Understanding Social Enterprise: Theory & Practice

Citation

(2012), "Understanding Social Enterprise: Theory & Practice", Development and Learning in Organizations, Vol. 26 No. 6. https://doi.org/10.1108/dlo.2012.08126faa.002

Understanding Social Enterprise: Theory & Practice

Article Type: Suggested reading From: Development and Learning in Organizations, Volume 26, Issue 6

Rory Ridley-Duff and Mike Bull, Sage, London, 2011

The crisis of capitalism that broke in 2008 makes apparent the need for fundamental changes to the way we organize our economy. For those of us who have recognized this for a long time, this comes as a relief. More disappointing is the failure of media channels to articulate an alternative vision, and the slowness of our academic institutions to respond to the challenge. Too many business schools are still teaching strategy according to the same competitive, profit-driven models that have clearly become obsolete.

Into this lacuna comes a textbook, which will enable all students in business schools to learn something of the alternative offered by social enterprise. Together with sustainability, this is surely an essential part of any course on enterprise and management in the twenty-first century. As we rewrite our curricula to support the changes in the wider economy, this book from Mike Bull and Rory Ridley-Duff will greatly facilitate our task. In its format and approach the book will be familiar to those who already teach management strategy courses, but the content is infused with an entirely different vision of how the economy might operate.

This is a practical book, by two people who demonstrate their long experience of teaching through their decision to break up the text with explanatory boxes and figures, as well as creating an open-access website to accompany the book. The book has also benefited from the experience of teaching on the social enterprise summer school run annually at Sheffield Hallam University, where Rory Ridley-Duff is a Senior Lecturer. Both he and his co-author Mike Bull of Manchester Metropolitan University have long been committed to a socialized approach to business and this depth of knowledge and genuine commitment provide authority and authenticity to what they have written.

The book is in two parts, and it is refreshing to see that the first part, focusing on theoretical perspectives, is smaller by volume than the second part, which covers the practice of social enterprise. All the chapters include case studies of real businesses in the social enterprise sector, and the whole book roots itself firmly in the co-operative tradition of business.

Part I includes chapters on distinguishing the third sector from the social economy; New Public Management and the private sector; Defining Social Enterprise; and Globalization and International Perspectives. These definitional chapters benefit from a critical approach with background in political economy that helps to give framing to discussions that can otherwise seem abstruse and vague.

Chapter 5, on Globalization and International Perspectives, for example, grounds the present discussion of globalization in a historical narrative that questions whether attempts to create global markets are a recurrent cycle in economic history. Can globalization be seen as a trigger for social enterprise as a form of resistance or empowerment in the face of powerful and destructive economic forces? In this context the authors mention Argentina’s empresas recuperadas, the factories that their workers occupied and managed successfully following the country’s financial collapse in 2001. Their analysis of globalization draws on both Polanyi and Marx to provide a useful historical underpinning that is so often missing from contemporary accounts.

Part II covers the usual topics you would expect to find in a management text but bringing the ideal of social ownership to bear. So we find chapters on Management Debates; Identities and Legalities; Strategic Management and Planning; Governance, HRM and Employee Relations; Leadership and Social Entrepreneurship; Income Streams and Social Investment; and Measuring Social Outcomes and Impacts.

Again we find a refreshing emphasis on political economy and a helpful degree of criticality. The chapter on strategic management, for example, includes a useful and insightful analysis of existing theories on strategic management, grouped according to whether the theory is prescriptive, descriptive or critical. This helps students and pedagogues alike to question the power structures that lie behind seemingly innocuous terms such as Human Resource Management.

Roger Spear, surely our leading researcher in social enterprise and a member of the Europe-wide EMES network, writes in his endorsement:

This is a well written, well researched and, above all, critical investigation into the notion of social entrepreneurship. It is essential reading for any student or practitioner who wishes to understand how social entrepreneurship has developed, its intellectual antecedents, and why it is so important to contemporary society.

I would entirely agree with this warm praise.

When using the book for teaching management students I have been struck by how far those of us who are committed to a social form of business are from the standard business model of competition, rivalry, the pursuit of profit and the exclusion of any form of social approach to enterprise. What we are still lacking, and this may be the job for a new edition of this book or for an altogether different book, is the bridging theory between the rapacious form of capitalism we live with today, which has proved itself so inadequate to deal with our social and ecological problems, and the ideal model of a co-operative commonwealth. For students schooled in the first, the gulf between it and the second can sometimes be so large as to strain credibility.

For a similar reason I would have liked to see some of the larger and better-known co-operatives represented as case-studies, Glas Cymru or John Lewis perhaps. While these may not find favor with the more co-operatively minded amongst us they are high-street names with which students are familiar, and while we may prefer the governance model of Suma Wholefoods, this can leave a faint whiff of lentils and yoghurt in the noses of skeptical students.

That aside I can whole-heartedly recommend this book to be used as a main text on courses focusing on co-operatives or social enterprise, and as an additional text on any course on business strategy, governance or leadership. It would also be excellent bedtime reading for some of our politicians and policy-makers who are keen to recommend social enterprise based on what is sometimes a rather thin understanding.

Reviewed by Molly Scott Cato, Professor of Strategy and Sustainability, Roehampton Business School, UK.

This review was originally published in Social Enterprise Journal, Vol. 8 No. 1, pp. 78-9.