Results tagged “civil society” from Uncivil Society

Jeremiah's Vanishing New York has the story of the recent relocation of venerable Greenwich Village institution Ansonia Pharmacy, whose store window featured "a revolving display of mostly local art known as the Ansonia Pharmacy Windows."

The reason for the move was explained by this not-so-cryptic quote from Aristotle: "Everything that moves is moved by another." The reason, no doubt, is the substantial escalation of rent at the original location, a market phenomenon that many believe is causing Manhattan to lose its core identity. One proposal to stop things like this from happening is the adoption of commercial rent control for small businesses. Although Aristotle notes that politics is inherently an ethical enterprise, whether rent control is the ethical solution has been the subject of considerable debate.

Here's a fascinating set of photos documenting Asgarda, a group of women who have formed their own alternate society "based on the the tribal traditions of the Scythian Amazons of ancient Greek mythology."

Jezebel has an excellent roundup of information regarding Asgarda, including this excellent first-person account from the photographer.

Iranians have reportedly starting protesting the Ahmadinejad regime by going to bazaars and not shopping.

However, that doesn't mean the rest of the revolution is noncommercial.

One popular item: t-shirts featuring Neda Agha-Soltan, the Iranian woman whose murder by Iranian security forces, caught on this YouTube video (more about which here), has made her an icon of the protest movement.

Pictured above: a Neda t-shirt sold on Facebook by an Iranian who pledges to give the proceeds to Neda's family if 400 shirts are sold, though judging from the comments not everyone is on board with this enterprise:

The CafePress blog has also noted Neda tee phenomenon, highlighting a link between commerce and political speech:

While the Iranian government prohibits Neda’s family and friends from having memorials in her honor and tries to locally silence the voices mourning her, the world is talking. And from our end, a T-shirt is worth 1,000 words.

In other words, let a thousand Neda t-shirts bloom!

And yes, the last one really is a "Remembering Neda (Iran) Dog T-Shirt." The photo proclaims "Made in the USA", and y'know, I don't doubt it.

UPDATE:

Here's the PrestijFashion shirt mentioned in the comments!

Last week on JustMeans I noted that the legal situation for nonprofits in Russia is more complex than the conventional wisdom would have us believe.

There was, of course, a method to my rhetorical madness. Here's an update on one important aspect of the Russian nonprofit world: reforms aimed at encouraging the formation of independent and financially sustainable nongovernmental NPOs.

A few months ago the Russian government formed a working group with a stated goal of facilitating the formation of nongovernmental nonprofit associations, which became a particularly pressing issue after restrictive measures enacted under Vladimir Putin a few years ago. Anyone familiar with Soviet rhetoric knows that sometimes words can have two meanings, and a leading governmental official promised that we'll soon see "many truly innovative proposals" for liberalizing current law, there was ample reason to be skeptical.

However, the first proposed set of amendments to the Russian law "On Nonprofit Organizations" finally went live a few hours ago, and it actually does lighten the regulatory burden in several significant ways.

A major focus of the proposed reforms is to rein in what some see as the unbridled authority of the Ministry of Justice--the state body that incorporates nonprofit organizations--to obstruct the formation and activity of nonprofit NGOs. The bill seeks to accomplish this in several ways, such as

• limiting the organizational documents the Ministry has the right to request,
• limiting the number of audits to once in a three years (as opposed to annually),
• limiting the grounds for the denial of registration,
• adding the option of suspending registration (as opposed to merely providing for denial), and
• requiring the government to explain reasons for refusal within a specific period of time.

The bill also has provides for the publication--in the mass media or online--of an annual report, with a simplified statement of ongoing activity for smaller organizations. This is also in keeping with the bill's announced purpose of "lightening but not eliminating accountability for NPOs."

Although the proposed reforms apply for the most part to Russian nonprofits--a subsequent bill is reported to be in the works in regard to foreign groups--the bill does include a welcome amendment in regard to branch offices of foreign NGOs: it would eliminate the current prohibition on foreign affiliates or representative offices deemed to be a "threat . . . to national uniqueness and identity [or] to [Russia's] cultural heritage."

