Social Entrepreneurship

A Lesson from Iran for Social Entrepreneurs

by Nathaniel Whittemore

categories: Dissent, Meta, Society

Published June 16, 2009 @ 08:09PM PT

The most important post any one wrote in our social entrepreneurship space today was Jeff Trexler's "Iran's Green Revolution and Social Enterprise." In it, he argues that social entrepreneurs have a tendency to attach their label to a wide array of figures - historical and contemporary - who stand up to create change, but that while self-affirming this tendency can also be blinding. Read the whole thing, but start with this piece:

In recent years, social enterprise experts have clustered around the theory that social entrepreneurs are special, creating the disruptive social innovations that break down suboptimal social equilibria.  It's an inspiring definition to be sure, one that no doubt is a boost to the self-esteem of anyone in the movement.  Yet if we look carefully at real-world movements for change, most of it has reflects the work of people who do not self-identify as social entrepreneurs.

For example, consider how the protest movement is mobilizing.  The core communications media--Twitter, Facebook, blogs, SMS, mobile phones, computers, even the rooftops on which protesters stood to shout--may be tools that social entrepreneurs use, but we did not create them.  The social benefit resulting from social media is at best a positive externality, a second-order consequence derived from someone else's disruptive innovations.

It is also useful to reflect upon the protesters' organizational tactics.  They are not starting social businesses, extending microloans, holding pitch contests or making social investments.  Instead, they are taking to the streets and telling anyone who will listen or watch what they want.  It is a classic display of political force.  Each compelling image from Iran--every impassioned Tweet--is an implicit critique of our naive bubble world where the price of progress is merely a monetary value.

If social enterprise is to mature as a movement, we can't afford to believe our own hype.

It's that last line that I think is the most important. It's incredibly easy in any young, vibrant movement like our own to quickly enable a hegemony of thought that becomes it's own constraining orthodoxy. To allow this to happen to the social entrepreneurship field would be deeply ironic, considering how much of it's appeal is to people looking to harness great tools for changing the world from wherever they come.

In fact, it's only the last line in the piece that I have any questions about. Jeff writes: "The more we insist that social entrepreneurship is a unique agent of historic social change, the less effective--and less credible--we become."

I actually think that the problematic tendency is to see social entrepreneurship as the unique agent of historic social change. Recognizing the power of market strategies to improve lives and to restore the social and environmental bottom lines to the balance sheet rather than the externalities list are powerful, and it does seem to me that there is something new (and powerful) about the networks and institutions forming around the people trying to do that.

The problem is when we forget, or try to reduce, or even try to lay claim to the inherent democratic chaos that has been at the center of every broad modern social movement since the abolitionists started signing petitions more than 200 years ago.

(Photo from Getty Images)