Schramm is right in that the sting of poverty was alleviated by entrepreneurship that we would not necessarily define as social entrepreneurship today. However, no one argued that conventional entrepreneurship cannot be good. Clearly, it can.
It is argued, however, that social entrepreneurship is inherently good, whereas entrepreneurship is neither inherently bad nor good.
What do I mean by good? Good is food & water, health care, and a sense of belonging. The latter is a motivation of all humang beings according to social psychology, at least. Marketing, to my mind, always plays on this trick. We all know it in the simplest form of bullying in school if you didn't have the Levis Jeans or at least the slight desire to have these Jeans (whatever your particular brand might have been). Now, that we all have grown up, products and services' value depends still on a sense of belonging in a wider sense. Marketing works through the association you have with the product or service. An association that belongs to a certain group of people such as young, elite, arty, relaxed, professional, conservative, traditional, prudent, useful etc. Note that in the age of individualism it might be impossible to find one person or group of persons resembling one association perfectly well but it is, nevertheless, true that we constitute our independence through the simultaneous belongings to distinct groups that we associate with, just think about what makes you unique in your socialentrepreneurship class and then find your friends or colleagues that share this. Thus, marketing creates value by playing of the universal desire to belong.
Marketing is a problem because it creates a need. Without the prior creation of that need no one would buy the product in its current form talking about consumer objects most obviously. Moreover, the development in car-technology for example and the accompanying value creation is probably not much more as the recurrent creation of new desires through smart marketing. Moreover, marketing would not work if everyone had the same or could get the same, rather it is inherent in the free market to make choices. The opportunity cost resembles this perfectly well. Is there an opportunity cost to health care? Life. That's why Prof. Ney explained to us that health care prizes in the free market would probably too high for anyone to pay.
The concept of opportunity costs, of course, makes only sense in a market where you are not forced by necessity to choose a certain option. Cynically speaking, opportunity cost makes sense only if things are not essential to you anymore.
But why do we choose at all then? Because we find one association more appealing than the other to our identity (our multiple simultaneous belongings to different through media and experience induced imaginary groups). Following this idea, one can group consumers according to their values as has been done very successfully (http://www.sociovision.de/ sinus studies).
Finally, marketing only creates the desire that the conventional entrepreneur of consumer products then satisfies. Watering someone's moulth and then letting him have it sounds like a very simple and succesful of making someone very happy, doesn't it? Ever thrown a stick, after holding it up in the air, waiting for your dog to return it?
Unfortunately, the dog example only holds for the individual. On a societal level there are only so many different sticks and so many different dogs. There are big sticks for big dogs and small sticks for small dogs. Size is the price in EUR or $ you have to pay to get your stick. The stratification of society according to income (see sinus studies) helps you to see who gets what and, presumably, also who thinks badly about someoneelse, assuming that:
1.Consumers buy products that they can identify with (if you don't like the verb „identify with“, use like the associations of)
2.Products have a price.
3.Consumers can be grouped by price paid.
All people are consumers.
All people can be grouped by price paid. (What is your financial aid status at Jacobs?)
People generally prefer in-group over out-group „price paid“ being one grouping principle.
Marketing re-enforces economic stratification through constantly grouping people by price paid.
This kind of conventional entrepreneurship is inherently bad because it only fulfills the desire that it created itself and additionally creates foldlines in society according to purchasing power via marketing. If the products starts telling something about your identity the price will, too. Only in a society with equal income this would not inhibit a universally shared sense of belonging...
The good conventional entrepreneur offers you a deal when he can gain from it and you say yes if you can gain as well (see Adam Smith). The bad conventional entrepreneur does the same thing except that the aggregate marketing of all bad coventional entrepreneurs also tells you that your different from your neighbour because you bought his product. The problem here is that through the mass media allmost all people understand the language of the signifiers (e.g. what does an ipod stand for?) but purchasing power at the same time restricts from which signifiers you may choose for yourself.
The social entrepreneur is different. He is inherently good because he does not create the desire of belonging before he gratifies it. He goes where people have a desire or need already without marketing prior to that. For a social entrepreneur society has created the need. For a social entrepreneur society has done the marketing so to say.
