Still Living and Practicing Social Enterprise: The Methodological Potential of Ethnography- Symposium 17th June, 2016, Glasgow Caledonian University

Social enterprise, as a field of study, has provoked scholarly engagement ranging from spontaneous celebration to critical engagement. However we lack a deep understanding of how the optimistic and politically powerful, yet ambiguous and elusive ideal is lived in social practice. Ethnography, ethnomethodology and workplace studies offer the methodological potential to carve out local experimental practices of social-problem solving, and to capture the ways managers, staff and/or target groups reflect on their engagement in entrepreneurial activities. Such insights are essential for (1) developing multilayered, contextualised views on social enterprise (2) understanding the temporal, spatial and cultural dynamics of social entrepreneurship, and (3) taking sufficient account of the effects of social entrepreneurial policies on vulnerable target groups. 

Ethnography also offers the potential to move the debate around social enterprise beyond idealized concepts and managerial views. Since emerging from the field of Anthropology, ethnography has been employed to study, in particular, the social realms of colonized, deprived, and marginalized groups of people. It has proven analytical strength in unraveling the contradictory, paradoxical aspects of human practice and the subtle workings of power. Social enterprise – as an organizational form comprising competing logics of social inclusion and management practice – demands an appropriate set of methods that makes room for complexity and counter-discourse, that considers social enterprise within its wider (political) context, and that attends to the longitudinal and spatial dimensions of organizational behavior which, to date, have been neglected in much of the academic literature. Potential questions which might be studied from an ethnographic perspective include: What are the long-term effects of social entrepreneurial practices? How do organizational actors sustain their social values in times of economic pressure? Which hopes and expectations motivate clients to participate in social entrepreneurial projects and how do they experience “personal improvement”? Under what circumstances do these initiatives fail or succeed?  
    
Programme

      0900-0930- Registration- Tea/Coffee
      0930-0945- Introduction and welcome
      0945-1030- Anna Kopec, University of Northampton 'Exploring the motivations and the role of empathy in social enterprise'
      1030-1130- Richard Hull, Goldsmiths, University of London 'Can ethnography do Big P politics?'
      1130-1145- Tea/Coffee
      1145-1230- Aurelie Soetens, HEC Liege- Management School of the University of Liege 'Cecosesola- Venezuelan organism of cooperative integration'
      1230-1330- Iain Cairns, Glasgow Caledonian University 'Duped lefties' or 'closet Tories': the experience of Asset Based Community Development practitioners'
       1330-1415- Lunch
       1415-1515- Juli Qermezi Huang, London School of Economics and Political Science ' Social entrepreneur as boundary object: a methodological and ethnographic exploration of ambiguity'
       1515-1600- Next steps
        
Hosted by:Yunus Centre for Social Business and Health
When: Friday, 17 June 2016 from 09:00 to 16:00 (BST) 
Where: Glasgow Caledonian University: Centre for Executive Education (CEE) Room 6 - Cowcaddens Road, Glasgow, G4 0BA 
Fee: £25

To register for the event please use the following link: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/still-living-and-practicing-social-enterprise-tickets-24617625982

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