The Motivation of Social Entrepreneurs: The Roles, Agendas and Relations of Altruistic Economic Actors

Abstract

Social entrepreneurs present a contradiction if one accepts that economic motivation is premised on personal gain alone. The economic activity of social entrepreneurs is presumed altruistic, their actions intending to primarily benefit others. The theoretical and actual motivations, social networks and values of these actors are compared in this article. A series of semi-structured interviews of prominent social entrepreneurs in the west of England form the basis of analysis. Subjects were selected through a nomination-referral technique that allows targeting for interview those who are considered prominent in the sector within the chosen location. Two types of analysis are attempted: a narrative exploration of their motivations and a semantic networks analysis of their statements. There is evidence of a conceptual association between those actors’ success, entrepreneurship, motivation and social relations that indicate profitable avenues for future research. Some policy recommendations are offered in the conclusion. The multiple roles of social entrepreneurs and the multiple audiences they address indicate multidimensional agency. The development of the sector depends on comprehending conflict inherent in their multiple agendas.

Key Words:

• Social enterprise
• social entrepreneurs
• social networks
• semantic network analysis
• social enterprise policy
• snowball nominations

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the participants of this study for their time and invaluable insights. We would like to acknowledge Tom Alcott, Jana Diesner, Betina Hollstein, Ajith Jayawickrema, Sue Milner, Anthony Plumridge, Christophe Sohn, Mike Sotirakos and Leroy White for their comments and advice to earlier drafts of this work. The University of the West of England Bristol and CEPS in Luxembourg provided research support. We also thank the editor and reviewers for their constructive comments and suggestions. Errors and omissions remain our own.

Notes

1. We use roles heuristically here and do not directly engage with the possibility of role conflict (Festinger 1957) or the potential dissonance between motivations and roles (Parsons and Shils 1951) examined by social psychology.

2. In a similar vein there has been some research comparing the traditional non-profit and entrepreneurial non-profit models (Duncan 2007).

3. Business literature fads have employed an idealized view of entrepreneurship such as intrapreneurship (Pinchot 1986).

4. Of course the question could be asked of how is it possible to engage in ‘creative destruction’ that would be devoid of risk.

5. Baumol (1990) perceives high economic rents to drive entrepreneurs to ‘entirely unproductive or even destructive pursuits’.

6. Rothschild and Stiglitz in their seminal paper on insurance markets suggest that ‘perfect competitors may limit the quantities their customers can buy, not from any desire to exploit monopoly power, but simply in order to improve their information. Second, equilibrium may not exist. Finally, competitive equilibria are not Pareto optimal’ (1976, 638)

7. ‘Adverse selection’ is often used to describe how an insurer cannot with certainty assess the risk behaviour of those they insure. They therefore penalize the risk averse and undercharge the risk takers.

8. These are not necessarily private goods however. Some could be classified as hybrid public goods, since they are non-excludable and some as quasi-private goods whose pricing conceals a subsidy to account for externalities. For a discussion of imperfect public goods see Cornes and Sandler (1996).

9. Ward (1993) is typical of the game theory literature in assuming these actors to be aiming at the maximization of social welfare.

10. The collective action problem (i.e. less efficient outcomes from actors who cannot coordinate) can be linked to the nature of public goods (i.e. consumption of which is non-exclusive and non-rival). Public entrepreneurs can be seen to take advantage of information inefficiencies from collective action problems to coordinate the provision of goods that are not readily provided by the market. It has been furthermore argued that ‘acting on an entrepreneurial opportunity in politics requires collective action’ (Holcombe 2002, 144).

11. See for instance the development of the concept of ‘status groups’ and the concept of the ‘social estimation of honour’ in Gerth and Mills (1948 & 1991, 184–187) or Weber's (1947) work on organizations.

12. The now classic attempt by Giddens (1979) through the notion of structuration to integrate the duality of structure and agency is directly relevant, but unfortunately as a theory virtually untestable and therefore only useful as a heuristic devise.

13. Of direct relevance is the attempt by Hay and Wincott (1998) among others to develop historical institutionalism as the theoretical background to this debate.

14. ‘As the broker between two otherwise disconnected contacts, a manager is an entrepreneur in the literal sense of the word - a person who adds value by standing between others’ (Burt 1998, 10).

15. In the UK this has followed a mantra on facilitating ‘Big Society’ although the concept is poorly understood by SE (Allinson et al. 2011).

16. To complicate the picture further, the advancement of the interests of one group is not tantamount to community welfare. Putnam (2000) may be the most celebrated but not the only author to discuss the dark side of social capital. He provides the example of how a lack of bridging and preponderance of bonding social capital impact racial segregation across the United States (Putnam 2000, 350–363).

17. A major weakness in social enterprise models is that the generation of a public utility can warrant enterprise survival. The lack of consistent criteria to determine an operation's survival has the unintended side effect of stifling competition for the provision of public goods between social enterprises.

18. The one interviewee whose social enterprise was in the process of folding at the time of interview, met our peer prominence criterion and their continuous engagement with the sector was confirmed at interview.

19. An alternative approach is the methodology introduced by Trochim (1989) and developed in Jackson and Trochim (2002) for ‘concept mapping’. The limitation of the technique is that it requires units of text to fit into single categories.

20. Two coders have assigned text units (concepts) to categories in binary form. Cohen's kappa was calculated at 0.82 between the two coders. All scoring discrepancies between the two coders were then reconciled for complete agreement. The data depicted reflect this final bi-modal matrix projected to one mode (see Wasserman and Faust 1994).

21. See Vogl (2012) for the reasoning behind mixing methods.

22. Putnam (2000) classifies these as bonding and bridging ties while Burt (2005) as closure and brokerage ties.

23. In the graphs presented there have been minor adjustments from the MDS solution to make all labels visible.

24. Betweenness centrality compared with eigenvector centrality offers multiple advantages. Betweenness is a good proxy of brokerage while eigenvector is a good proxy of global centrality. The first calculates the number of times a focal actor is in the geodesic between others (i.e. acts as a broker/conduit/bottleneck) and the second weights the centrality of those they are connected to. Both can be employed with valued data (for eigenvector symmetrized) and analyse centrality metrics on the largest component.

25. Similarly the work of Battilana et al. (2012) suggests a shift of policy focus in the US to ‘hybrid’ corporate models that will combine business-for-profit operations with non-profit operations, while in the UK Community Interest Companies have created a legal form that facilitates social enterprise investments for profit. The UK Public Services (Social Value) Act of 2012 may also positively affect social enterprise contracts with the public sector (Villeneuve-Smith and Chung 2013).