Thursday, March 18, 2010
An Interesting Article about Entrepreneurship in General
Hello Everyone,
What do you make of this?
http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/all_entrepreneurship_is_social/
Cheers
S
What do you make of this?
http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/all_entrepreneurship_is_social/
Cheers
S
Friday, March 12, 2010
Social enterprise helps Malawi's poor
By Cassie Farrell Alvin's Guide To Good Business, BBC World, Neno, Malawi |
 Poverty and disease means many in Malawi need urgent help |
The weekly HIV clinic is teeming with patients of all ages, from babies to grand-parents.
A health care worker is questioning one of them about their social and economic background.
He writes down an increasingly grim litany.
Education - none, job - none, children - many, rooms in mud hut - too few.
It is clear that these are people in need.
In Malawi, one in eight adults are infected with HIV.
But drugs alone may not be the answer to this deadly scourge.
Care in the community
In Neno, a remote area in southern Malawi, poverty and HIV are both rampant.
 Edna has created a new life for herself and her children |
There are clutches of straw roofed huts, neglected villages and abandoned crops.
People here are obviously very poor. It is the recipe for a major health crisis, one that is far beyond the resources of the government to cope with.
But in the last three years, they have joined forces with Partners In Health (PIH), a social enterprise dedicated to providing quality health care to the world's poorest people.
PIH believes that social factors are as important as medical ones.
They do not just offer medical care, but practical help as well. They argue that the poor need food, homes, work and education in order to stay healthy, not just tablets and surgery.
This means that a lot of their work does not take place in hospitals, but out in the community.
New life
Edna Joseph was taken in by PIH after she was diagnosed with HIV. Tiny and hunched, she is wasted by the disease and moves with difficulty.
 |  I am so happy not to have to sleep in a house with a leaking roof any more  Edna Joseph |
Seventeen-year-old Edna was married at the age of 13 and has two small children.
Her husband was adult when she met him.
After being diagnosed with HIV and suffering abuse from both husband and in-laws, she was turned out of the marital home.
She returned to her mother's home, but her parents were in no position to support her.
PIH was prescribed anti-retroviral drugs to control the illness, as well as given the food she needed to make the medicines effective.
PIH also built her a tin-roofed house with two bedrooms so she could start to re-build a life for herself and her children.
"When I moved into my new house," said Edna, "I sang a song to say I am so happy not to have to sleep in a house with a leaking roof any more."
Food enterprise
PIH also helps patients get jobs.
But with little formal employment, they have to do this by giving them grants to set up their own businesses.
| Partners In Health Operates health systems in 12 different countries Raises around $65m in donation Serves 2.3 million people Source: Partners In Health |
In a nearby town, a group of 15 women recently set up their own restaurant with the support of PIH.
They are former prostitutes, and all are HIV positive.
The women, all on anti-retroviral medication, wanted a business, not only to provide money to live on, but to give them a sense of pride in themselves.
Good food is essential for HIV positive patients, but the local diet is generally poor.
The staple food is "sima", a maize flour mixed with water.
Its nutritional value is negligible and PIH has started programmes to encourage people to both grow and eat a wide variety of vegetables.
But growing vegetables takes a lot of water, a scarce commodity. One of the projects here failed simply because it lacked a proper well.
Successful business
The restaurant, named Peace, has been a tremendous success.
| Malawi Population: 15,263,000 (est.) HIV prevalence: 11.9% Life expectancy: 52.9 years Source: UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs |
The rota is in place, Florence has a new right-hand woman named Ivy and, most importantly of all, the cooking is delicious.
The women are already turning a profit but their goal is even more ambitious. They want to be self-sustaining by the end of the month.
Soon after that, they hope to see their turnover top $200 a day - a staggering amount in Malawi.
Pride and hope
The investment PIH has put into Malawi has been enormous. They have built two brand new district hospitals equipped with wards and operating theatres.
The money comes from a partnership between Partners in Health and the Malawian government, and the running of the hospital will become the sole responsibility of the government within the next five years.
But the best and the most visible return on their investment is Edna's shy smile.
The medication has saved her life, but her new house, decent food and the prospect that soon she may have a job have given her back her pride and hope.
Alvin's Guide To Good Business, broadcast on BBC World, 12 and 13 March 2010.