Moreover, in a separate and equally significant legal development, a Russian appeals court recently held that grants made by foreign organizations to Russian nonprofits are exempt from the profits tax. This precedent could, if not overturned, put an end to questions as to whether tax exemption for foreign grants is limited to grants received from just a few charities specified on a list issued by the Russian government.

As Human Rights Watch indicated when the scope of the proposed liberalizations was initially announced, additional changes would be useful, but the proposed bill, if enacted, appears to be a welcome "first step for reform."

  

The heroic myth takes on a new form. A commenter explains:

Ganesha is seen as the Remover of Obstacles, so anyone or anything that takes action to remove obstacles can be seen as exhibiting an aspect of the divine, in the form of Ganesh. The people who made this statue are saying that the heroic nature that we admire in the fictitious character of Spider-Man is an expression of the divine within us all, and should be honored. Also, it’s FUN. Bravo!

Thanks, Deborah Elizabeth Finn!

The words we use for corporate identity--not just corporation, but terms such as social enterprise and civil society--are from one perspective sophisticated forms of data mapping, akin to the cutting-edge 3D visualizations of choreography at Synchronous Objects.

Andy Warhol's Empire consists of 8 hours and 5 minutes of continuous footage of the Empire State Building at night.

On Thanksgiving I went to the top of a local building and filmed an homage appropriate to an age of micro-chic: the ESB at night for 8:05 seconds.

That corporate form represents an identity distinct from its owners and managers is a legal principle so basic that we have lost sight of its significance.   Limited liability, fiduciary duties, the maximization of shareholder value as opposed to the personal enrichment of insiders—these corporate clichés are all normative institutions designed to establish a corporate identity that is more than the sum of its parts.  They are as much an extension of naturally occurring emergent form as Aristotle’s model of a city partnership or our internal sense of self.  

Isolating the root of corporate identity in a programmatic model of emergence opens dramatic new possibilities in both our theory and practice of organizational life.  For the burgeoning research in managerial leadership and systems theory, the embedding of emergence within corporate form provides an organic basis for integrating dynamic systems research into corporate life.  Moreover, it adds a new dimension to our understanding of organizational law, which to far too many scholars seems little more than a routinized cliché unworthy of serious academic attention.

What professed business experts have yet to realize is that the same creative impulse we see in the creative arts animates all forms of corporate life; the Renaissance corporate consultant who nurtures an appreciation for science, mathematics, literature and art actually has a competitive edge in understanding the nuances of  corporate design.

In itself, a metaphorical model of emergent properties does not necessarily entail an ethical commitment, any more than a hybrid form of collective properties emerging from connected atoms given a moral character to water, ice and steam.  However, the creation of a coherent emergent from human elements is a different environmental predicate, and the result is a complex and seemingly contradictory array of identities all deriving from the impulse to rise above the mundane.  On the individual level, our conscious ratio of difference between whole and part takes shape in normative  values that resist reduction to otherwise deterministic forces; we strive for immortality, curb our appetite for food, deny that smoking will hurt us, negate our sexual drives and engage in sex without regard to consequence.   

On a wider scale, groups of individuals create connections and constraints that not only extend these personal values but create new collective properties.  For instance, whereas economies tend to exhibit turbulent swings and the scale-free concentration of wealth in the hands of the relative few, we create models of society designed—at least in theory—to generate a steady rise in wealth distributed to all and health care is not an allocation of scarce assets but a fundamental human right.

For a non-state corporate entity, whether nonprofit or for-profit, ignoring the embedded ratio of difference between whole and part can have dramatic consequences, particularly in the form of unwanted and burdensome government regulation.  It is here where the reasoning of today’s business managers and theorists has had its greatest negative effect.  The image of a unity distinct from its constituent parts is encoded in the DNA of our for-profit corporate entities, yet business leaders persist in reducing corporate identity to the material enrichment of  its executives and shareholders. The resulting backlash—both in public criticism and waves of new expensive and rigorous ethics rules—is akin to the reaction against the Roman Empire when it conflated Aristotle’s metaphor of civil society with paganism and later, Christianity; each represents the reduction of a higher unity to the private privilege of one part.

