Nine Verbs to Keep the Social Entrepreneurship Research Agenda ‘Dangerous’

Abstract

This paper critiques and re-imagines current research approaches to the field of social entrepreneurship. Taking a theoretical view of research as ‘enactment’, this paper explores research as a constitutive act and explores a range of ways of relating with and constructing the subject of inquiry. Three models of enactive research are presented, each based on three verbs which denote the contours of a ‘dangerous’ research agenda for social entrepreneurship. These include: (a) ‘critiquing’ approaches to research through denaturalizing, critically performing and reflexivity; (b) ‘inheriting’ approaches through contextualizing, historicizing and connecting; and (c) ‘intervening’ approaches through participating, spatializing and minorizing.

Key Words:

• Social entrepreneurship
• critique
• context
• intervention
• research agenda
• enactment

Notes

1. This research uses the attribute ‘affirmative’ to signify that a critique is not inherently negative nor aims necessarily at re-stabilizing a situation governed by a new orthodoxy (Grant 1993). Rather it makes possible creativity in researching the field of social entrepreneurship.

2. Note that Fournier and Grey's (2000) call for anti-performativity has elicited mixed reactions in the realm of organization studies. The most noteworthy critical claim was that a nonperformative stance toward management would indeed be antithetical to practical knowledge and application.

3. The concept ‘inheriting’ approaches text not in the sense of some ‘content enclosed in a book or its margins, but [as] a differential network, a fabric of traces referring endlessly to something other than itself, to other differential traces’ (Derrida 2004, p. 69).

4. As indicated by the Latin ‘con’ of ‘context’ (meaning together), social entrepreneurship should be understood as socio-political performance that transforms common sense by relating it to other texts (hence con-texts).

5. It is important to note that historicizing as inheriting must be distinguished from standard approaches to history that seek to reveal the origin (and hence identity) of a given sign (cf. Agamben 2009). As with Foucault's (1994) genealogy, historicizing opposes the search for origins precisely because such endeavors imply the existence of a pre-ordained, true identity of a concept.

6. In the German version: ‘was hätte sein können oder sollen und vielleicht eines Tages sein kann, aber vorläufig nur im Stadium von … Ruinen vorhanden ist’.