Social enterprise - irrational exuberance?

Irrational exuberance - Alan Greenspan's famous phrase about the 1990's stock market boom - has cropped up again recently amidst all the worries about the state of the financial markets.

A few things recently have got me thinking that there are certain parts of the social enterprise sector which are guilty of a bit of irrational exuberance. What started me thinking was realising how much I'd have to pay to go to this year's Voice 08 conference in Liverpool - close to £600 inc VAT. Not much chance of me sharing my vision, shaping the movement or lending my voice at that price.

I'm annoyed because of the simplistic pricing - God's chosen people - social enterprises, academics and the public sector - pay up to £230 - but fat cat capitalists like me pay £600. Last time I looked, I was a social entrepreneur who's self employed and earning a living - but not a £600-for-a-tubthump living. But I also think it's a bit over-the-top for a sector get-together.

I've picked it up on the blogs too - and I'm afraid to say that I think there's a bit of a London thing going on. Hardly a week goes by without SSE's excellent blogger telling us about a social enterprise awards ceremony/launch where the great and the good of the sector have got together over canapes and Belu. And then last week Rodney Schwartz on his blog told us of being bowled over by the presence and enthusiasm of the Chief Exec of BSkyB at the Independent's Social Entrepreneur of the Year awards. I don't know how these people manage to get any work done.

I'm aware that I'm setting myself up as the sector cynic here, but I assure you I'm not. I'm massively enthusiastic about social enterprise and social entrepreneurship - I just think that the reality of social enterprise in 2008 is a little more complex. Away from the glamour at the top end of the market, there are loads of organisations which are working hard at changing internal cultures, working with customers to encourage them to pay for services, and battling with the public sector to get them to match their new-found enthusiasm for social enterprise with an acceptance that someone somewhere still has to pay for social benefits to be delivered. And many of them - like me - are starting to get a bit distracted by some of the more exuberant cheerleading on the touchline.

In the recession that followed the stock market boom of the 1990's, people in the US had bumper stickers which read "I want to be irrationally exuberant again." Perhaps I'd feel the same if the social enterprise bubble burst. But I'd rather try to inject a bit of rationality into it first.

Comments

[Nick Temple]

It's fair comment, Rob, I think. Have you tried haggling them down? Comes back to the reductiveness of defining people by legal structure, which you know I am against...

It's the same at Skoll: £500 per person. And that's the charity / non-profit rate. How many of our students or Fellows will be able to splash out that one event?

Probably valid on London too, or at least on the stratification of the sector (elites / far from the real stuff).

Some of the social entrepreneurship orgs (UnLtd / SSE / Ashoka) are working on a more accessible event: see http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=6965873361

[more to follow]

[Rob Greenland]

Thanks Nick - the other event sounds interesting.

I got in touch with them over the fee for Voice - but haven't had a reply. I'll send them this post.

Thanks

Rob

[Aurelie]

Hi,
I went to a talk yesterday by Prof.Peter Nolan from Judge Business School, Cambridge University. His talk as about capital and freedom...his vision was that the recession will go deep down until we face the abbyss and that the only way to get out will be to cooperate with each other...so, let's go down all together and social enterprise will rise to save the world!!

[Mike Chitty]

Rob

Great, great, great post.
Remember what Jim Collins urges in his 'Good to Great' monograph for the the third sector? Don't take on the habits of mediocrity that define many of the 'for profits' - including over-hyped and over-priced 'networking' gigs.

Sure you could try to haggle them down on price - but why bother? Attitudes, values and beliefs come shining through in these pricing policies, in the shiny awards dinners and other hob-nobbing events. I think that they have forgotten that the third sector is about social justice - not social climbing!

Mike Chitty

[Sue Talbot]

I don't think you're the sector cynic, Rob. It needs saying.

Alt the risk of being crude and simplistic though, I'm kind of not surprised.. After all, social enterprise exists within the context of global capitalism. Social enterprises are subject to the logic of production for profit/the market and the economic, social and political stratification that goes with it. I think it's clear this sets up dynamics within the sector which mirror those in society at large – hence creeping London-centricity, expensive conferences for the (allegedly) great, the good and the clever.

We will constantly have to fight for values of social justice, quality and equality, even within the social enterprise sector, because they will constantly be under attack in an inherently competitive economic and social system whose principal driver is the maximisation of profit, and where money is power.

As the Redskins sang – 'We've got to keep on keepin' on...'

[Rob Greenland]

Aurelie, Mike and Sue, thanks for your comments. It's good to know I'm not alone in questioning some of these things. It's good to see the term social justice keep cropping up. The more I work, the more I realise that I need to keep focussed on the complex yet simple task of doing what I can to create a more socially just society.

[adrian ashton]

"irrational exuberance" can be a useful thing (philosiphically speaking), bold and sweepiong grandiose statements and positions can serve to inspire and cause us to review and challenge our own views, and so better appreciate the wide variety of the social enterprise landscape.
(I'm 'guily' of this myself with the fuss that I kicked up a while ago when i publically lobbied against the CIC).

but you're right Rob - there needs to be a tempered and managed approach, London does seem to be the hub for the movement, but then that's also trur for the charities and private businesses of this world.

maybe what we need to do is to start to look to such examples of irrantional exuberance and consider how they can be applied in our own communities in more meaningly, relevant and approriate ways?