A more sustainable corporate strategy—in the sense of maintaining the autonomy of the corporate enterprise as a self-subsisting and self-regulating organizational form—recognizes that the rules and routines of corporate form exist to do more than to generate and allocate financial return.  The business partnership already functioned as an aggregate of profit-seeking individuals, and that model is no longer the norm.  Every element of corporate identity—its name, its brand, its people, its products—should in some way work to reinforce the image of a whole beyond the parts; the more that people perceive the business primarily as a scale-free aggregation of profits enriching insiders, the greater the likelihood that society will at some point act to make the business something more.
 
A similar principle applies to nonprofit identity.  The difference between nonprofit and for-profit entities is one of degree, not of kind—they are both extensions of the corporate model of emergence, albeit with distinct wells of attraction.  Whereas for-profit entities tolerate a certain, though not all-encompassing, degree of commerce and personal enrichment, within the nonprofit universe the image of a form beyond finance and private interests tends toward the absolute. 

Above: Ellen Dissanayake examines art, identity and design

This means that nonprofit design requires even more rigorous attention to rhetorical effect.  Nonprofit and other ostensibly charitable organizations that define themselves primarily as businesses—as is all too often the case with organizations attracted to social enterprise by the mimetic bandwagon effect—risk fostering the suspicion that they have in some way betrayed the core values of their higher mission, regardless of whether there is actually any wrongdoing.   Conversely, nonprofits that proceed as if they have no relation to the mundane equally generate distrust, inasmuch as people intuitively grasp that the higher order cannot emerge without connections and constraints.

As a hybridizing algorithm, social enterprise is an adaptive response to the loss of coherence in corporate identity. A variety of factors have worked together to shape the movement as it current exists—mimetic mirroring of dot-com and 2.0 rhetoric, the immediacy of electronic technology, the integrative effects of globalization.  The most influential factor, however, is the diffusion of corporate form itself.  What had once been the prerogative of priests and civic leaders has become a social norm; we now live in a world where plugging into the hybridizing algorithms of corporate form is an all too familiar experience.  In this environment bifurcating the world into profit-maximizing businesses and idealized nonprofits becomes unsustainable; it literally does not make sense to a rising generation accustomed to joining things together so as to create something new.

But this does not mean that social enterprise is itself a wholly novel concept.  It is instead a reflection of what already exists.  Ever since modern corporate law formalized a conceptual diversion between nonprofit and for-profit entities, movements have emerged to infuse a public spirit throughout the whole of our organizational system. As we noted earlier, social enterprise is just latest of these movements, and like its predecessors it lacks a structural basis for embracing hybrid values.  Understanding social identity as a programmatic model of emergence eliminates this problem.  In today’s corporate world every enterprise becomes a social enterprise once it creates a legal entity or recognizable brand.

That people feel the need to advocate for hybrid ventures is a symptom of how familiarity has obscured our perception of all forms of corporate identity. At base, social enterprise as a discrete movement is akin to adaptive morphogenesis in the biological realm, where forms evolve in the gap to facilitate missing constructive behaviors.    Among animals this is, it would appear, an unreflective process, but within human society—itself a means of modeling adaptive transformation—there is at least the potential for self-awareness.  

The core question for facing social enterprise is not so much whether it will last but how best to exhibit what corporate life should be.  At a certain level the continued existence of social enterprise is more or less guaranteed, much like there are still a few priests who speak Latin, charities called settlement houses or NGO workers who self-identify with civil society.  But social enterprise ostensibly seeks more than mere survival as a semantic trace.  If social enterprise is to be truly sustainable, it must find a way to become more than just the latest permanent revolution to experience a turbulent upswing and precipitous decline.

One common suggestion for increasing the impact of social enterprise is to create new separate social institutions—a social stock exchange, social venture capital funds, a social legal entity.  As advocates note, such endeavors could offer substantive advantages for individuals who want to self-identify as social entrepreneurs.   Besides signaling their values and providing a standardized structure for integrating commercial business with social benefit, formally recognizing a discrete social enterprise sector could result in a less costly and burdensome operating environment than currently exists—social entrepreneurs arguably would not face the same pressure to maximize solely the financial value of shares, nor would they have to comply with the often arcane restrictions on business activity and profit distribution imposed on tax-exempt charities.

