Actor-network theory as an approach to social enterprise

This thesis is an exploration into the activities of actors who are engaged in organising diverse markets that challenge some of the most straightforward notions about markets - namely profit and self-interest. The very notion of social enterprise is indeterminate, having emerged in Ghana in the mid-1980s among practitioners in movements such as fairtrade and various types of community-based organisations. Actors in these movements are interesting in that they do not strive for profit, what most people think markets are about; rather, they seek social value or social impact. They are distinctively different from various communitarian movements (Etzioni 1988) which have very little participation in markets, relying rather on voluntary and non-monetary resources. Social enterprises are interesting as actors since they combine economic and social values (Defourny 2001). Most social movements that struggle for social or economic justice have started by setting up demonstration camps, sit-ins and civic educational workshops outside the gates of well-guarded market institutions (Pleyers 2010; Reitan 2007). In the case of social enterprises, the hopes of activists in various guises - NGO staff, development consultants, ICT-entrepreneurs, community health workers, leadership mentors, ethical investors and social reformers alike - have joined markets and created enterprises for their pursuits. Social enterprises, therefore, constitute a sphere where social values are enacted through markets which have the capacity for plural notions of calculation and measuring (Barry and Slater 2002). Social enterprises demonstrate that economies do not necessarily converge towards utilitarian self-interest. The pursuit of social value indicates that a ’purification’ (Latour 1993b) and ’disentanglement’ (Callon 1998a) of markets to constitute spheres of economic agency alone are not the only possible courses of action. Indeed, many for-profit enterprises are also quite open about the existence of political and social motivations in market settings (Fligstein 2001), as exemplified for instance by social innovations towards greater car safety (Palmaas 2005).