Popeye, the first social entrepreneur?

Like any good religion, social entrepreneurship is developing its own creation myth. Before the 1980s all was formless and void; then lo, the gods reached forth their mighty hand to create social enterprise ex nihilo. Social entrepreneurs live in this new world, this sustainable Garden of Eden, as the new Adams and Eves, resisting the serpent's call to taste traditional nonprofit fruit.

However, as something of a professional heretic, I find myself gravitating toward apocrypha. I present here the true Adam, the unsung Hidden Prophet of our new age:  Popeye, who, in 1973, inspired a generation of comics readers to believe that they could do well by doing good.

OK, so maybe Popeye isn't the real inspiration for social enterprise, but I think you catch my drift.  Social enterprise isn't really all that new, and as I've been saying in my various talks and blog posts, its time as a mainstream organizational metaphor is likely to be short.  If we want to understand what's really going on with the movement--and how to perpetuate its ethic long past the expiration date of the term--we have to get past the myths and self-congratulation to figure out what's really going on.

In that regard, I want to point you to Martin Smith's self-censored meditation on social enterprise. I have in my own files an unpublished essay on "Is social enterprise bullshit?" that I'm currently revising for the academic family hour as "Is social enterprise sustainable?", so as you'll see pretty soon--next draft almost done!--I have a fair amount of sympathy with Martin's cri de couer.  Rather than copy a bunch of it here, I'll just recommend that you go over to his site and read the whole thing.