Yet for all the strategic benefits of separate social entities, the movement’s greatest contribution would be to remind us what corporate identity already is—and then fade away.  The first and arguably most important step toward this end would be to stop speaking of a division between “social” business and existing non-profit and for-profit structures.  Not only is the distinction untenable, it effectively concedes that social enterprise is a niche unto itself; by assuming a conceptual divide between social and business values, it frames the discussion in a way no argument for hybrid enterprise can win.  Instead, advocates for the movement need to explain why existing entities already embody hybrid values—and how our failure to grasp this fuels the regulatory inefficiencies and PR debacles that ventures of all types seek to avoid.

The movement would also benefit from explaining the process of transformation that is central to all corporate identity.  All form blends separate elements into a greater whole; to maintain their integrity, for-profits and nonprofits alike need to learn the art of corporate composition.  That some reduce business to shareholders while others view nonprofits as non-market entities indicates the degree to which the leaders of each so-called sector do not comprehend the objects of their ostensible expertise.

Beyond rethinking group identity, social enterprise could also secure its legacy by highlighting the social dimension of other organizational technologies.  As noted in an earlier section, society is a fractal concept; we have used the ratio of difference between whole and parts to create a universe of self-similar hybrids. From this perspective speaking of a double- or triple-bottom line is redundant; money and stock are themselves intrinsically social media, with their value emerging out of complex interactions and constraints. Once again, the methodology must shift from differentiation to inclusion—instead of grafting social concerns onto other metrics, what we need instead is to explain how social and financial values are the same.    

There are, of course, other useful applications of corporate identity as a pragmatic model of emergence, but their overall effect should be the same:  to make social enterprise a transitional form.  It brings together values that we should not have torn apart, and once we learn its deepest lesson it will become obsolete.  While this might seem like a failure to those who champion the movement as a permanent revolution, disappearance in this context would be a mark of its success. It’s one thing to change how people talk about groups, quite another to transform how we think.

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Earlier we noted that the rhetoric of social movements is turbulent.  This semantic turbulence, like that in financial markets or the generation of hybrid ventures, exhibits fractal properties—its swings and spikes are self-similar, flowing from the expression of a common value.  The impulse to hybridize is the root of all forms, and not merely  coincidence or some vague mystery of the world.  Rather, it is the defining property of corporate form.

The phrase “social enterprise” provides a clue as to the how this came to be.  The term is actually not new; it’s just the latest variation of a long series of constructs that attempt to integrate reductionistic and emergent values.  The most influential of those constructs is “civil society,” a term that in its recent heyday proved to be susceptible to interpretation as social enterprise.  Contrary to what today’s so-called experts claim, however, civil society does not refer narrowly to such things as NGOs, nonprofits or a voluntary sector between state and market.  Rather, civil society is a programmatic legal metaphor designed to model emergence—as is the corporation itself.

That civil society is a metaphor for emergence becomes apparent when we look past its present use among NGO advocates.   Aristotle coined the phrase in the treatise commonly known as The Politics, although this too obscures the true significance of the work.  The word translated “politics”—in Greek, politike—literally refers to the “city,” or polis, a phenomenon that Aristotle is struggling to understand.
 
Aristotle’s fascination with the city lies in what he perceives to be its metaphysical distinctiveness (I). Apart from the city, people enter into cooperative arrangements that are at base reductionistic aggregates akin to a koinonia, or legal partnership.  In a business partnership, two or more individuals enter into a contract to share the profits from commerce—unlike the modern corporation, the partnership was not a discrete entity but an aggregate of individuals whose rights and responsibilities were set by the agreement.  A family, for Aristotle, is merely a koinonia in which two individuals unite to produce offspring and to manage household assets.  A village is a koinonia connecting several households; like other partnerships, the village is nothing more than a simple aggregate, with no distinct properties or values beyond its constituent parts.

