Social enterprise and the recency illusion
Perhaps the single greatest weakness of the social enterprise movement is its belief that it is new.
Go back to the deepest origins of human society and you'll see it fused with what we would now call social ventures--in fact, the integration of commerce, charity and civic identity was arguably more thorough than what we celebrate today. The allegedly moribund nonprofit sector is itself the legacy of periodic waves of innovation; if we could swab it and put the cells under a microscope, we'd see the DNA of countless tributary shifts. You don't have to be a historian to see the evidence for this--hospitals, universities, thrift shops, even the lifestyle focus of contemporary commercial advertising all functioned as social/business hybrids long before the so-called revolution of social entrepreneurship.
But if social enterprise is so old, why people perceive as a radical innovation? The linguistic concept of the "recency illusion" provides a clue:
Stanford linguist Arnold Zwicky coined the term, and he defined it on the Language Log linguistics blog as: "the belief that things you have noticed only recently are in fact recent". A typical example discussed on the blog involved a blogger who believed that the sports expression "pulled within two points" was a recent invention, probably by US sportscaster Marv Albert. In reality, variations date back to the 19th century.
Instead of an unprecedented revolution, what we might be seeing in social enterprise is just the latest in a series of selective attention cascades, in which a new generation of do-gooders--a web of students, researchers, retirees and emerging entrepreneurs--clusters around an organizational metaphor that seems new to them. What is new, though, is not so much the underlying structure as our awareness of the metaphor itself.
0 TrackBacks
Listed below are links to blogs that reference this entry: Social enterprise and the recency illusion.
TrackBack URL for this entry: http://uncivilsociety.org/mt/mt-tb.cgi/245
I totally agree with the fact that today's buzzword means things that have been done for thousands of years; at the same time the fact that the buzzword, or meme, in question entered the collective consciousness as a kind of semantic flashmob means that it could leave it just as fast as the next buzzword replaces it, leaving in its wake much debris as available money chases the first ones who came up with the new wordwrap for the same concept.
In the meantime I have been active in social enterprise, after hearing about it from Adriano Olivetti in my native Italy since I was a little child, later seeing it in action in the city that he rebuilt using those principles, being a hippie social artist, activist and entrepreneur for the last 45 years through community switchboards, agricultural communes in the US, Italy and Israel and now running AMEN, Association to Empower the Needy, (please see the page on Facebook) to help prevent suicides and divorces caused by destitution, but never finding sufficient funding to implement my ideas when they were deemed "ahead of the times" nor when their time had come but the funding went to those who fit the "criteria" meaning that they were applied to those generally already rich themselves, or at least who had gotten a formal education instead of the real one I have got on my own by being in business (electronics) from age 12, and of course leaving school with four languages already under my belt.
My project can put back on their feet a hundred families for less than a million dollars, and create many more millions in real wealth, but to get started it needs real cash, not just rejection letters; anyone out there wants to know the details? here is a short sample:
I found in a top location an industrial loft
of about 10.000 square feet at 60 cents a sqf.
( have you ever heard of Bill Shapiro's Mart
in '76 on Market St. between 6th and 7th St.?
- he rented the former Kress Bldg and sublet
affordable stalls to hundreds of microbusinesses - my ex-wife had the "Catskill Susie" boutique there ) including taxes and utilities where I want to put the following facilities:
50 equipped minioffices
10 bigger ones for management and laboratories
(electronic, photo, computer, etc...)
a (natural foods Italian gourmet ) restaurant
where besides regular customers all the people
who work at or belong to AMEN can have their
meals too; many of those I work with would
rather starve than be seen and/or humiliated
at soup kitchens, and if instead they can buy
their meals on credit the main dish is recovery of their self esteem; beyond that, an inner alternative economy allows them to trade in their own intellectual product and skills as well, besides documenting and publicizing them affordably.
professional printing facilities to produce also a street vended newspaper which gives besides income, exposure to the intellectual product and ability of the artists who produce it, sell it or both.
a TV studio to create content for US Cable networks' Jewish channels in Art, Science and
Torah; this means also lab to build sets,
etc...and to broadcast live events from the
7.500 sqf. main hall downstairs, such as
conferences, exhibitions and weddings. There
are 21 other wedding halls in the area which
can also be easily wired to the studio, and
two theatres in the same building, which is
next to the Israeli TV Channel 2 premises and
other content producers.
I intend to tap the large pool of available
talented personnel I am in contact with, people who might not look like the typical employable folk, but whom I know how to train, motivate and obtain results from; granted, my methods and even persona are unorthodox, but so are and have been most successful innovators, that is, if they have had access to the required resources. The Orthodox (Jew) part of my persona is now more accepted in the Israeli business world than it was when I made Aliyah, but in the meantime age and lack of formal education have replaced it as reasons to never obtain a job and earn a decent livelihood, although the main reason is that I am just not made to be someone's employee, my ego is to big to get me even past the secretary...
Ask me for more details at pizzarebbe@gmail.com
Eliahu Gal-Or
The Pizza Rebbe: AMEN, Association to Empower
the Needy www.jstraight.org
Lightwave Communication Services, Ltd.
www.kotl.tv
Lightwave International Mediation & Investments, Ltd. Israeli RE Lic.12.597
www.shuk.net
POB 31403 Jerusalem 91313 ISRAEL +97254-9726921 - ITALY +39331-7573033 - HUNGARY+3620-4131394 - BELGIUM +32494-786393
What excites me about the concept of social enterprise is that these initiatives are accountable to standard business practices - being sustainable. Not only are they mission driven they also must be sensitive to the financial bottom line.