Rural regions are characterised by the proximity and mutual knowledge of its people (Steinerowski/Steinerowska-Streb 2012). Social enterprises operating in rural regions do well to take this into account. In order to receive acceptance in rural communities and to foster social innovations they strive to establish and maintain good relations with local costumers, decision makers and other stakeholders. It is advantageous if social entrepreneurs are personally involved in local communities or if they have local “ambassadors” who maintain and develop local contacts. However, local embeddedness (Seelos et al. 2010) is only one side of the coin. Social enterprises would hardly innovate and enhance rural development if they were just domestically oriented. Rural development also requires to bring in new ideas picked up elsewhere and to establish supra-regional networks that provide ideational, political and economic support. Referring to the social network researcher David Obstfeld it can be said that rural social enterprises succeed with finding solutions for the “idea problem” that may arise in dense local groups as well as for the “action problem” that appear in sparse supra-regional networks (Obstfeld 2005). Against this background I argue that rural social enterprises can be described as intermediate actors (Christmann 2014) that interconnect “the local” and “the global”. The ability of social enterprises to facilitate social innovations depends on how they are locally integrated and supra-regionally connected rather than on being established one-sided only. The innovative power of rural social enterprises derives from bridging the gap between peripheral rural regions and urban centers or networks on other spatial scales.
This assumption is supported by findings of the European research project RurInno (H2020 MSCA-RISE-2015) that was set up to receive insides in how social enterprises proceed to foster social innovations in rural regions. Qualitative case studies of rural social enterprises in Austria, Greece, Ireland and Poland (methodologically based on participant observations and semi-structured interviews) show how social enterprises mobilise resources and organise support on higher political levels and how they collect ideas and concepts elsewhere and reassemble them in their rural contexts. Likewise, we observe that referring to experiences made in other regions or countries is an argumentative technique often used by social entrepreneurs to convince stakeholders in rural communities. Furthermore, not only social enterprises as a whole, but also social entrepreneurs embody characteristics of intermediate actors. Most social entrepreneurs in our sample are return migrants who established social entrepreneurial initiatives in their home regions after having lived for some time at other places.
In the proposed presentation I will, first, explain the preliminary conception of social enterprises as intermediate actors. Second, by empirical examples (Rural technology labs in Austria, Mountain bike trails in Ireland) I will show how bridging the gap between different spheres enables rural social enterprises to foster social innovations.
Christmann, Gabriela B. (2014): Social Entrepreneurs on the Periphery: Uncovering Emerging Pioneers of Regional Development, In: disP 50(1), S. 43-55.
Obstfeld, David (2005): Social Networks, the Tertius IungensOrientation, and Involvement in Innovation, In: Administrative Science Quarterly 50(1), S. 100-130.
Seelos, Christian/Mair, Johanna/Battilana, Julie/Dacin, M. Tina (2010): The Embeddedness of Social Entrepreneurship: Understanding Variation across Local Communities, Working Paper 858, IESE Business School, University of Navarra.
Steinerowski, Artur A./Steinerowska-Streb, Izabella (2012): Can social enterprise contribute to creating sustainable rural communities? Using the lens of structuration theory to analyse the emergence of rural social enterprise, In: Local Economy 27(2), S. 167-182.
2. Social innovation and social entrepreneurship