The city is different.  It consists of businesses, families and villages, yet it is “self-sufficient, so to speak, emerging for the sake of life but existing for the sake of the good life”  (I:8). This root of this higher ethical purpose is the city’s distinct metaphysical character; the koinonia politike—the partnership of the city—is not merely the sum of it parts, but it is a “whole” that is “prior by nature” to its constituent elements (I:11).  This, Aristotle observes, makes the city the interpersonal extension of human identity.  Just as the human is a self-sufficient unity with its own distinct—and ethical—existence beyond the mere components of its body, the koinonia politike emerges out of the routine interactions of connected elements to create a higher meaning for them all.

Two thousand years later the city’s defining paradox—a discrete whole irreducible to the mere sum of its parts—is routinely described today with far less metaphysical baggage.  The city, with its order and identity spontaneously appearing from the discrete interactions among its constituent parts, has a become a familiar example of the natural phenomenon now known as emergence, in which “the behavior of large and complex aggregates . . . is not to be understood in terms of a simple extrapolation of the properties of a few” separate parts (222).

We now know enough about the emergence of collective properties that we do not feel the need to ground them in a distinct prior essence, and we are able to recognize the phenomenon in a wide array of contexts, from families and small towns to animals, plants and inanimate natural forces.   Rather than making the city an object of philosophical speculation, we can sing of a city that never sleeps without feeling the urge to meditate on the paradox of a city that never sleeps even though all its denizens do. 

Nonetheless that should not obscure the historic significance of Aristotle’s description.   His use of a programmatic legal metaphor is a classical analogue to contemporary scientific approaches to analyzing emergent properties in complex systems—it is, in its way, a direct predecessor of current research in understanding cities through cellular automata, agent-based modeling and fractals. 

Previously the metaphors for a self-sufficient higher order tended to be religious in nature, most notably the Hebrew “divine contract” that linked separate family tribes into a sacred unity.  The “partnership of the city,” on the other hand, provided a replicable model for emergent identity that transcended cultic loyalties.  It did so by describing key elements of the process of emergence in accessible non-mystical terms—by connecting and constraining agents in a certain context, such as large-scale population bounded by its physical geography and common name, a city could function as a supervenient order that shaped the very people and relationships from which it emerged.

Contemporary communitarian versus liberal public policy debates should also not distract us of the fundamental insight embedded in Aristotle’s rhetoric of the good, which foreshadowed contemporary notions of public norms that are ideally irreducible to private interests, particularly those defined by wealth, family or personal influence.  The analog between civic good and individual values reflects how each derives from the ratio of difference implicit in emergent identity—just as personal ideals reflect the impulse, grounded in our very consciousness, to rise above the deterministic drives and limits of our material being, the koinonia politike aspires to something more than the parochial narrowness of subsistence living.

The adaptive capacity of Aristotle’s model of emergent civic form made it well suited as a programmatic construct for cosmopolitan Rome.  The Latin translation, societas civilis, was equally a legal metaphor reflecting a partnership framed by urban citizenship. The full history of the evolution of this concept is beyond the scope of this article—its influence on adaptive Christian networks framed by koinonia, city metaphors and a higher unity “where two or three are gathered in my name” is worthy of its own book; for our purposes suffice it to say that the model of a social order unifying contractual routines with a transformative identity connections took shape in a diverse array of forms.

Arguably the most significant development in the evolution of civil society as an organizational metaphor was the conceptual separation of emergent identity from city, church and empire.  We can trace the direct roots of the modern form to a series of events that now seem unrelated.  One signal moment in this history was the formation of the Cluniac monastic network, which used a common charter, rituals, clothing and structured multi-tiered governance to create what we would now recognize as a multinational corporation with its own distinct brand, autonomous from the jurisdiction of feudal lords, bishops and the Pope (28-9). 

An equally revolutionary moment followed in the twelfth century, when law students in Bologna co-opted the classical Roman law concept of a universitas to create a unified common identity distinct from themselves as residents of their home cities.  These corporate archetypes provided a real-world model of the phenomena discussed in the Aristotelian writings that, not coincidentally, enjoyed a twelfth-century revival of their own.

