares).

As shown, the urban agriculture cooperatives, organized as social enterprises for the benefit of their members to combat primarily the social problems they had, offer a model of social and economic enterprise. As a self-help group, their organization is widely accessible for the impoverished and the marginalized. Where private enterprise or government is weak, they enable local people to organize and improve their conditions. They could create productive employment, raise incomes and help to reduce poverty while enhancing social inclusion, marketing strategies, social protection and community-building. Thus, while they directly benefit their members, they also offer positive externalities for the rest of society and have a transformational impact on the economy.

Urban agriculture, for the majority, occurs as a consequence of a survival need. The cooperatives have commune plots which give them equal benefits in addition to the private small plots they possess. Women’s income from private plots was used for consumption. Women-headed households contributed equally to cooperatives. Estimated average income of urban farmers was about 50% above income of the general population. They consumed about 10% of their main products, but ate 10% more vegetables than the average city population with a similar income level. An average of 10-20% of income was saved by own vegetable production. About 60% owned their own homes, and about 70% owned livestock.

This trend seems to possess the features of social enterprises; however, results indicate that the growing competition of urban resources tends to dispossess the capacity of the poor and to magnify the social problems. Hence, the core issues to be addressed refer to supporting urban agriculture activities and their chains.

In conclusion, the survey shows urban agriculture is a vital tool for alleviating poverty. Its implications in food security, poverty reduction, employment generation, social integration and the use of liveable spaces needs to be valued and explored more in its central role of social dimensions.

____________________________

References

Haddad, L., Ruel, M., and Garrett, J. (1998). Growing Urban Poverty and Undernutrition and Some Urban Facts of Life: Implications for Research and Policy. International Food Policy Research Institute, Washington, D.C.

Mougeot, L. J.A. (2006). Growing better Cities: Urban Agriculture for Sustainable Development. International Development Research Centre, Ottawa.

______________________________________

Posted by Berhanu Gebremichael

Berhanu Gebremichael is a doctoral candidate at International Doctoral School of Local Development and Global Dynamics in University of Trento. He has worked in two universities in Ethiopia for twelve years. He is also the founder of SAFE Ethiopia, the result of his engagements in EURICSE and EMES. His Ph.D. project is on Ethiopian coffee farmer cooperatives’ role in upholding livelihood asset portfolio, which integrates value chain and sustainable livelihoods. The urban agriculture survey is part of the additional requirements to be considered for programme completion and a component of SAFE Ethiopia. Email contact: berhanu24@yahoo.com

While completing my thesis, I have had the opportunity to lecture on the topic touching upon conclusions from it in various milieus and in front of different audiences. The more interesting experiences so far have been meeting people who have been in direct contact with social enterprises, either as employed social entrepreneurs or as people being subject to workfare measures within the companies. In meeting people with ‘inside’ perspectives, I have received a lot of interesting feed-back and sharp analysis of what the solutions advocated by social enterprises sometimes may imply. And the pictures drawn to me are not always quite as beautiful as the vows of social enterprises undertaken in the political discourse and articulated by the Swedish government. Rather than being empowered and participative, several people give testimonies of being used as workforces and feeling abandoned by the welfare state in being subject to workfare measures run by social enterprises.

So, how could similar indications of the implications created by social enterprises be comprehended? And how exactly is the concept of social enterprise understood and used in a Swedish context? Well, similar to a wider European understanding, the Swedish social enterprises are mainly viewed as initiatives operating within the third sector, and adopting a legal organizational form with limited access to profit-distribution (Nutek, 2008). In focusing on work integration, the Swedish understanding of the concept is further linked to what is usually referred to as ‘work integration social enterprises’ in the wider European discourse (Defourny & Nyssens, 2008). The first social enterprise initiatives appearing in Sweden were run as social work co-operatives and were mainly developed as a result of the deinstitutionalization within the Swedish psychiatry in the early 1990’s.  The concern with inclusion in these enterprises primarily focused on processes of collective action and democratic governance as a means to reinforce the influence and power of marginalized groups in society. In the discourse emerging from these initiatives excluding processes and structural factors were highlighted as causes of social exclusion. However, a more pro-active attitude to labour market integration has emerged in recent years, where the social enterprise is framed as an active labour market policy tool aiming to amplify excluded people’s work abilities in order to enhance their possibilities to be included in society. Rather than highlighting structural excluding forces in society, in this latter understanding of the social enterprise the excluded individuals’ capacities to change in order to ‘fit’ in society are the focus. Hence, two different discourses of the social enterprise emerge in Sweden that imply a discursive sliding in the view of the social solutions offered by similar initiatives.

