social/consumer to public/citizen
a language, approach to and understanding of what they did. The cases, with one starting question attached to each, are the following:
1. Aluma. This is about publishing a regular journal about homeless people, sold only by homeless people. The idea is to provide some finances as well as some decency to them. We can ask one starting question about this case, in the spirit of what this chapter is all about: Is there a ‘public-entre- preneurial’ possibility to help homeless people to help themselves to a more decent living?
2. The old shipyard park. The vision is here to build a huge outdoor skate- board arena on part of the ground of an old (closed) shipyard, in Malmö south of Sweden. We can ask the following question: Can the building of a large outdoor skateboard arena for young people to get together, making it possible for them to practise their lifestyle, be understood as entrepre- neurship?
3. The Brewery. Some youngsters cannot make it in the official school, nor do they feel comfortable with traditional pedagogic ways. The Brewery provides them with an alternative. Question: Is it an entrepreneurial achievement to provide reasonable education also to people that do not fit into schools, which most young people attend without having a problem?
4. Home Service. Sweden is becoming more and more a country of immi- grants. Along with this development come challenges of providing possi- bilities for a new life for these ‘new-Swedes’. There is a growing home service black market where lots of ‘new-Swedes’ earn their income. The
‘Home Service’ project seeks to transform unemployment and social secu- rity money to start-up money for prospective home service entrepreneurs in this group of ‘new-Swedes’. Question: Is it of public interest to create room for a heterogeneity of ‘new-’ and ‘old-Swedes’, to fit the former group better into their new society by, for instance, make them interested in working publicly as consultants in servicing homes and institutional buildings?
5. The Green Room. This is a cooperative effort among researchers, society and artists to build a place for recreation, therapy and relaxation in a horti- cultural setting. Question: How could such a project be described as entre- preneurship?
6. Fair Play. By setting up a training program for a soccer team, a problem that has been built to truly take care of the hopes and dreams of the team (consisting of young boys that have just become teenagers). Creating an arena to support sports in the broad sense rather than only encouraging elites requires resistance against dominant forces determining what sport is. It demands organisational skills to legitimise sports as exercise rather than competition. Is this also entrepreneurship?
This project has been truly built on giving and taking. The learning settings (what are later referred to as the workshops) have never been classrooms and the generation of a common language has opened a partly new world to all participants, project leaders as well as case participants. The cases will be described in more detail below.
We will argue that even if possibilities like the ones above have been actu- alised through significantly hard-working and idea-driven people that we could call entrepreneurs, we cannot, at the same time, make them resonate with either traditional business entrepreneurship (which is too common in the mainstream discourse on social entrepreneurship), or with ‘new public management’s’ framing of such entrepreneurship in terms of economic effi- ciency, that is, in terms of management (as by Osborne and Gaebler, 1992).
‘Public entrepreneurship’ instead allows a novel discussion (and frees ‘a people’) that up until now has been missing in discussions of entrepreneurship as a societal force. We believe that the questions asked (along with the short initiation to the cases above) all call upon citizens to act, rather than upon consumers to buy. In this chapter we want to substantiate this characteristic of what we call ‘public entrepreneurship’: in order to create sociality that enhances life for people, it produces a public space in which citizens can act.
Public, Social, Consumer and Citizen
Public, in ‘public entrepreneurship’, is by no means a self-evident choice.
What we want to say is related to a broad set of terms – perhaps more often collected under the ‘brand’ of social entrepreneurship. Public here stands in relation to private and as such forms a piece of history in itself. The Latin privatus functions in the context of law and describes that (often a right) which belongs to a particular person, group or class, as opposed to the public.
Importantly it describes what cuts you off from the public, whereas the social – from socius – describes the bond. The Roman virtues of abundantia (the ideal of there being enough food and prosperity for all segments of society) and aequitas (fair dealing both within government and among the people) indicates how the discourse on the public was inaugurated. It seems to us, from our experiences of the workshops, that people engaged in public entrepre- neurship have rescued the qualities and vitalities of these virtues from being marginalised in a Western history of gradual individualisation and subsequent privatisation of ethics (Bauman, 1993). Bauman would say that this (post- modern) ethics, resisting the privatised ethics of modernism, would be rela- tional, based on a responsibility for the other. By public we are not referring to a ‘public sector’. We use the term in a much broader, historically contingent, sense.
To contextualise our use of ‘public’ we need to relate it to ‘the social’, to
the development of the early nation states’ economic government and the subsequent establishment of modern capitalism:
Ever since the end of the Middle Ages, and particularly as a result of the increasing frequency of war and civil war in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the search was on for a behavioural equivalent for religious precept, for new rules of conduct and devices that would impose much needed discipline and constraints on both rulers and ruled, and the expansion of commerce and industry was thought to hold much promise in this regard (Hirschman, 1977, p. 129).
A certain form of governmental rationality – governmentality – more consciously debated after Machiavelli’s Prince (1513), subsequently made the expression ‘economic government’ into a tautology, ‘given that the art of government is just the art of exercising power in the form and according to the model of the economy’ (Foucault, 1991a, p. 92). Between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries, the word ‘economy’ is in the process of acquiring its modern meaning. During this time it is also
becoming apparent that the very essence of government – that is, the art of exercis- ing power in the form of economy – is to have as its main objective that which we are today accustomed to call ‘the economy’. The word ‘economy’, which in the sixteenth century signified a form of government, comes in the eighteenth century to designate a level of reality, a field of intervention, through a series of complex processes that I regard as absolutely fundamental to our history (ibid., pp. 92–93).
