Abstract
This article theorizes how a social enterprise builds, strengthens, and legitimizes community among marginalized people. Prior work investigated social enterprises and community-led social enterprises, or social enterprises rooted in community culture. Missing are perspectives on the roles of social enterprises in community creation and support among marginalized individuals. This qualitative interpretive study draws on ethnographic and netnographic data collection of the social enterprise Familyship; marginalized entrepreneurs developed a social enterprise to address a particular social problem, thus helping other marginalized people to address their constraints and collectively legitimizing a new meaning of what family is and does as a community. The study finds five overarching themes—namely, informing, protecting, connecting, supporting, and normalizing—that characterize Familyship’s process of building, supporting, and legitimizing a community among marginalized individuals. I discuss these findings with regard to contributions to theory on social enterprise and institutional voids, as well as social enterprise and online communities.
Highlights
Markets and governmental institutions often fail to serve people that live outside the mainstream, leaving institutional voids to be filled, or not, by other means, such as social enterprises [1,2,3,4,5,6]
While the findings suggest that social enterprises have the ability to bring individuals together and decrease social exclusion, they do not reveal the specific ways in which social enterprises bond marginalized people together in building, strengthening, and legitimizing community
Five overarching themes characterize Familyship’s function of building, supporting, and legitimizing a community among marginalized individuals: Table 1 summarizes the findings along five dimensions: informing, protecting, connecting, supporting, and normalizing
Summary
Markets and governmental institutions often fail to serve people that live outside the mainstream, leaving institutional voids to be filled, or not, by other means, such as social enterprises [1,2,3,4,5,6]. Social enterprise is a fascinating phenomenon because it involves many facets: entrepreneurial innovation, organizational structures and legitimation, and innovative ways of using business and market logics to create solutions to the burning social problems of our times One such problem is the marginalization of certain persons or groups within society. The authors’ ideas of filling institutional voids, empowering marginalized communities, and matching people through an ICT platform will be echoed in my own study; their findings fall short of answering my research question: How can a social enterprise build, strengthen, and legitimize community among marginalized people?
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