As Brian Tierney documents in his history of corporate divisions leading up to the Reformation and the rise of fractious nationalism, the notion of a self-sustaining identity transformed out of its constituent elements grew considerably less esoteric with its embodiment in a replicable legal form.  Hybrids and metamorphosis became a recurring theme in scholarly writing; the Church formalized status as a distinct collective entity while churches and secular powers declared themselves distinct from the Church; even cutting-edge artistic theory analogized  the depth created by three-point perspective to the collective will emerging out of interactions in city government.   

By the time Thomas Hobbes wrote his classic analysis of social theory in the mid-seventeenth century, Aristotle’s narrow focus on the city as the archetype of emergent form was no longer viable.  Instead Hobbes describes a nation as made up of private “systemes” of “fictitious” and “artificial” “bodies,” each of which mimics the relation between whole and parts evident in the human sense of self as a well as the collective political order (155-65).  Writing in a time of both global joint-stock trading companies and violent sectarian conflict, Hobbes adapts Aristotle’s metaphor of the koinonia politike to model an ethical identity that keeps the constituent parts in check, as individuals and groups negate their own self-interest to connect within a higher unity.  

In explaining this model Hobbes did not, as is commonly assume, coin a unique new image of a “social contract” the explain the origins of the political order.  To the contrary, he was merely translating the Latin societas civilis into an English phrase that captured the same image of a legal contract and a higher collective identity—an image that the frontispiece to Leviathan illustrates by depicting citizens united literally within the person of the king.

What is most revealing about Hobbes’ reference to a social contract is not the metaphor itself, which would not at all have seemed new to peers literate in Latin, but the way it evinces a subtle yet significant shift in the meaning of “social” itself.  Years earlier the societas—Aristotle’s koinonia—was a mere composite, a partnership that was nothing more than a contractual aggregate of individuals.   By the seventeeth century, however, society bespoke the greater whole, which itself emerged out of self-sufficient legal entities emerging from connections among individuals—each of whom was envisioned as a higher self distinct from its bodily organs and natural drives.  A complex array of self-similar identities patterned on emergence, society, in short, was fractal.
  
Within a relatively short period of time, this acclimation to systems of artificial entities defined by connection and constraint generated a shift in the meaning of civil society itself.  Cultural observers stopped limiting the scope of civil society to the state; instead, it became the corporate “realm of solidarity” that “set men over the animals and the basic life of material existence”  (33-34)—Aristotle’s koinonia politike as the market norm. By the time of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, civil society has become the realm of corporate market relations, through which the atomistic individual makes connections outside the family and in so doing mediates the ethical norms that reach their highest expression in the public good.

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Social enterprise did not arise in a vacuum.  It emerged out of a peculiar array of historical circumstances increasingly distant from the world of today.

The roots of the term extend at least as far back as the late 1970s, when fiscal crises buttressed support for cutbacks in government grants in the West and the Solidarity movement gave global prominence to the idea of what the Polish reformers called “social enterprise”—self-governed, self-sustaining and the fundamental source of social benefit.  The sustained economic boom of the past fifteen years did not only give rise to a new generation of entrepreneurs applying their expertise to philanthropy; it also fostered an association between entrepreneurship and such adaptive values as success, insight, growth and the future. 

In this environment the rhetoric of social enterprise spread far beyond the confines of organizations engaged in identifiable hybrid activity; it also became a standardized mode of self-description among otherwise non-entrepreneurial nonprofits.  We see a similar phenomenon at work in the dissemination of such descriptors as green, organic and, of course, sustainability, which have emerged as normative as much through imitation as ideology.  This is what I referred to earlier as the fourth less acknowledged expression of hybrid values:  mimetic replication of entrepreneurial and public benefit language, with minimal to no impact on organizational behavior.  

While it is indeed possible for social enterprise to be a revolutionary new standard that will forever change our ways of doing good, it is also possible that social enterprise may turn out to be an organizational equivalent to the hula hoop.  Just as each new summer brings forth a new song that captures the ear of everyone between age two and twenty-five, evolving political and economic circumstances give rise to new ways of talking about coordinated action.  In the for-profit business world this is all too familiar; just as “atomic” businesses flourished after WWII and the invention of the transistor fueled a “tronics” boom, over the past decade we have seen dot-com rhetoric morphing into Web 2.0 as well as the painful rise and fall of shared modes of description for hedge funds and subprime mortgages.