Within such a reality one could then describe the broader system of institu- tional and juridical forms that try to secure ‘free, open market competition’ as capitalism. It is in this context that contemporary uses of the terms ‘private’
and ‘public’ can be understood.
Through the emergence of the modern state, the private is by no means an autonomous sphere but rather a bundle of rights and guarantees mediated by the state. The social – a field of policies, institutions and scientific disciplines, in place sometime in the mid nineteenth century – can be seen as an invention (originating in post-revolutionary France) meant to make visible the specific problems related to inequality and poverty in a society founded on civil and political inequality (Dean, 1999).
We use the concept ‘public’ to think our way back from ‘social and soci- ety’. We do this, as will be clarified throughout this chapter, as a reaction against how managerial economic rationality has come to define and refer to
‘the social’ while being called upon to provide expert knowledge in the recent urge for ‘re-inventing government’ (Osborne and Gaebler, 1993). This move from social to public, however, necessitates a second move – from consumer to citizen. How come?
Being subject to governmental exercise of power in the form of the econ-
omy (Foucault, 1991a), the social has gradually been re-described as a form of the economic. This has happened through a ‘progressive enlargement of the territory of the market – the realm of private enterprise and economic ratio- nality – by a series of redefinitions of its objects’ (Gordon, 1991, p. 43).
Among these objects we here focus on how citizen has become redefined more and more as consumer. The social is today becoming an epiphenomenon of the market, and therefore represented as populated with consumers. Management knowledge – which is the provider of ‘Social Entrepreneurship’ and ‘New Public Management’ discussions – has thus found new areas for its expertise serving/staging ‘social entrepreneurs’ to this bundle of markets represented as
‘society’, where they act responsibly to meet the demands of consumers.
When we advocate a move from social to public we need to replace the role of consumer with a role as open and generative as we find ‘public’ to be. We have opted for the role of citizen and try to affirm the political and ethical possibilities this role brings. From there we imagine that the social again can become shaped in new ways through forms of public entrepreneurship. Later, we clarify the two moves our chapter seek to argue for in discussing entrepre- neurship and social change, as described in Figure 5.1 on page 102.
Purpose and Structure
How can we understand entrepreneurship as social change if we want to avoid starting out from a composite concept (social) which is already ordering and limiting our possible imaginings of entrepreneurship? We are looking for a more raw point of departure, one that opens up the process of creating social- ity as an entrepreneurial force and achievement in public space. In order for us to understand entrepreneurship as a force creating social change today, we have found it necessary to disassociate ‘the social’ from the market. Doing so we move the social away from being ‘swallowed’ by the market (particularly in neoliberal discourse) towards the public. The noun public, far from repre- senting something unproblematic or good (vis-à-vis the social, which would then be the bad), describes the people as a whole (populace). As such it is more open and less composite. In public space sociality can be created and trans- formed. Sociality is understood as collective investments in a desired image, investments which produce an assemblage, a heterogeneous multiplicity united by co-functioning, by sympathy.
Having made such a move, our cases suggest that we need to find an alter- native role to represent the basis for participation in the public arena as a creator of sociality. Neither the consumer role of the market, nor the already too over-coded ‘social entrepreneur’ of the ‘enterprising society’ allows us the kind of openness in which the process of ‘becoming-public-entrepreneur’ can be conceptualised and practiced. From the case stories we conclude that the
role of citizen (which has a complex and ‘problematic’ history, see discussion in 2.1 and 2.3) describes well the way people participate in the public arena when creating sociality.
This chapter proceeds according to the following structure. In the first two sections of part two we position our framework against what we have described as the ‘ruling social entrepreneurship discourse’ so as to build a conceptual framework for which our moves from social to public and from
SOCIAL
CONSUMER
The sphere of ‘social entrepreneurship’
PUBLIC
CITIZEN
The sphere of ‘public entrepreneurship’
1.
2.
1–2a 1–2b
Notes:
1. Through an analysis of the social and the government of the social, we argue for a need to move to the public as the site for what is usually called ‘social entrepreneurship’. 1-2a The analysis of the social reveals an increased tendency to populate the social with consumers, corresponding to a re-description of the social as a form of the economic.
2. Having argued for the need to move from social to public leaves us with the need to move from consumer to a more generative role populating the public. We opt for the role of citizen. 1–2b We see a point in relating the citizen to entrepreneurship. From our cases we find support for suggesting that ‘public entrepreneurship’ emerges out of citizenship rather than from a role as consumer.
Figure 5.1 From social/consumer to public/citizen
consumer to citizen are central in the third section. We are then ready to turn to the stories of public entrepreneurship (part three). These stories emerge from a study in Malmö (the very southern part of Sweden) conducted over sixteen months, from August 2003 to November 2004. We analyse these cases (in part four) so as to launch into a discussion that attempts to affirm how our moves can make a difference (part five), that is, how ‘public entrepreneurship’
is a concept allowing us to tell stories of a people presently missing in discus- sion of entrepreneurship in society. In part five we also conclude this study with formulations of new problems, and draw implications from it.