The one and the many problem--Is Social Enterprise Sustainable?--I.A

To build the case for social entrepreneurship, commentators have attempted to identify shared traits sufficient to demonstrate the existence of a distinct abiding pattern.  One approach is to construct a definition that has decided inspirational appeal but offers little practical guidance in setting the apparent boundaries.  For example, the Skoll Foundation, one of the leading supporters of social enterprise worldwide, describes a social entrepreneur as “society’s change agent: a pioneer of innovation that benefits humanity”—a definition that is capable of including any number of individuals and businesses that social entrepreneurs would typically not count within their number, such as Microsoft, big pharma or companies with patents on toothpaste.
  
Deciding what qualifies as a truly “social” benefit becomes even more difficult when we factor in historical change.  For example, little more than a century ago urban streets were rife with disease-bearing filth and a sickening stench until the automobile made the city cleaner by expelling its exhaust into the atmosphere, which is one reason why ads from the era linked oil companies with nature scenes and fresh air—though it may seem counterintuitive today, back then the internal combustion engine was green tech.  

To flesh out the definition beyond abstract ideals, commentators have also tried to supplement formal definitions with what they believe to be common distinguishing traits. The approach is akin what Ludwig Wittgenstein described as identifying family resemblance—in other words, eschewing a single fixed definition in favor of “a complicated network of similarities, overlapping and criss-crossing” among individual examples of the term (66).
Experts have proposed a wide variety of more specific values that they see as emblematic of social entrepreneurship, such as

•       Subsistence on the sale of goods and services,

•       Efficient use of grants,

•    Creative inspiration applied to “an unfortunate yet stable equilibrium,”

•    Quantifiable metrics,

•    Initiation and management by private citizens apart from government and commercial corporations,

•    Cooperative engagement among nonprofits, commercial business and the state,

•    Organization as a nonprofit,

•    Indifference to organizational form, whether for-profit, nonprofit or a mixed corporate group,

•    Rejection of organizational form in favor of productive networks, or

•    The creation of a new organizational form marked by “blended value” and limits on investors’ profit.

Given the all too evident confusion engendered by the inevitable contradictions arising among these possible distinguishing traits, experts have attempted to clarify the concept by aggregating traits and definitions in relation to the traditional boundaries between the market, government and nonprofit sectors.  Yet this too gives rise to its own share of confusion.  An advocate’s “considerable range of innovative and dynamic international praxis and discourse” (5) is to the critic an ad hoc mélange; likewise, when the editors of one collection of essays preface their book with a three-page small-print chart contrasting the distinct definitions offered by each other, it raises the question of whether a term that can mean anything means anything at all.

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