Above: the dancing alien meme from the subprime mortgage boom


That social enterprise could prove merely to be a semantic bubble is not as outrageous as it might seem.  All the talk of world-changing revolution distracts us from a more unpleasant historical fact: that social enterprise is far from the first charitable revolution witnessed in recent years.  Merely a decade ago, many of the same experts now espousing social enterprise were proclaiming a “global associational revolution” that was poised to change the world forever. However, this revolution in doing good did not champion hybrid social ventures but nonprofit NGOs, or “civil society,” which were said to constitute a distinct “third sector” apart from state and market.  It was a paradigm well suited to an environment that now seems like the ancient past—the breakdown of the welfare state, waves of recession, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc and the imminence of a new millennium in the standard Gregorian calendar.

But even this was not the first social revolution.  Go back a few more years and you’ll find another way of describing nonprofits and charity.  As opposed to a third sector, nonprofits were “partners in public service” with government in administering “the welfare state.” Commercial business was a sector spoken of primarily in terms of market failure, a trope that does not seem surprising when you consider that this was a time marked by rampant inflation, a dormant stock market and the implosion of industrial manufacturing in the U.S.

In fact, the very terms we use now to describe doing good reflect the linguistic dynamics of earlier times.  Consider, for instance, the word “philanthropy.”  The use of this word to describe charitable giving reached a critical mass around the turn of the twentieth century, with the rise of charitable giving by wealthy industrialists.  That philanthropy is a word derived from Greek roots—philia, “brotherly love”, and anthropos, “human”—is not a coincidence; it reflects a strategic linkage of the industrial nouveau riche with the classical language then associated with the establishment elite.  

Similarly, the word “social” used in the charitable context is not an isolated novelty.  It is a word that came to prominence in the charitable world with the early development of social systems theory in the nineteenth century.  Whereas then-traditional charity viewed poverty as the result of personal flaws, social reformers—including the first generation of academic sociologists—argued instead for seeing society’s problems in terms of systemic social dysfunction. Even the analytical language is familiar, with analogies drawn from membranes and networks found in the society, the human body and such radically new media as the telegraph and railroad.

Akin to turbulent disruptions within the economy (Mandelbrot, 2004), the language of charity exhibits a tendency to evolve through waves of exploding bubbles, with some collapsing into nothingness, others leaving signal traces and a few systemically reshaping how we think and act.

A variety of factors influence how these patterns emerge,  perhaps the most prominent being strategic symbiotic mimesis, in which groups seeking an infusion of capital adapt to the perceived interests of potential patrons.  At present, this is the rhetoric of entrepreneurship, with particular instantiations of reflecting, inter alia, the extent of adaptive change each actor deems necessary to satisfy the expectations of targeted potential patrons.  Other factors that influence the spread of particular metaphor include the emergence of new media, shifts in status markers, the recognition of scientific progress, the vicissitudes of politics and the perceived stability of the broader economy.  

Here is where the analogy to Web 2.0 becomes particularly salient.  Akin to the initial mania for the so-called dot-com revolution, Web 2.0 has from the beginning been criticized as vague and questionably novel concept.  However, with the market downturn, Web 2.0’s semantic flexibility is less of an adaptive advantage than another piece of evidence for viewing the idea as just an echo of 1990s dot-com hype.  The exponential escalation of Web 2.0 can just as quickly become an exponential implosion, as negative associations with web-based social networking cascade into a market collapse.

Like its online counterpart, the sustainability of social enterprise is entangled with that of its underlying metaphor.  The more society tends to associate entrepreneurial values with positive feedback, the greater the potential for social enterprise to amplify  in ways that reinforce the perception that the movement is a permanent revolution.  Yet as business may lose its appeal, there is also the probability that a cascade transforms into a collapse.  In the latter scenario the question facing social entrepreneurs will go beyond merely defining what they are.  They will encounter increased resistance to the very notion of blending charity with entrepreneurship, a scenario in which the linkage of charity and entrepreneurship may become opaque at best.

