These cases expand the construction of HPSE significantly from its current formulation as managerial, elite, professional, formal, scaled, and dramatic.
They suggest relocations and revisions that expand both the social aspects of entrepreneurial activity and the entrepreneurial aspects of social action.
The cases suggest a domain one could call the social sphere or field as a site of entrepreneurship. (The term ‘public sphere’ could also be used, but in the US context this term is associated with government and citizenship; addition- ally, it fails to capture the private aspects of social life; for example, Addams established a house and built on the metaphor of home.) This refers to broad expanses of social action, with many players, and including complex phenom- ena such as currents of thought and processes of consensus. Blumer (1971) suggests that we focus not on actors or organizations but on social problems and on how they become collectively framed as such. He describes the ‘career of a social problem’: emergence (through agitation, advocacy, activism, violence, and so forth), legitimation (consensus as to explanation for problem),
‘official solution’, and implementation of ‘solution’. This move shifts attention from individual social actors to vast scenes and highly inclusive processes. For example, Addams’s work interacts with a progressive (lower case ‘p’) or social-reform-minded community as well as with a particular context of social class and its reproduction. Individual conscience is a factor, the derivation of which is problematic but must connect to social phenomena (Addams’s father was a devout Quaker, the only identity he chose when introducing himself (Addams, 1910, p. 16); Addams also participated in the Social Gospel move- ment (Handy, 1966, pp. 118, 166, 183–184). Addams blamed her education, finding that intellectual pursuits blunted moral development (Addams, 1910, p. 77). She felt shame that her education had ‘immunized’ her against ‘the automatic response to the human appeal’. Addams also takes her place with the many women leaders of the Progressive era (Muncy, 1991). Similarly, the founding of the homelessness industry may be situated in the context of social protest and activism. The cases of Mayo, Donham and Rockefeller illustrate complex social and ideological agendas at play. Businessmen wanted business to be a respected profession in the same way as law or medicine. The institu- tion of the business school was struggling to become established. The schools needed acceptable research and content – advertising jingles would not pass muster. Science in the model of medicine and history in the model of the humanities were needed. The content was weighed relative to the loss of Latin, Greek, and according to some, even proper English. Appropriate faculty had to be recruited, satisfying education experts as well as the CEOs funding the enterprise. Socialists were said to be on the faculty at Harvard. Businessmen had made available the sums of money necessary to accomplish their agendas amid threats from education experts, humanists, socialists, workers, agitators, politicians, social workers, and regulators. Following common-sense depic- tions of entrepreneurship, one might say that Mayo sold an idea. But he was also broke and desperate to get a job, and his story is about getting work. He had dropped out of medical school, with a loss of economic and social status.
But he creatively combined psychology, politics, and industry; and he walked
into the opportunity of Southard’s death and the larger opportunity of the struggle between industrial democracy and corporate autonomy (O’Connor, 2001). One might say that Donham built a business. But he also built an insti- tution that is almost taken for granted in social and academic status today, starting from dire financial and moral straits.
Analogue terms moving from for-profit to nonprofit contexts are often proposed: ‘donations’ become ‘investments’, ‘giving’ becomes ‘partnering’.
Letts et al. (1997) translated venturing to philanthropy; Kanter (1999) repot- ted the corporate R&D function into philanthropy; Porter and Kramer (1999) adapted corporate strategy to large nonprofit foundations and their stakehold- ers. One value-laden term is claimed to carry over smoothly to another, but some nonprofit leaders dispute this (Sievers, 2001). In the social realm, along- side economic currency is moral currency. Legitimacy building draws from and traffics in this currency (Suchman, 1995). Legitimacy has a moral aspect, in which an institution meets social criteria as to what is expected and judg- ments as to whether its activities are ‘the right thing to do’ (Suchman, 1995, p.
579). It also has a hidden aspect in that it becomes taken for granted through repetition over time (Berger and Luckmann, 1966), that is, actions simply
‘make sense’ (Suchman, 1995, p. 575).
The cases support legitimacy as an analogue to monetary currency in conventional entrepreneurship, with one important qualification: legitimacy is arbitrated at the broadly social, local community, and individual moral levels.
It does not require or lead to economic wealth, although it may. Legitimacy building depends on access to information and individuals being able to inter- act with others. It also depends on communities that tolerate or even welcome such an exercise. In the case of homelessness, public shame was mentioned as a moral currency. Winning the public sentiment was a goal and milestone, moving shame from an individual matter of defective persons to a social matter reflecting on the moral poverty of a community that tolerates home- lessness. However, what complications ensue when public opinion, through Blumer’s processes of collective definition, converges around the belief that, having granted money to a cause, this cause should be considered solved or should have been solved? Blumer notes that the career of a social problem includes dissolution: the problem becomes part of the order of things. Is the homelessness industry part of the solution or the problem? For the activist I interviewed, entrepreneurial action in homelessness still means ending home- lessness. To allocate more dollars only further fuels the industry that needs homelessness in order to act in the accustomed ways. Here, the quest to under- stand legitimacy reverts to the original formulation of reciprocated typification (Berger and Luckmann, 1966). The power of repetition and the force of habit are deeply social processes, and entrepreneurship theory has not taken them seriously into account. Blumer’s idea of the career of a social problem also
shifts attention from the entrepreneur to the problem and to the social processes that fix a problem as such. The entrepreneur is not only not a hero but also is not even a main character. Whether or not SE could accommodate such a radical move is hard to say; however, this perspective significantly expands the view of the social.