Additionally, in the definition of social enterprises provided by the Swedish state authority in charge of the growth and development of social enterprises (Tillväxtverket, former Nutek), three forms of enterprises are described. These are social enterprises focusing on i) work with wage employment, ii) job training as a preparation for taking a job in the ordinary labour market and iii) a sense of fellowship and meaningful pursuit (Nutek 2008:23). In this regard, social enterprise does not come forward as one uniform phenomenon. More accurately, it appears as a concept with several possible understandings, aims and goals. The idea of  ‘enterprise’ as activities involving multiple goals and principles opens up for a wide range of competing discourses in the social enterprise discourse. Consequently, in the Swedish debate of social enterprises the lines are repeatedly blurred between what is to be understood as businesses with paid employees and what is to be understood as human service organizations conducting welfare services and offering workfare-measures for excluded people. From a neo-institutional point of view, this can be interpreted as a way for social enterprises to gain legitimacy in different institutional domains, such as spheres run by for example labour market policy logics, social policy logics and enterprise policy logics. The various institutional logics at play in the institutional fields surrounding social enterprises provide possibilities for the enterprises to creatively use and negotiate various discourses in the struggle for legitimacy. In the process of institutionalization that social enterprises are subject to in Sweden today, this kind of creative negotiation is also needed in order for institutional entrepreneurs, such as social ones, to get access to the resources available in different institutional domains, and hence to survive as organizations. However, in the grand narrative of the social enterprise emerging in the contemporary political discourse it is chiefly the first form of social enterprise that is being discussed. Hence, in the political discourse work integration primarily tends to be equalized with the possibility for social enterprises to create new job openings, and to employ excluded people in these positions. The empowering ability of the social enterprise is hence linked to the possibility to be employed and become self-sufficient.

In framing labour market integration as the overall – and common – goal for the work conducted by social enterprises, initiatives enabling people to become fully employed business leaders with discretion of the operation of the company are regularly talked of in similar ways as the ones being subject for workfare initiatives. This implies an exposed position for the people being subject for workfare measures within the social enterprises, especially as they are being talked of as people being empowered when they are actually positioned as objects of change. This also explains why people in ‘client’ oriented positions in Swedish social enterprises many times experience themselves as being used and abandoned, as the dominating discourse first and foremost frame the possibility to be employed and empowered as a self-sufficient individual as the grand outcome of the work conducted by social enterprises. Hence, it is time for a more reflexive and less idealized debate of social enterprises. Hopefully my thesis can make a contribution and create a starting point to this process.

____________

References

Näringsdepartementet (2010) Handlingsplan för arbetsintegrerande sociala företag. Regeringsbeslut: N2010/1894/ENT.

Nutek (2008a) Programförslag för fler och växande sociala företag. Stockholm: Verket för näringslivsutveckling (NUTEK).

Defourny, Jacques & Marthe Nyssens (2008) ”Social enterprise in Europe: recent trends and developments”. Social Enterprise Journal, vol. 4 nr 3, s. 202-228

Posted by Ulrika Levander

Ulrika Levander is a final year PhD student at the Department of Social Work, Gothenburg University, Sweden, who will defend her thesis, ‘The Social’ in the Social Enterprise, during the fall. In the thesis she explores the construction and understanding of the Social Enterprise in varying institutional and political contexts in Sweden.

Email contact: ulrika.levander@socwork.gu.se

Social innovation is the great promise of our time, not to say that is the only hope in which some of us are relying to compensate the disparity between the scale and urgency of our problems and the imaginative solutions that are flourishing in different corners of the world, proposed by ordinary citizens like you or me.