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One of the professed aims of Starbucks is to serve as a social "third space," akin to the historic role of coffee shops in the emergence of nongovernmental noncommercial social networks in Europe.  While the company has succeeded to a certain degree, there is a key difference: for the most part, customers in Starbucks don't interact.  It's a public meeting place for private individuals--couples or a group of friends talking to each other; co-workers conferencing; laptop legionnaires tapping away by themselves. 

By contrast, the coffee houses famously described by Jurgen Habermas went beyond the public aggregation of private spheres.  They were a place where the various customers interacted amongst themselves, even if they didn't know each other before they came in.

This came to mind as I read the most recent blog post by Paul Cornell, whom some of you may recognize from the epic Dr. Who two-parter last season in which the Doctor became human:

I popped in to officially open the shop the other weekend . . .  and found myself part of a warm sitcom about selling comics and actually talking to your customers. There’s already quite a social life developing around that shop, as with all the best comic retailers.

That's more like the classic model of the coffee-house-as-civil-society.  The best comic shops are indeed stores that are more than stores--they are places where people connect.

Today I had the pleasure of speaking at another StartingBloc Institute, this time at Yale just a few yards from where I used to meet every other Monday with the folks from the University's Program on Nonprofit Organizations--meetings that led me to think about going to law school, which eventually led to this site.

I didn't make the connection just out of nostalgia; my point in the session was that while social enterprise seems all revolutionary and worldchanging now, the same was true back then when folks were touting the civil society revolution and before that, nonprofits as the cutting-edge in administering government welfare programs. From there I did a brief SWOT (well, technically, SOWT) analysis of the social enterprise movement itself to assess whether social entrepreneurship is sustainable or just another fad in a cycle that tends to resolve not in the private sector but the state.

While I have my own answer to this question, I decided that instead of yakking at the SB gang for the whole hour I'd ask 'em what they thought, and I'm glad I did. It was a most engaging discussion, ranging from the ethics of Darwinian competition to the potential dangers of a market-focus to the ways in which a market model can make a charity more responsive to social needs.

Several of the questions hit square on subjects on which I'm currently writing longer articles that will eventually be excerpted on this blog, so if you're interested in Hegel, symbiosis or corporate identity, you might want to check back here every so often, because I'll be addressing those questions soon enough.

I'm going to post the obligatory Powerpoint slides for anyone who's interested, but unless you were there they probably won't make much sense--for example, the Jetsons cartoon may seem nonsensical, but the point was to start with a jokey jab at retro-futures that sequed into asking what future generations will think about the utopian claims made for social enterprise. As for why my slides tend to lack words, well, I've come to use slides for associative iconic reinforcement, not bulleted lines that I read. I'm also lazy as all get out, but please don't tell anyone, because it sounds a whole lot smarter to blame the whole thing on cognitive science. Maybe once I get past next week's deadlines I'll record what I said for the archive, albeit without most of the jokes and all the swears.

 This reprint from a 1943 magazine has prompted the usual gee-aren't-we-enlightened-now responses.  But it also sparked this interesting exchange:

• "What idiot came up with the idea of discarding half of the species as mentally unfit to function in civil society?"
• "Psssh... Civil society? Any place that forces people to toil endlessly simply to eat and stay warm is no more civil than any slave or surf wielding society."
   

 

 

 

 

 

Yesterday on the way up to my office I overheard two students talking about the assigned reading for their class--a philosopher who kept talking about gemeinschaft and gesellschaft, though the students weren't exactly sure about the difference between the two.

Ah, memories . . .

Nonprofits embody the dueling cultures that sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies described as gemeinschaft (“community”) and gesellschaft (“society”). From one angle, nonprofits represent the emotional, spiritual, and even familial values of a communal realm outside state and market: the Metropolitan Opera is art, but Les Miserables is commercial pop; a museum Lichtenstein is superior to a Batman comic; church transcends group therapy; NPR offers “intelligent talk” while Rush Limbaugh is a pitchman. And yet in direct contrast, the nonprofit as gesellschaft embodies the impersonal world of contract and commodity. Vague talk of transcendent values must give way to a crisp, quantifiable metric, and the role of the nonprofit expert is to educate the public in what the term “nonprofit” truly means.