"“Everyone a Changemaker”: Social Entrepreneurship, Hegemony and the Fantasy of Social Change"

Abstract

In the wake of the economic crisis a space has opened up for imagining alternatives to capitalism ‘as we know it’, or so it seems. In this article we use the case of social entrepreneurship as the par excellance utopia in the “post-ideological” era to chart how seemingly radical articulations of the social might eventually solidify rather than transgress the status quo. Drawing on a mixed methods analysis of Austrian social entrepreneurship support institutions based on an affect-oriented approach to hegemony, we illuminate the articulatory mechanisms which align social entrepreneurship with an ethos of enjoyment that entertains the (illusionary) view that progress and wealth are possible if (and only if) social issues are subjected to pragmatic business solutions. Particularly, we emphasize that semantic vagueness and the fantasmatic effacing of the social’s inherent contingency form essential preconditions for the establishment of hegemonic meaning. The article concludes that rather than appealing to more ‘realistic’, i.e., post-fantasmatic accounts of social entrepreneurship, the task consists in revealing the political and fantasy narratives which engender the illusion of fullness.