I have had the privilege of studying the topic of social innovation and of social enterprise innovation with some rigour for the last two years, thanks to a, yes, ‘innovative’ studentship that places students in organisations working in the field. My organisation, based in London, is called Locality and is the membership organisation for community enterprises, development trusts and settlements in the UK. Their long term aim has been creating a community anchor in every single neighbourhood, a place where people with talent for social change can converge with those in need.

The rationale behind my research project goes as follows: Almost every aspect of social enterprises, from its emergence and mission to its more operational dimensions, has been deemed innovative by someone, somewhere. And going beyond the organisational spectrum, social enterprises are also understood to play a major role in the broader process of social innovation. Those interested in finding these assertions only need to look at the most cited pieces of some of these prolific authors: Clayton Christensen, James Phills, Andrea Westall, Charles Leadbeater, Geoff Mulgan, Robin Murray, Stephen Goldsmith. Or contact me for a detailed bibliography. I think they have all helped us to structure our understanding, to gain legitimacy and to advance the field of social innovation. But these same authors point towards the need for more rigorous, extensive, context-specific and historically aware research on how the innovation process takes places in the social field, how does it happen.

Other questions that arise from this study are:

What types of innovation can be found within the social economy?

This first sub-question will serve to develop a typology of innovation within the social economy. It is also expected to reveal information about the motivations that drive innovation: efficiency, sustainability, visible opportunities, users, public policy, ideology or funding are some examples of the motivations that are likely to be encountered which deserve further examination.

What is the role of networks, peer learning and inter-organisational relationships within the process of social innovation?

Where there are examples of innovation, this research is also interested in understanding the networks and the learning processes underpinning them, and how have these relationships been built up. I have been examining issues of trust, power and competition as they are also likely to influence the trajectory of innovations.

What prevents some organisations from innovating?

The problematic aspects of community enterprises which stifle innovation are also worth consideration. Intrinsic and diffusion-related challenges weaken innovations from their beginning and should be observed to open up the possibility of overcoming them.

Attempting to answer these questions, I have been using a mixed methods approach. This dwells primarily on 7 ethnographic case studies of innovative initiatives (some organisations, some programmes) within the social economy in London. I have also been interviewing social innovators, experts and entrepreneurs around the UK and asking them what were the critical incidents, the micro-processes and the tipping points that helped them conceive novel solutions. Finally, I have also managed to use data from a survey of community enterprises for two consecutive years (adding a longitudinal perspective to the study) asking them, among others, if they have introduced any new product, process, programme or ideas and where did they get the idea from.

So far, my findings point towards the unpredictable nature of the innovation process and to the discreet and almost personal character of those moments, encounters and impetuses that ended up providing fairer solutions. Most of the examples that I am coming across are improving the world on a small and localised scale, emerged out of frustration and impotence and are struggling to secure their way in a wider context of public spending cuts and scarcity. Many grew stronger through friendships secured at university or previous jobs. This has little to do with the open model of social innovation proposed recently by some thinkers, almost a formula for achieving systemic change, regardless of your background.

This is the first post of what we hope will be a platform to connect students, exchange opinions, ideas and references within the intellectual tradition created and supported by the EMES European Research Network. The world needs more multi-disciplinary research networks like EMES, which encourage dialogue, cross pollination, constructive feedback and which reminds us that there are many of us out there trying to imagine and to build a fairer society, almost  a new political economy, more collective, more inclusive, where many can reap its benefits.

Posted by Maria Isabel Irurita

María Irurita (Middlesex University, UK) is a trainer and a certified advisor on issues related to business and financial planning for social enterprises and is also conducting a funded PhD on processes of innovation and peer learning within the social economy in the UK.  Previously Maria worked as a CSR manager within a community investment foundation, as mentoring coordinator for a refugee integration programme and as frontline advisor of various community initiatives. Maria has been supporting EMES with their social media strategy since February 2011.

Email contact: m.irurita@mdx.ac.uk