Friday, March 5, 2010
Problems, Agendas and Frames
Over the last two weeks, we looked at social problems -- what they are, how we can understand them and how this understanding can be used strategically pursue strategic goals. There is a large and established literature on social problems in the policy sciences. There is a good reason for this. Unlike more mainstream political science, the policy sciences (invented by someone called Harold Lasswell in the 1940s, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Lasswell) have always focused on social problems. We policy scientists think of politics primarily as problem-solving processes. Now, while Harold Lasswell was an idealist and a visionary, he certainly was not naive enough to think that politics is always and everywhere about problem-solving. Indeed, it was Harold Lasswell who came up with the most succinct, no-nonsense definition of politics: Politics is who gets what, when and how. But, he argued, if we began thinking of policy-making as problem-solving, then maybe this could help make political processes better at actually solving these problems. So this is why policy analysts think a lot about the nature of social problems, about how we can analyse these problems, and, of course, about how we can best solve them.
Why, then, is this important for social entrepreneurs? Scholars of social entrepreneurship, such as Geoff Mulgan, also see the process of social innovation as being about solving social problems. (Ok, I’m cheating a bit: Geoff Mulgan is a fellow policy scientist, so he would define it in this way.) But whether you choose to call social innovation the “creation of social value”, “meeting unmet social needs”, or “doing good”, it is, at least at some level, about solving social problems.
What, then, are social problems?
Most of us may have an intuitive conception of social problems that makes them seem like conditions or states of the world that are, for lack of a better word, bad. Much like a disease such as measles or the flu, social problems have an identifiable cause (the rubeola or influenza viruses.....I looked that up) and observable effects (a red rash or fever...I remembered that from experience). And, if we know what causes it, we know how to fight the disease (in our two examples, stay in bed, remain hydrated and take it easy, probably antibiotics to prevent secondary bacterial infections).
On this view, any social problem, say drug abuse, has observable effects (such as crime, delinquency, excess mortality, disease, underachievement) as well as discrete causes (the courts’ leniency towards the trade with drugs). So, if we want to fight drug abuse, then we need to tighten laws on drug dealing.
What happens when we have more than one probable cause? What if it is unclear whether it really is the courts’ leniency or whether it is, say, a lack of constructive after-school leisure facilities for the youth. Simple, say the proponents of this school (sometimes also called “positivist” after its founder Auguste Comte, c.f. http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auguste_Comte). Basically, all we need do is find the main cause. And we do this by gathering and marshalling as many facts as possible about this social problem. On the basis of this objective data, so the argument goes, we can see identify the main cause and can then design our policy response accordingly.
But there is also another way of looking at social problems. This approach suggests that social problems are somehow internal to the way society works. So, to stay with the medical metaphor, the disease of the social body -- say, drug abuse -- is not caused by an external pathogen (the viral analogy of the “criminal element”). Instead, social pathology emerges because of society itself. These social problems can be “useful” for society and social cohesion: after all, how are we to recognise and enforce moral behaviour if we have no immorality to point to? However, this view -- sometimes called “functionalist” -- also recognises that social problems can become a risk -- or dysfunctional -- to society. Drug dealing may be an effect of the way modern societies work, so the argument goes, but where is the social utility in increased street-crime and soaring HIV infection rates? Whatever the flavour, policy-making along functionalist lines would look for causes for social problems (and their remedies) within society itself.
A third lens thinks of social problems as a product of social interaction and negotiation. Both the positivist and functionalist schools understand social problems as objective conditions in the world “out there”; they disagree about the causes. The third way of thinking about problems -- called social constructivist -- believes that social problems reflect not so much some objective reality as the judgement and evaluation of perceived reality by groups in the policy process. On this view, the way any particular group defines a social problem says more about the social commitments and ideological biases within this group than it does about the objective condition being defined as a problem.