[Rob Greenland]

Good points Adrian. I think that one reason that social enterprise can be so attractive to people is that it's often driven by exuberant people, who are in sharp contrast to some of the world-weary apathy that some of us who work in this arena are accustomed to being faced with.

[Rodney Schwartz]

I do not know how I manage to get much work done either, but hey, I'm not running BSkyB--think about him!

I enjoyed reading your blog

Rod Schwartz

[Rob Greenland]

Thanks Rod - good to hear from you and glad you enjoyed the blog.

[Jeanne]

Enjoyed your blog about conference prices, Rob. It's been a bit of a bug bear of mine for some time that the funding from taxation that's supposed to benefit disadvantaged communities, generally gets diverted into quangos, fancy conferences, overheads (look at Yorkshire Forwards building) and into salaries for the voluntary, public and social enterprise sector. I suspect 90% of funding for regeneration and employment gets so diverted leaving a paltry 10% for the community businesses on the ground. I've set up 3 very successful businesses in my time, and countless community projects. Along with most entrepreneurs, I did so with back of the envelope business plans, costings and marketing strategies. And certainly without the support of business angels and trainers, or expensive conferences. Not that these aren't useful tools once a business is up and running, but if entrepreneurs waited till they'd done SWOTs, been on courses, attended conferences, no business would ever get off the ground. As for conference pricing, a couple of years ago Plunkett Foundation ran a conference in Todmorden at £150 per shot. It was attended by salaried workers in the sector and I think about 3 community businesses. I suggested then that funded delegates in the social enterprise field should donate their tickets to members of the community who wouldn't otherwise be able to afford the fee. Sounds like, from your blog,no-one's taken notice!!

Jeanne

[mike chitty]

Interesting to note that to attend VentureFest this year (where investors meet private sector companies looking for finance) attendance was free of charge.

This insured plenty of investors looking for rising enterprises (who did pay to exhibit)and generally a really good vibe.

The place was jumping!

[Rob Greenland]

Thanks Jeanne and Mike for your comments. I take your point Jeanne about how entrepreneurs get on and do it themselves - but I still think that good quality support (which often comes from other entrepreneurs) is really valuable too.

Fair point too on who attends some of these things. My personal favourite was a meeting I went to in inner city Leeds a few years back to talk to entrepreneurs about social enterprise. Everyone (And I mean everyone - there were a dozen people there) was from a support agency. The guy chairing the meeting carried on regardless. Crazy.

Mike - good to hear that VentureFest was good. It's a long story - but I've managed to get a ticket for Voice - not paying £600 I hasten to add. I'll let you know how it goes later this week...

[Roger Jardine Thomas]

nothing changes. In the 80's I remember turning down a job as tour technical manager for what is now one of the biggest bands in the world. I wanted to do community enterprise etc.

We had a really good musicians collective. The members voted to do a compilation tape to get gigs for the bands, also sell copies.

The umbrella community group immediately closed the collective down and about 60 musicians many unemployed, young or students etc lost everything.

The community group considered what we as a collective were doing was an "unacceptable aspect of Thatchers enterprise culture".

The real reason was the community workers were running a £250,000 a year grant funded project. If the collective "took off" record company etc, they risked losing some of their grant funding. So they shut all the suucessful aspects down. Of course they still all went to their expensive conferences and left the unemployed with nothing.

The Manchester music scence took off, the disbanded collective was on the edge of that and had been contributing building up the scene in the North West.

All the money and jobs went to Manchester, we got nothing. Shut down and opposed because we were motivated and successful, and a threat to continued public funding.

[Jim Brown]

I've come to this blog via today's article in the Guardian, so I was really interested to see the pre-history of this article. I thought it was really appropriate that Rob's Guardian article should appear today, when Voice 08 is taking place. I've stopped going to this event, partly because of the cost, but also because of this queasy feeling I get when in the presence of so many people who are VIP inspired.

I've been closely involved with the development of this sector; since the late 1970s as part of the workers' co-operative movement, and then more recently since the mid-1990s when we rebranded it as social enterprise. (We reinvented a moribund support organisation called London Co-operative Training and renamed it Social Enterprise London).

The trend towards "celebratisation" began early on, with the creation of awards such as Enterprising Solutions, culminating most recently in the Social Enterprise Ambassadors scheme. I try to tell myself that none of this really matters, but I'm afraid it really does, because it masks a steady shift towards a rather conservative, materialist and mainstream approach to social enterprise, which is becoming increasingly indistinguishable from the corporately responsible private sector. Indeed, social enterprise has become the trojan horse for the private sector to take over the field of public service delivery. I guess I shouldn't really find this surprising from a government that has done so much on the back of public-private-partnerships, and sees nothing wrong in the very rich getting even richer.

I continue to hold onto the romantic notion that social enterprise offers us the scope to demonstrate that there are other ways of running a market economy, and other, better ways of running enterprises, that will be for our social good, and capable of addressing the biggest challenge of all, that of environmental sustainability. This in my mind, is closely linked to promoting an enterprise philosophy based on sustainability not growth, which means learning not to over-consume, and to promote happiness through the non-materialist pleasures of collective endeavour.

[Paul Halfpenny]

Great post Rob - just swinging by to add that you didn't miss much, and the values that informed the pricing policy were repeated throughout.

[Rory Ridley-Duff]

So long as it is social rationality :)

(Google "Social Enterprise as a Socially Rational Business")

Best wishes
Rory