Polanyi’s ‘substantive approach’ to the economy in action? Conceptualising social enterprise as a public health ‘intervention’

Abstract

For several decades now, critical public health researchers have highlighted the deleterious effects that pursuing neoliberal policies can have on the ‘causes of the causes’ of poor health and upon growing health inequalities. This paper argues that the conceptual tools of Karl Polanyi can help lend particular insight into this issue. The specific example that this paper focuses upon is the ‘social enterprise’: a form of organisation that combines both social and business objectives. The paper explores, conceptually, whether social enterprises may have the potential to act as one component of a neo-Polanyian countermovement: helping to re-embed the economy back into society, and offering greater recognition for a more comprehensive and socially imbued concept of health. Importantly, this potential is critically examined in the context of neoliberal hegemony, where challenges to the status quo have regularly been met with assimilation, co-option and/or repression.

Keywords:

• Polanyi
• public health
• social enterprise
• health inequality

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the anonymous referees for their helpful comments, and also from those who attended the Karl Polanyi Conference at Concordia University, Montreal, in November 2014. Michael Roy would especially like to recognise the late Abraham Rotstein, Professor of Political Economy at the University of Toronto, for his kind words of advice and encouragement relating to an early draft of this paper.

Funding Information

This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council [grant number MR/L003287/1]; Medical Research Council [grant number MR/L003287/1].

Notes

¹ The concept of ‘embeddedness’ has been a central feature of the New Economic Sociology over the last 30 years, particularly since the seminal work by Granovetter (1985). However, the way in which Polanyi (1957) employs the term is not, strictly speaking, the same way that it was used by Granovetter and those who followed since him (for a full discussion see Krippner 2002; Krippner and Alvarez 2007; Krippner et al. 2004; Machado 2011). To do justice to the history of the concept of embeddedness, which has undergone something of a ‘Great Transformation’ of its own, as Beckert (2011) aptly puts it, is well beyond the scope of this paper. For clarity, in this paper the terms ‘embed’ and ‘disembed’ are used in the Polanyian sense.

² The authors use the term neo-Polanyian to signify Polanyian ideas applied to modern day society (1970s-present).

³ That is: while a conventional for-profit business may reinvest its profits into capital assets as a means of extracting higher profits down the line for owners or shareholders, the (EMES conception of) social enterprise would assumingly reinvest into capital assets as a means of enhancing their social impact, either immediately (allowing them to employ more disadvantaged people for example) and/or down the line through, for example, achieving greater efficiencies and thus a greater amount of reinvestment into the community/social enterprise in the future.

⁴ Or, more accurately, when promoting social enterprise to third-sector actors, the U.K. government appears to promote the ‘earned income’ school’s focus on the ability of non-profit organisations to generate revenue while serving a social purpose; but the official definition of social enterprise provided by the U.K. government (2006: 10) – ‘A social enterprise is a business with primarily social objectives whose surpluses are principally reinvested for that purpose in the business or in the community, rather than being driven by the need to maximize profit for shareholders and owners’ [italics added] – provides space for profit-oriented pseudo-‘social enterprises’ to enter the field. See Box 2 for an example of this.