"Everyone a Changemaker": An Analysis of Discursive Mechanisms for the Hegemonization of Social Entrepreneurship

As multiple social, economic and ecological crises continue to linger, and as the belief in governments and markets as problem-solvers has dwindled, social entrepreneurship (SE) has emerged as a new beacon of hope to guide us into safer waters. While the popularity of SE has been ever-growing, understandings of SE - in academia as well as in practice - have been diverging to the point of incommensurability. The aim of this paper is to trace the fault lines of diverging understandings of SE, and to illuminate the discursive mechanisms by which certain understandings of SE are enacted as universally positive, necessary, and thus potentially hegemonic. We base our analysis on Laclau and Mouffe's discourse theory, and on a qualitative text analysis of websites of eleven support organizations for SE in Austria.