Abstract
The present work investigates, with a cultural approach, the emergence of an art-based social enterprise and an art-entrepreneurial ecosystem in Southeastern semi-rural Brazil, shedding light on how local private initiatives may build stronger communities and vice-versa, in a mutually transformative relationship. The focus lies on Oficina de Agosto, a folk-art studio, school, and shop. Fieldwork design combined ethnography and art-based research. The thick description of the phenomenon is organized under the acronym P.L.A.C.E., a conceptual framework describing five principles of community development. The contributions of this study are three-fold: (1) it illustrates how social enterprise may work as an alternative market model that could support community building; (2) it raises awareness to the possibility that social enterprises’ initial social focus may not be perennial or unshakeable, in an undesirable change that might require a both/and mindset and a patient management of paradoxes; and (3) it offers practical managerial recommendations to the SE under focus, which might be extended to other local businesses, or to SEs in other semi-rural Brazilian towns, or even in international settings that might bear economic and social resemblance to our researched context.
Highlights
The present work investigates, with a cultural approach, the emergence of an art-based social enterprise (SE) and an art-entrepreneurial ecosystem in Southeastern semi-ruralBrazil, shedding light on how local private initiatives may build stronger communities and vice-versa, in a mutually transformative relationship
The main take-aways of the present study are three-fold: (1) it illustrates how social enterprise may work as an alternative market model that could support community building; (2) it raises awareness to the possibility that social enterprises’ initial social focus may not be perennial or unshakeable, in an undesirable change that might require a both/and mindset and a patient management of paradoxes; and (3) it offers practical managerial recommendations to the SE under focus, which might be extended to other local businesses, or to SEs in other semi-rural Brazilian towns, or even in international settings that might bear economic and social resemblance to our researched context
We offer an alternative view, based on paradox theory’s both/and perspective, and we bring post-structuralism to the debate, in order to reveal the extra challenge posed by the Brazilian context with its long-lasting history of hierarchical opposing categories that lay underneath the opposing forces a place-based SE usually faces
Summary
The present work investigates, with a cultural approach, the emergence of an art-based social enterprise (SE) and an art-entrepreneurial ecosystem in Southeastern semi-rural. Brazil, shedding light on how local private initiatives may build stronger communities and vice-versa, in a mutually transformative relationship. Oficina de Agosto (OdA), which is a folk-art studio, school, and shop located in the village of Vitoriano Veloso. Other local social enterprises are part of the study, emerging as a result and as co-producers of a new economic, cultural, and societal reality precipitated by OdA. With the aim of showing the article’s significance, this introduction will briefly place the study in a broad geographical, historical, economic, cultural, and theoretical context, will review the current state of pertinent scholarship highlighting its controversies, will present research objectives, and will summarize the principal contributions.
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