Social Entrepreneurship and the 'New Spirit of the Third Sector'

Social entrepreneurship in the third sector is largely represented as an indispensable response to declines in government subsidies and private donations. This contribution uses ideology critique to turn this logic on its head: summoning the heroic and monumental, iconic representations conceal that social entrepreneurship might be less a "necessity" than an ideological justification of a post-welfarist regime of the third sector. Probing the margins of this ‘New Spirit of the Third Sector', a discourse analysis of Swiss non-profit practitioners gets presented that pinpoints the cleavage between the fantasy of social entrepreneurship and the disruptive potential of local meaning making practices. It gets argued that interpretive research in general and discourse analysis in particular offer distinctive insights into how the ideology of social entrepreneurship gets "consumed" and transgressed by practitioners, which is why it should get to play a more significant role in prospective research endeavors.