Social impact and economic habitus

Keywords: Social impact, economic habitus, meaning, reflexivity While the social enterprise scene is undoubtedly a hot-bed for efforts at measuring and assessing the social impact generated by organisations, it is not the... [ view full abstract ]

Keywords: Social impact, economic habitus, meaning, reflexivity

While the social enterprise scene is undoubtedly a hot-bed for efforts at measuring and assessing the social impact generated by organisations, it is not the only source of innovation around the topic. There are also efforts emerging from within the private sector, with the large consulting firms developing frameworks and new international standards for corporate reporting moving in an eco-socially ‘integrated’ direction. But why are this broad movement taking shape? Using the analytical framework developed by the French sociology Pierre Bourdieu (1977), we look at the inter-related set of dispositions catalysing these developments at an individual level, referred to here as the economic habitus. The economic habitus relates to that set of dispositions which come into play when an actor engages in economic activity. These dispositions may vary between actors and across time, and we will sketch out new developments in the economic habitus based on the research undertaken on social entrepreneurship in Germany. Methodologically, the research was conducted against the backdrop of a structural hermeneutic framework, itself a melding of elements from the critical hermeneutic (Habermas 1990; Ricoeur 1981; Thompson 1981) and cultural theoretical (Alexander/Smith 2001; Rasmussen 1975) traditions. The methods involved were drawn primarily from the ethnographic tradition, with a particular emphasis on elements from the focussed (Knoblauch 2005) and organisational (Neyland 2008) strands. One novel method utilised was the habitus analysis approach (Schäfer 2011) which can be used to assess – at a rudimentary level – the dispositions of actors around given topics. A set of semi-structured interviews were conducted and analysed along these lines in order to produce insights into the economic habitus of the actors in question [i.e. people who work full-time in the social enterprise sector in Germany]. Earlier work on the economic habitus by Bourdieu (2000) as well as Boltanski & Chiapello's (2005) work on the new spirit of capitalism provide a comparative basis for the material. The analyses are organised around the changes in economic dispositions on occupation and meaning before the focus switches to calculation and returns. The final set of analyses goes on to deal with the topic of reflexivity in greater detail. The results indicate that for actors in the social entrepreneurship scene, the opportunity to generate a tangible social impact is a source of meaning in their lives. Life-decisions are weighed up and made on the basis of maximising social impact, which is in turn leading to a situation where organisations and the social enterprise sector itself is moving towards greater eco-social reflexivity. Efforts at improving the formal measurement of social impact can thus be interpreted not only as a reaction to external factors – such as funding possibilities or legitimacy questions – but as a manifestation of the desire on the part of individual actors to quantify and thus possibly maximise their social impact.

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