Institutionalization of social entrepreneurship in Russia: an inter-sectoral partnership or a business project?

Key words: social entrepreneurship, discourse, actor, sector, organization The aim of the project is to identify the main driving forces and vectors of institutionalization of social entrepreneurship in Russia, which is... [ view full abstract ]

Key words: social entrepreneurship, discourse, actor, sector, organization
The aim of the project is to identify the main driving forces and vectors of institutionalization of social entrepreneurship in Russia, which is considered as a result of interaction of discourses and public activity of the actors of three sectors of society as for-profit, not-for-profit and government.

The main tasks of the project are the following:
- identifying and describing the typical actors of three sectors that take part in process of legitimation of social entrepreneurship (SE)in Russia
- identifying and describing the variation of existing forms of SE in terms of types of ownership, organizational regimes, fields of work and economic conditions;
- identifying and describing the typical discourses of SE which actors of three sectors use with taking into account their image of desired normative order, advantages and disadvantages of embedding in current norms or construct new norms;
- evaluation of cohesion and/or contradiction between the discourses of the main actors and description of the main vector of the institutionalization of SE in its reflection of the interests of the actors of three sectors of society.

Empirical grounds. The discourse of SE arises in Russia in 2007 with the establishment of the Russian private foundation “The fund of regional social programs “Our Future” whose main activity is organization of regular competition of SE projects in the Russian region. From that time the popularity of the term of SE and the number of finalists winning the competition have increased. At the same time from the beginning of public recognition of SE there is a tendency to shape its concept as a predominantly business-like (for-profit) activity. Current turn of governmental policy to creation of the new infrastructure for SE development in the regions as well as preparation of a new bill introducing the concept of SE in the legal field seem to support business bias of SE development. At the same time as in Russia there is no received view on what SE really is as well as sufficient information on SE real practices the concept of SE remains a subject of power play and of competition of high rollers where the voice of nonprofit sector is relatively small (hypothesis).
Methodology.
The research is based on desk review of government documents, texts of 2 versions of state bills on SE as well as definitions, programs and reports, coming from three sector actors in public discussions on SE development in Russia. In addition to formal statements and reports I analyze the results list of search by key words ”social entrepreneurship” in Yandex searcher in order to identify the agendas and sector origin of the organizations who are the most active Internet players in the SE discourse development. In order to form more balanced list of soc.entrepreneurs I used different sources from different sectors data base.
The research is partially based on Teasdale 2012 approach to analyze SE as a result of competing discourses and a policy tool as well as on Grenier 2009 analysis of SE policy in UK as a neo-liberal project. The paper also develops ideas of the author expressed in Moskovskaya 2011 with reference to 4 models of state – social entrepreneur relationships in Russia based on empirical evidence of previous research.
Grenier P (2009) Social Entrepreneurship in the UK: from Rhetoric to Reality. In: Ziegler R (ed.) An Introduction to SE: Voices, Preconditions, Concepts. Chentenham
Moskovskaya A. (Ed.)2012 Social entrepreneurship in Russia and in the world: Practice and Research. Moscow: HSE Publishing House.(In Rus.)
Teasedale S. (2012) What's in a Name? Making Sense of Social Enterprise Discourses. Public Policy and Administration, 27 (2)