So when Fuller and Myers (1941) argue that "social problems are what people think they are”, they are saying that the world is socially (and linguistically) constructed (see Berger and Luckmann, 1968). In a nutshell, social constructivist believe that our access to reality is inherently shaped by socially negotiated norms and values. This is the case, they argue, because the cognitive tools we use to understand reality (concepts and ideas that help us imbue things with meaning) and communicate this understanding (essentially language) are inescapably products of social interaction. Therefore, they are invariably and inescapably shaped by social commitments (to this or that social order, belief, etc). The radical (and, quite frankly, silly) version of this denies the existence of objective reality.....it's all socially constructed. In terms of social problems, these people would argue that there is no such thing as a social problem because every conceivable definition is merely a reflection of some groups' beliefs and values. A more sensible version of this approach argues that there is such a thing as objective reality (try dropping a heavy stone on your foot if you are in any doubt) but that our understanding of this reality can never be complete or unbiased. Here, social problems -- or rather competing problem definitions -- can be thought of as different articulations of the same complex but inherently unknowable reality.
When issues are clear-cut and straightforward, it is more difficult to recognise the social constructions of reality that underlie our understanding of these problems. For example, very few people would argue that beating one’s wife is an appropriate way of inner-family decision-making. Indeed, social constructivists would argue, such a straightforward problem suggests that a particular social construction has come to dominate other possible interpretations. In this case, for good reason.
Yet it is when issues are uncertain and complex -- such as climate change or stem-cell genetics -- that we can observe the way the social construction of problems works. When our knowledge -- scientific or otherwise -- leaves us with more questions than practical answers, we can more clearly see how people in the policy process rely on their values and beliefs to fill these gaps. This is not to say that uncertainty engenders a relapse into pre-modern irrationality. (Of course, the idea that everything between the fall of Rome and before the enlightenment was eminently irrational is itself a very particular -- not to mention inaccurate -- construction of history). But uncertainty and complexity mean that people in the policy process need to bring into line available but incomplete knowledge with available but scarce resources. This, in turn, calls for interpretation and judgment. And our judgment is guided by our ideas and belief-systems.
Take for example the recent ballyhoo on campus about the advert for the neighbourhood purveyor of bio-produce. Let’s leave aside for a moment the question of whether religious imagery is an appropriate marketing tool. Nonetheless, the question “What would Jesus do?” is indeed the way Christians should and do approach uncertain policy situations. It provides a way on pulling together the disparate bits of knowledge and information into a meaningful picture of ‘what is to be done’ (to quote a famous atheist). Different belief systems work in very much the same manner: they provide what is sometimes called “interpretative templates” (Deutungsschablonen) that help us make some sense of the complexity of contemporary policy problems.
So, you may very well ask, what does all this have to do with social entrepreneurs?
First, the way people in the policy process understand and define problems is not merely of academic interest. It is about the exercise of political power. Political science traditionally deals with the way formal institutions distribute, channel and regulate the flow of power through a polity. Some polities are more democratic than others (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyarchy). Some concentrated all the power in the executive. Others, distributed power horizontally across different institutions such as the legislative and judiciary. Some polities additionally distributed power vertically from central to local governments. Many a scientific career has been built on comparing and evaluating different formal designs for channeling and regulating political power. And for a long time, political science believed that this was all there was to understanding decision-making.
In the USA of the 1960s, many thinkers began to wonder why the democratic process was leaving so many Americans without an effective political voice. The most prominent example here is E.E. Schattschneider (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluralism_%28political_theory%29). These social scientists argued that -- yes -- the formal policy process is democratic, open and pluralist for issues that actually make it into the system. There are, however, a whole host of issues and problems that never even get into the democratic political process. As Schattschneider (1960) argues, “some issues are organised into politics while others are organised out”. He called this the “mobilisation of bias”: those with an interest in maintaining the status quo and the wherewithal to affect policy processes mobilise bias in the system to prevent issues even entering the political process. Mobilising bias is about managing the scope of conflict: keep it narrow to avoid change, expand it to precipitate change. (I have the book in my office should anyone be interested).
People like Cobb and Elder picked up where Schattschneider left off. In order to get a better handle on this process of “organising out“, Cobb and Elder suggest we think of politics in terms of agendas. Like real agendas, the things at the top are considered more important than the ”AOB“ at the bottom. They also suggest that we think of policy-making in terms of two agendas: one systemic and one institutional. The systemic agenda, they argue, contains all the possible problems and issues within society (or within the public sphere, to use Habermas’ term). We can think of the institutional agenda as being close to the formal policy process outlined above. The mobilisation of bias, then, is about managing and manipulating the movement between the systemic and the institutional agenda. They refer to this process as issue-expansion (or contraction). These processes of issue expansion and issue contraction involve the manipulation of values and norms as well as societal images, expectations and perceptions. It is about using models (i.e. cognitive resources) and values (i.e. normative resources) to make a particular state of affairs a problem for a sufficient number of people in society. Controlling the agenda in this way, they suggest, is a very effective, if subtle exercise of power: legitimate concerns can be suppressed without resorting to formally illegitimate means.
