Never Mind the Buzzwords: Comparing Social Enterprise Policy-Making in the United Kingdom and Australia

Abstract

Comparative studies of social enterprise have shown that social enterprise exhibits distinctive characteristics across ‘world regions’. This article uses corpus analysis to empirically explore social enterprise policy in the United Kingdom and Australia. We explore convergence in both datasets by looking at semantic structure, comparing each country’s policy corpus against ‘everyday’ language. This allows a comparison of the convergences between the two datasets (policy discourses) compared to a control (everyday language). Although both are reflective of tropes associated with social policy, we also explore linguistic divergence to unpack the different ways that social enterprise is represented in the respective countries. We find a stronger emphasis on work and employment categories in the UK, which aligns with public policy that has linked social enterprise to local and community development. In Australia, market-oriented categories are emphasized. We argue that policy-makers engage with social enterprise in distinctive ways and that like institutional settings do not necessarily lead to like policy outcomes. These findings illustrate why corpus analysis is an important complementary technique for comparative policy analysis as the approach reveals the discursive nuances – or divergences – between countries. Ultimately, this contributes to long-running debates in policy studies scholarship regarding convergence and divergence among regime types.