I. Defining social enterprise

Social enterprise is charity’s Web 2.0—a would-be revolution as open to interpretation as a Rorschach blot.  If commentators agree on anything in regard to social entrepreneurship, it’s the lack of a consensus as to what the concept means.

For example, Oxford’s Alex Nicholls notes that “the definition of social entrepreneurship is often seen as contested and unclear,” although he adeptly reframes this as a “dynamic flexibility” that is the “basis of [the movement’s] extraordinary impact (10). Professor Marthe Nyssens similarly observes that social enterprise “remains a very broad and often quite vague concept,” particularly in the U.S..  While her European research group had distilled its own preferred definition—citizen-initiated community benefit with a limits on material benefit to investors—she expressly disclaims any effort to impose “prescriptive criteria.”  Instead, the definition is at best an attempt to describe an “ideal-type” within a “galaxy” of groups (10).

It is tempting to assume that the concept’s vagueness is a feature, not a bug, but as a programmatic strategy this is not without its risks.   As NYU’s Paul Light has observed, the lack of an agreed-upon definition of social enterprise is likely to hurt the movement’s chances of long-term success.  At the very least, he argues, measurement of the growth and impact of social enterprise will be impossible without a shared understanding of precisely what we’re supposed to measuring—an ironic situation for a field that exhorts nonprofits to use quantifiable metrics.

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