The way policy actors define and construct problems, then, is crucial to the political process. Problem definition is not only about discovering the ”truth“ about problems by objective measurement (as the positivists would have argued) nor is it simply about understanding its functionality or dysfunctionality for society as a whole (as our functionalists would have argued). Rather, problem definition is about placing an issue on the policy agenda (or keeping it off or, once on the agenda, moving it up and down). It is, in short, about power. But, unlike the formal process with its battery of checks and balances, this field of political power is largely unregulated. (Thinkers like Habermas (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%BCrgen_Habermas) and those inspired by his work have been calling for the institutionalisation of an ethics of discourse or, in German, ”Diskursethik” (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diskursethik, sorry couldn’t find an English entry). As you can imagine, institutionalising the “ideal-speech situation” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideal_speech_situation) this is not all that straightforward.)
Second, while many social scientists -- as is their wont -- look at all this manipulation with dismay, it also represents an opportunity. Not all people are unreflective automatons driven by their belief-systems. There is, then, a strategic aspect to problem-definition and agenda-setting. In the policy-sciences jargon, we call this aspect the “strategic framing” of policy issues. A ‘frame’ is just a convenient short-hand for a set of ideas and concepts that allows us to make sense of the world. (Applying frames to social reality, Rein and Schön argue, “. . . is a way of selecting, organising, interpreting, and making sense of a complex reality to provide guideposts for knowing, analysing, persuading, and acting. A frame is a perspective from which an amorphous, ill-defined, problematic situation can be made sense of and acted on” [Rein and Schön, 1993, p.146]).
When we speak of strategic framing, we implicitly abandon the idea that policy-making is a problem-driven process. Here, ‘problem-driven’ means the policy process is about seeking out social problems and, once found, rationally solving them. Instead, strategic framing suggests that policy actors exploit the uncertainty and complexity of social problems to pursue a range of objectives, not all of them necessarily related to solving the problem at hand. Significantly, strategic framing stands the “problem recognition -- policy formulation -- policy implementation” process on its head. And lies it on its side. And makes it do summersaults. Strategic framing can aim to show that there is no solution to a problem (e.g. the climate sceptics’ argument hold out on climate mitigation until the knowledge and resources are available). Or strategic framing can show that current solutions are in fact making real problem worse (e.g. Yunus argument that development aid perpetuates dependence). Or strategic framing can be about what Cohen, March and Olsen (1973) call “solutions chasing problems” (e.g. the Cato Institute’s insistence that every conceivable problem is to be solved by free markets and, if it cannot be solved by free markets, it isn’t a real problem).
We can use this knowledge to better understand what successful social entrepreneurs do. As we saw in the case studies, successful social entrepreneurs are very adept at framing and reframing policy problems. They seem to understand the way people rely on belief systems to make sense of uncertain policy problems (see also, Mintrom 2000). Not only that, they also seem very skilful at manipulating these problem definition processes to push their social innovations onto and up policy agendas.
A particularly effective way of analysing strategic framing is to use an approach called “narrative analysis” (see Roe, 1994) . Like most good ideas in social science, the basic concept is simple. It asks you to think of strategic framing as a form of story-telling. On this view, problem-definitions are stories written to convince an audience of sceptical policy actors. These stories weave fact and value into a narrative fabric. In addressing different audiences, these stories will need to find a functioning blend of positivism (what is the nature of this problem qua a problem), functionalism (to what extent does this problem relate to society) and social construction (what social commitments are threatened/ strengthened by this problem). In so doing, they provide us with plausible interpretations of uncertain and incomplete knowledge about complex problems. In the case of reframing, they cast a fresh light on problems long thought solved or, more importantly, unsolvable.
