In line with the second topic in the thematic line ‘Social enterprises, sustainable transition and common goods’, this paper brings to life situated community economic action that preserves common goods while instituting... [ view full abstract ]
In line with the second topic in the thematic line ‘Social enterprises, sustainable transition and common goods’, this paper brings to life situated community economic action that preserves common goods while instituting basic rights to a safety net (or human security). The fundamental contribution of the paper is a proposal for the rethinking of social value of social enterprise to more sensitively appreciate the precarious conditions of village communities in developing countries and context specific aspects of wellbeing from a bottom-up perspective.
The main research question guiding this paper is: ‘How is the social value of social enterprise conceived of from an inclusive, bottom-up perspective?’ The premise is that social value is performed through rhetoric as a technical concept, positioning management as the foremost disciplinary tool. Social value stabilises discourses of social enterprise and social entrepreneurship. It is treated more or less as self-explanatory, despite that ‘the economic’ is conventionally extracted from ‘the social’ and as a consequence conditions for the social are rendered artificially thin. This paper is inspired by the call for pragmatic emphasis on valuation as a verb rather than value as noun. This pulls away from the bipolar ‘subjective-objective’ scheme whereby value is either intrinsically subjective or alternatively external to individuals, amounting to a problem that can be addressed only through the correct use of the appropriate metrics (Muniesa 2011, 25-26). The consequential collapse of social value into a process, that can be at once a ‘thing’ and an ‘experience,’ collapsing the division between subjectivity and objectivity, also draws support from texts on embodied cognition (Varela et al. 1992). People provoke the reality of social value at the same time that they consider it. Therefore, to understand social value, power cannot be ignored. At the village level in Cambodia, I find that the tendency for more powerful people’s justificational narratives for certain actions to take precedence over those of less powerful individuals certainly cannot be neglected. Attention to little narratives that transcend the scope within which social value is conventionally interpreted is therefore especially imperative because the moral expectations of social enterprises and social entrepreneurs cannot be mapped easily onto Cambodian village life.
The data drawn on in this thesis was yielded from an action research project, which took place over the space of one year in two adjacent peri-urban villages in Eastern Cambodia. This project was undertaken in collaboration with ten villagers and has been the basis for a PhD thesis. The objective of this fieldwork was to elicit bottom-upwards perspectives on social enterprise as a building block for community development and wellbeing. This stands in contrast to top-down views of social enterprise as a way to develop new markets and promote ‘business at the bottom of the economic pyramid’ that is pervasive in the language of international development agencies.
In the process of eliciting these perspectives, the action research project led to experiments with bamboo furniture making which, while not proceeding as hoped for, elicited a pre-existing community economy constituted by tacit agreements between the manufacturers of bamboo skewers which are sold to local barbecue businesses and street food vendors. The uncovered little narratives raise questions about collectivity and also how precarious villagers might interpret the notion of ‘social’ enterprise. Bamboo skewer making is not a collective activity. Collectivity beyond the household level is dis- incentivised by dyadic patron-client ties, but these ties also incentivise ‘loose cooperation’ that keeps the skewer making economy in motion. Skewer making keeps bamboo open as a common resource while people’s right to private deliberation on the use of property is also upheld. Multiple economic subjectivities of community members, family members, clients of patrons and people under threat from outside interests are all at once embodied in tacit knowledge of the past and agreements on safety nets.
The discovery of this critical community economy is considered as an instance where the community itself acts in an entrepreneurial way, as far as villagers have ‘organized themselves to respond’ to identified market opportunities that provide a situated sense of wellbeing that can be also called the ‘social value’ that is generated. The insights are instructive for development practitioners seeking to work with strength based approaches to social enterprise promotion as a building block for community development.
References:
Muniesa, F. (2011). A flank movement in the understanding of valuation. The Sociological Review, 59, 24-38
Varela, F.J., Thompson, E. & Rosch, E. (1992). The embodied mind: Cognitive science and human experience. Cambridge, USA: MIT Press
8. Social enterprises, sustainable transition and common goods
