The role of community entrepreneurs in depleted communities: A case study of Father Greg MacLeod’s ‘action research’ in Cape Breton

Abstract

Community Business Entrepreneurs are significant actors in many depleted communities – towns, cities and regions which have lost much of their rationale as economic spaces as a result of disinvestment by capital, resulting in job losses, high unemployment and a declining population as younger people leave, but which retains high social attachment to place. This paper reviews two books about Father Greg MacLeod, a catholic priest, professor and prominent community business entrepreneur in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, a region whose once thriving resource-based economy was devastated by the contraction and ultimate closure of its coal and steel industries in the final decades of the 20th century. Government initiatives to create replacement jobs were largely ineffective. MacLeod played a key role in establishing several community businesses, notably New Dawn and BCA Holdings, using what was at the time the innovative structure of the company limited by guarantee. The paper reviews his ‘entrepreneurial experiments’ – which he described as ‘action research’.