In sum, then, the recognition of social problems as opportunities is not only about discovering unmet social needs. Crucially, recognition also involves appreciating that other policy actors may see the issue in very different ways. Moreover, the successful social entrepreneur needs to understand the reasons why people may not agree. Merely brushing them aside as wrong, stupid or ignorant will, in all likelihood, not be a terribly profitable strategy. Instead, the successful social entrepreneur needs to put together policy stories using “the language” of other policy actors. It is in this way, then, that social entrepreneurs can get their social innovations onto policy agendas.
Why, then, is this important for social entrepreneurs? Scholars of social entrepreneurship, such as Geoff Mulgan, also see the process of social innovation as being about solving social problems. (Ok, I’m cheating a bit: Geoff Mulgan is a fellow policy scientist, so he would define it in this way.) But whether you choose to call social innovation the “creation of social value”, “meeting unmet social needs”, or “doing good”, it is, at least at some level, about solving social problems.
What, then, are social problems?
Most of us may have an intuitive conception of social problems that makes them seem like conditions or states of the world that are, for lack of a better word, bad. Much like a disease such as measles or the flu, social problems have an identifiable cause (the rubeola or influenza viruses.....I looked that up) and observable effects (a red rash or fever...I remembered that from experience). And, if we know what causes it, we know how to fight the disease (in our two examples, stay in bed, remain hydrated and take it easy, probably antibiotics to prevent secondary bacterial infections).
On this view, any social problem, say drug abuse, has observable effects (such as crime, delinquency, excess mortality, disease, underachievement) as well as discrete causes (the courts’ leniency towards the trade with drugs). So, if we want to fight drug abuse, then we need to tighten laws on drug dealing.
What happens when we have more than one probable cause? What if it is unclear whether it really is the courts’ leniency or whether it is, say, a lack of constructive after-school leisure facilities for the youth. Simple, say the proponents of this school (sometimes also called “positivist” after its founder Auguste Comte, c.f. http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auguste_Comte). Basically, all we need do is find the main cause. And we do this by gathering and marshalling as many facts as possible about this social problem. On the basis of this objective data, so the argument goes, we can see identify the main cause and can then design our policy response accordingly.
But there is also another way of looking at social problems. This approach suggests that social problems are somehow internal to the way society works. So, to stay with the medical metaphor, the disease of the social body -- say, drug abuse -- is not caused by an external pathogen (the viral analogy of the “criminal element”). Instead, social pathology emerges because of society itself. These social problems can be “useful” for society and social cohesion: after all, how are we to recognise and enforce moral behaviour if we have no immorality to point to? However, this view -- sometimes called “functionalist” -- also recognises that social problems can become a risk -- or dysfunctional -- to society. Drug dealing may be an effect of the way modern societies work, so the argument goes, but where is the social utility in increased street-crime and soaring HIV infection rates? Whatever the flavour, policy-making along functionalist lines would look for causes for social problems (and their remedies) within society itself.
A third lens thinks of social problems as a product of social interaction and negotiation. Both the positivist and functionalist schools understand social problems as objective conditions in the world “out there”; they disagree about the causes. The third way of thinking about problems -- called social constructivist -- believes that social problems reflect not so much some objective reality as the judgement and evaluation of perceived reality by groups in the policy process. On this view, the way any particular group defines a social problem says more about the social commitments and ideological biases within this group than it does about the objective condition being defined as a problem.
So when Fuller and Myers (1941) argue that "social problems are what people think they are”, they are saying that the world is socially (and linguistically) constructed (see Berger and Luckmann, 1968). In a nutshell, social constructivist believe that our access to reality is inherently shaped by socially negotiated norms and values. This is the case, they argue, because the cognitive tools we use to understand reality (concepts and ideas that help us imbue things with meaning) and communicate this understanding (essentially language) are inescapably products of social interaction. Therefore, they are invariably and inescapably shaped by social commitments (to this or that social order, belief, etc). The radical (and, quite frankly, silly) version of this denies the existence of objective reality.....it's all socially constructed. In terms of social problems, these people would argue that there is no such thing as a social problem because every conceivable definition is merely a reflection of some groups' beliefs and values. A more sensible version of this approach argues that there is such a thing as objective reality (try dropping a heavy stone on your foot if you are in any doubt) but that our understanding of this reality can never be complete or unbiased. Here, social problems -- or rather competing problem definitions -- can be thought of as different articulations of the same complex but inherently unknowable reality.
