A
specter is haunting the globe since the sixties – the specter of Social
Enterprise. All the powers of old have
entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this specter. Like all ‘holy
alliances’ of the past, they will fail, not least because it offers genuine
alternatives for communities that are really neither served by commercial
providers nor by government programs that produce results meaningful to their
needs. Social enterprises are created on the fault lines between market forces
and charity, between the necessity of averting unrest and discontent and the
imperatives of continuing to create opportunity on which a knowledge-driven
economy depends. Venture
philanthropy, CSR
and charitable
foundations, classic and also non-traditional cooperatives have
experimented for some time with a broad range of initiatives. They range from
microcredits to social direct investment to many versions of small-scale,
targeted help with self-help. Sometimes their underlying objectives include
social engineering and sometimes they do not.
But
overall, social enterprise is
here to stay. It is no threat to for-profit operations, nor does it erode
their realistically perceived market potential. Only at the fringes of
predatory capitalism (think sub-subprime mortgages, pre-paid credit cards
accruing fees greater than their ‘credit line,’ bad-faith insurance policies or
violations of implied consumer trust) need it be expected that semi-charitable service
to less than privileged target audiences, sometimes to the ultra-poor, would somehow
interfere with bona fide generation
of profit and other aspects of commercial shareholder value.
While
the traditional political left finds itself at a loss for effective solutions
and its reflexive reach for Big
Government and entitlement spending has failed resoundingly over
considerable parts of the twentieth century, isolationist concepts such as
opposition to free trade in North America or quasi-isolationist proposals
fashionable in Europe such as taxing machines or hard drives as “job killers”
do not resolve anything. Social enterprise attempts to put technology and
education to differently prioritized uses that ultimately all aim to put
existing tools and concepts to a smarter use with greater holistic value
creation for the public interest. It is not synonymous with volunteerism.
Political
and philosophical views about the proper role of government or the optimum size
and funding of the welfare state may well differ across many cultures and political
flavors. It will continue to make for die-hard election issues. What cannot
differ, though, because it operates on the very principles of a free market and
in the organizational, structural and legal forms and tools of private
enterprise, is the use of imaginative entrepreneurial means to effect
impactful social change. Whether one wants to proclaim socialism dead or simply
hibernating, the conclusion “if you can’t beat them, join them, they must be
doing something right” has been demonstrated more than impressively across all
the success stories of Eastern Europe as well as by the legacy of Deng Xiaoping,
the man who transitioned China from cultural revolutionary chaos to capitalist
juggernaut (yet
was also responsible for the 1989 massacre at Tienanmen Square) with all
its remaining environmental and civil libertarian issues. But one of Deng’s unforgettable
aphorisms is particularly memorable in this context: “Poverty is not socialism.
To be rich is glorious.”
