Social enterprise as a transitional form--Is Social Enterprise Sustainable?--III

Social enterprise is at a crossroads.  One path leads to an all too common fate for elements in a mimetic cascade, from slang and viral video to civil society and settlement houses—mass diffusion followed by collapse.  Yes, the social enterprise movement will persist to varying degrees, from a cadre of adherents to traces of its characteristic language.  It’s also possible that certain policy goals embraced by the movement may thrive due to factors largely outside the movement itself, such as the effect of rising oil prices on funding for alternative fuels.   However, the movement defined by remaking the nonprofit and for-profit worlds in the image of social ventures will perhaps dramatically recede, a twenty-first century heir to hippies, Beats and Fourierites.

But this is not inevitable.  The core weakness of the movement to hybridize is not that it strives to emulate sustainable systems, but that it does not provide a coherent reason to integrate seemingly disparate values.  Infusing nonprofit rhetoric with the language of for-profit business—“metrics,” “ROI,” “capital markets”—threatens to betray the very essence of the nonprofit as a space apart from commerce.  At the same time, grafting a charitable ethic onto for-profit corporate enterprise seems inconsistent with the law and logic of free market capitalism, in which social good emerges from the pursuit of selfish ends.

Rather than dismissing so-called traditional organizations as obsolete, the social enterprise movement would have a sustainable long-term impact by highlighting the ethical complexity of existing corporate constructs—in short, every enterprise is a social enterprise, just in different ways. In this regard social enterprise is a revolution, just not in the sense of being wholly new.  Rather, it is a returning—the literal translation of the Latin revolvere—to the dynamic of corporate life itself.

To understand why, we need to change how we think about corporate form.  Capra’s reductionistic image of corporate formalities—the soulless rules of corporate governance and asset allocation—unites all parties in the social enterprise debate, even as they differ on the value of infusing this dead letter with a social spirit.  What no one realizes is that the programmatic code of both nonprofit and for-profit corporate identity functions as a hybridizing algorithm.

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