Relocating entrepreneurship to social fields and acknowledging legitimacy building and dissolution as complex social processes greatly expands and deepens SE. Combining insights from the cases – the idea of a vast social sphere or scene and complex social processes of consensus building, moral currency, accumulation, consensus, and legitimacy building – opens a new metaphor for SE. As Kaufman (1985) proposed the ‘bubbling cauldron of organizational soup’ to capture entrepreneurial action, and as Aldrich and Martinez (2001) associated entrepreneurial action with turbulence, so does the metaphor of a social cauldron capture SE spaces and processes. It captures both the idea of a place (social spheres) and process (interaction, interdepen- dence). It suggests the use of ‘new combinations’ and ‘new organizations of industry’ (Schumpeter, 2000) while challenging narrowly conceived notions of these constructs and their workings. Might one approach the case of Jane Addams as recombining a proper young girl’s nineteenth-century education and upbringing, including the requisite European trip, with inspiration from utopian movements and the Quaker religion? She used Toynbee as a model – but she modified it too, and Hull House not only became better known that its model but also earned credit as founding the settlement house movement.
Could threats to the legitimacy of business and capitalism be viewed as inputs that Mayo and others recombined to develop services such as company unions or psychological counseling, and the foundational skills for personnel management? Could the CEOs who funded Mayo’s research be considered co- founders or co-authors as well as consumers of Mayo’s products, his ideas and counseling practices? Although entrepreneurship is usually approached as a planned process, the cases suggest a different view. Mayo did not see himself as constructing organizational behavior or personnel management. This is only seen in retrospect. Mayo needed a job. He pursued a relatively new field (psychology) in a relatively new place (industry). He benefited greatly from happenstance; Southard’s death had left a void that Henderson wanted filled.
Addams spoke of her ‘scheme’ and explicitly rejected the idea of building a thing – especially an organization. Conventional wisdom says that entrepre- neurs create companies that they in turn own. However, these cases suggest different forms of and relationships to entrepreneurship. Instead of companies, we have campaigns, causes, and schemes. We have entrepreneurship with no owner and no main character. We have multitudes of bit players, minute but persistent and emergent interactions, defining moments of ‘official’ defini- tions, playing out through complex, interdependent social processes. What
counts are the interactions and the intertwinings: who/what joins forces with who else/what else, how, where, to what ends, with what consequences.
Finally, SE is also a domain of knowledge. To the extent that we, as researchers, consultants, teachers, and practitioners, ignore or blindly adhere to disciplinary boundaries and the confines of our departmental, institutu- tional, and patronage-based affiliations, our knowledge and practices will stay within these confines. Our work will replicate the logic and structures that enable them. ‘Organizational analysis is an organized and an organizing insti- tution’ (Ackroyd, 1993, p. 104). As Ackroyd notes, this is a matter of linkage within the academic community as well as to ‘the community more generally conceived’ (Ackroyd, 1993, p. 113). What are our links to this more generally conceived community? So much of academic life disrupts links to communi- ties, particularly local communities. We go away to graduate school, we are encouraged to move elsewhere for our first job, and then frustrated tenure- seeking often takes us elsewhere. Our legitimized research paradigms empha- size objectivity and underemphasize the role of local context in pursuit of generalizability. The business school dilemmas confronted by Mayo and Donham continue to this day. Striving to legitimize ourselves vis-à-vis the other professions, we have tended to adopt and reify the interpretations that they initiated, but other possibilities for legitimacy building exist as sketched in this chapter.
Twenty years ago, Peter Dobkin Hall called for studies of ‘relationships among firms, government, and nonprofits within local, regional, and industry- wide contexts’ (Hall, 1985, p. 66). He was not including still broader social concepts formulated here, such as the social cauldron, legitimacy, and consen- sus processes. Today he reports little advance, as such work requires
‘Chandlerian breadth and Parsonian depth of theoretical vision’ (Hall, 2005) – not the routine fodder of organizational studies.
SE offers the potential to pursue the theory and practice of creative action within and for society. Many avenues are open. For example, as Hall suggests, one might envision collaborations that cross domains of knowledge (disci- plines) and practice (the three sectors). Promising directions are offered in sociology, specifically the social movement literature (McAdam et al., 1996) and in institutional and neo-institutional theory (Hwang and Powell, 2005). In addition, one might envision community-crossing collaborations focusing on the careers of social problems, this time including people who suffer from those problems (as co-authors, not subjects) and the broader stakeholder of society itself. This raises the question as to how to articulate the ‘point of view’ of society as a social actor. How do we articulate the point of view of this ‘subject’ from a methodological and ethical standpoint? This question has important political implications too, of far greater consequence to society than to organizational research per se. This chapter has drawn extensively on
historical accounts. Indeed, history is much neglected as a research enterprise and as a data source. Using biographies, correspondence, and archives, social- entrepreneurial histories such as those sketched here offer rich examples to inform social action as well as organization studies. Finally, one could envi- sion collaborations with contemporary social entrepreneurs working in social cauldrons and living out the ideas discussed here with practical consequences for business and society. Regardless of the path, SE presents wide openings and big opportunities – for us all.