Up for Grabs: A Critical Analysis of the Distortion of Social Entrepreneurship Discourse in the United Kingdom

Abstract

This paper explores how political institutions use language in social policy to control and naturalise understanding of key social issues and practices. Specifically, I address the impact of blurred discourses and the exploitation of a cultivated ambiguity surrounding social entrepreneurship (SE). In so doing, it contributes to knowledge by empirically analysing the theorised antagonistic relationship between discourse participants in the public sphere. Rather than align with a strictly Habermasian view of public discourses, my analysis is more sympathetic to post-Marxist analysis (i.e. Laclau and Mouffe 2001) by positioning SE-state relations in terms of asymmetrical power and on-going struggle towards hegemony and ultimately, resistance. This latter outcome is especially prescient, since it shows that ideology and meaning cannot be asserted by hegemony-seeking actors where SE meaning is contested in monological rather than dialogical terms (Dey and Steyaert 2010). This opportunity arises because of the persistent debate over the meaning of SE – which creates a discursive space involving academics, practitioners, and political organisations. Similar to the view that SE operates in blurred boundaries between state, private and third sectors, key SE discourse thus also occurs in a blurred space. This arena is created by the discordant ideological views that persist between state, private and third sector interpretations of SE. Furthermore, based on the work of Steinberg (1994), I explain how this discursive space is necessary to pursuing a consensual but contested and on-going struggle for hegemony. To explore the origins of how such ambiguities arise and how and why they are maintained in discourse, I use the example of social enterprise policy and strategy in the United Kingdom. Specifically, I refer to the third way ideology closely associated with the Labour Government (1997-2010), and their social enterprise policies produced between 2002 and 2008. Using a critical discourse analysis (CDA) methodology, I explore the problems faced by organisations that exist within ‘blurred boundaries’ by performing a quantitative semantic-meaning (Wmatrix) and an interpretive policy language analysis (Leitch and Motion 2010). Having focused on the use of language and its power effects on discourse, I examine the statistical support for high frequencies of business/SE semantic tag collocations, based on a corpus containing three SE policy texts from the period and all available Government ministerial speeches between 2002-2008. This corpus was compared against a more general third sector corpus and a baseline corpora. This stage found a high concentration of semantic tags, as distinguished from the other two corpora, principally: ‘business (general)’; ‘social (states and processes)’; and ‘cheap’. Furthermore, I support this by examining the contextuality and intertextuality of SE policies during the defined period, finding that as well as a high level of consonance with SE rhetoric, other discourse participants rejected this forced marriage between third way and SE ideologies. Once both analytical stages were collated and compared, the major finding is empirical support for previous discourse research such as Steinberg (1994), as well as current critical SE research streams (such as Curtis 2008, Steyaert and Day 2010) which call for moves away from the perennial debate on SE definitions. Furthermore, my research shows that in SE-related discursive spaces, an on-going dialogical (rather than monological) process is in fact closer to reality than some researchers suggest, and this is enacted through resistance and counter discourse. Importantly, the paper contributes to SE understanding beyond the contextual confines of the UK SE sector. To this end, I suggest that internationally, SE/state relations might be more progressive, although still contested, if political actors understand the needs of practitioners more clearly and pursue an agenda of dialogical and deliberative, social welfare policy development.