When issues are clear-cut and straightforward, it is more difficult to recognise the social constructions of reality that underlie our understanding of these problems. For example, very few people would argue that beating one’s wife is an appropriate way of inner-family decision-making. Indeed, social constructivists would argue, such a straightforward problem suggests that a particular social construction has come to dominate other possible interpretations. In this case, for good reason.
Yet it is when issues are uncertain and complex -- such as climate change or stem-cell genetics -- that we can observe the way the social construction of problems works. When our knowledge -- scientific or otherwise -- leaves us with more questions than practical answers, we can more clearly see how people in the policy process rely on their values and beliefs to fill these gaps. This is not to say that uncertainty engenders a relapse into pre-modern irrationality. (Of course, the idea that everything between the fall of Rome and before the enlightenment was eminently irrational is itself a very particular -- not to mention inaccurate -- construction of history). But uncertainty and complexity mean that people in the policy process need to bring into line available but incomplete knowledge with available but scarce resources. This, in turn, calls for interpretation and judgment. And our judgment is guided by our ideas and belief-systems.
Take for example the recent ballyhoo on campus about the advert for the neighbourhood purveyor of bio-produce. Let’s leave aside for a moment the question of whether religious imagery is an appropriate marketing tool. Nonetheless, the question “What would Jesus do?” is indeed the way Christians should and do approach uncertain policy situations. It provides a way on pulling together the disparate bits of knowledge and information into a meaningful picture of ‘what is to be done’ (to quote a famous atheist). Different belief systems work in very much the same manner: they provide what is sometimes called “interpretative templates” (Deutungsschablonen) that help us make some sense of the complexity of contemporary policy problems.
So, you may very well ask, what does all this have to do with social entrepreneurs?
First, the way people in the policy process understand and define problems is not merely of academic interest. It is about the exercise of political power. Political science traditionally deals with the way formal institutions distribute, channel and regulate the flow of power through a polity. Some polities are more democratic than others (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyarchy). Some concentrated all the power in the executive. Others, distributed power horizontally across different institutions such as the legislative and judiciary. Some polities additionally distributed power vertically from central to local governments. Many a scientific career has been built on comparing and evaluating different formal designs for channeling and regulating political power. And for a long time, political science believed that this was all there was to understanding decision-making.
In the USA of the 1960s, many thinkers began to wonder why the democratic process was leaving so many Americans without an effective political voice. The most prominent example here is E.E. Schattschneider (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluralism_%28political_theory%29). These social scientists argued that -- yes -- the formal policy process is democratic, open and pluralist for issues that actually make it into the system. There are, however, a whole host of issues and problems that never even get into the democratic political process. As Schattschneider (1960) argues, “some issues are organised into politics while others are organised out”. He called this the “mobilisation of bias”: those with an interest in maintaining the status quo and the wherewithal to affect policy processes mobilise bias in the system to prevent issues even entering the political process. Mobilising bias is about managing the scope of conflict: keep it narrow to avoid change, expand it to precipitate change. (I have the book in my office should anyone be interested).
People like Cobb and Elder picked up where Schattschneider left off. In order to get a better handle on this process of “organising out“, Cobb and Elder suggest we think of politics in terms of agendas. Like real agendas, the things at the top are considered more important than the ”AOB“ at the bottom. They also suggest that we think of policy-making in terms of two agendas: one systemic and one institutional. The systemic agenda, they argue, contains all the possible problems and issues within society (or within the public sphere, to use Habermas’ term). We can think of the institutional agenda as being close to the formal policy process outlined above. The mobilisation of bias, then, is about managing and manipulating the movement between the systemic and the institutional agenda. They refer to this process as issue-expansion (or contraction). These processes of issue expansion and issue contraction involve the manipulation of values and norms as well as societal images, expectations and perceptions. It is about using models (i.e. cognitive resources) and values (i.e. normative resources) to make a particular state of affairs a problem for a sufficient number of people in society. Controlling the agenda in this way, they suggest, is a very effective, if subtle exercise of power: legitimate concerns can be suppressed without resorting to formally illegitimate means.
The way policy actors define and construct problems, then, is crucial to the political process. Problem definition is not only about discovering the ”truth“ about problems by objective measurement (as the positivists would have argued) nor is it simply about understanding its functionality or dysfunctionality for society as a whole (as our functionalists would have argued). Rather, problem definition is about placing an issue on the policy agenda (or keeping it off or, once on the agenda, moving it up and down). It is, in short, about power. But, unlike the formal process with its battery of checks and balances, this field of political power is largely unregulated. (Thinkers like Habermas (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%BCrgen_Habermas) and those inspired by his work have been calling for the institutionalisation of an ethics of discourse or, in German, ”Diskursethik” (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diskursethik, sorry couldn’t find an English entry). As you can imagine, institutionalising the “ideal-speech situation” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideal_speech_situation) this is not all that straightforward.)
Second, while many social scientists -- as is their wont -- look at all this manipulation with dismay, it also represents an opportunity. Not all people are unreflective automatons driven by their belief-systems. There is, then, a strategic aspect to problem-definition and agenda-setting. In the policy-sciences jargon, we call this aspect the “strategic framing” of policy issues. A ‘frame’ is just a convenient short-hand for a set of ideas and concepts that allows us to make sense of the world. (Applying frames to social reality, Rein and Schön argue, “. . . is a way of selecting, organising, interpreting, and making sense of a complex reality to provide guideposts for knowing, analysing, persuading, and acting. A frame is a perspective from which an amorphous, ill-defined, problematic situation can be made sense of and acted on” [Rein and Schön, 1993, p.146]).
When we speak of strategic framing, we implicitly abandon the idea that policy-making is a problem-driven process. Here, ‘problem-driven’ means the policy process is about seeking out social problems and, once found, rationally solving them. Instead, strategic framing suggests that policy actors exploit the uncertainty and complexity of social problems to pursue a range of objectives, not all of them necessarily related to solving the problem at hand. Significantly, strategic framing stands the “problem recognition -- policy formulation -- policy implementation” process on its head. And lies it on its side. And makes it do summersaults. Strategic framing can aim to show that there is no solution to a problem (e.g. the climate sceptics’ argument hold out on climate mitigation until the knowledge and resources are available). Or strategic framing can show that current solutions are in fact making real problem worse (e.g. Yunus argument that development aid perpetuates dependence). Or strategic framing can be about what Cohen, March and Olsen (1973) call “solutions chasing problems” (e.g. the Cato Institute’s insistence that every conceivable problem is to be solved by free markets and, if it cannot be solved by free markets, it isn’t a real problem).
We can use this knowledge to better understand what successful social entrepreneurs do. As we saw in the case studies, successful social entrepreneurs are very adept at framing and reframing policy problems. They seem to understand the way people rely on belief systems to make sense of uncertain policy problems (see also, Mintrom 2000). Not only that, they also seem very skilful at manipulating these problem definition processes to push their social innovations onto and up policy agendas.
A particularly effective way of analysing strategic framing is to use an approach called “narrative analysis” (see Roe, 1994) . Like most good ideas in social science, the basic concept is simple. It asks you to think of strategic framing as a form of story-telling. On this view, problem-definitions are stories written to convince an audience of sceptical policy actors. These stories weave fact and value into a narrative fabric. In addressing different audiences, these stories will need to find a functioning blend of positivism (what is the nature of this problem qua a problem), functionalism (to what extent does this problem relate to society) and social construction (what social commitments are threatened/ strengthened by this problem). In so doing, they provide us with plausible interpretations of uncertain and incomplete knowledge about complex problems. In the case of reframing, they cast a fresh light on problems long thought solved or, more importantly, unsolvable.
In sum, then, the recognition of social problems as opportunities is not only about discovering unmet social needs. Crucially, recognition also involves appreciating that other policy actors may see the issue in very different ways. Moreover, the successful social entrepreneur needs to understand the reasons why people may not agree. Merely brushing them aside as wrong, stupid or ignorant will, in all likelihood, not be a terribly profitable strategy. Instead, the successful social entrepreneur needs to put together policy stories using “the language” of other policy actors. It is in this way, then, that social entrepreneurs can get their social innovations onto policy agendas.
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