Social enterprise' and dis/identification : The politics of identity work in the UK third sector

Of late, social enterprise has been portrayed as a ‘muscular discourse' which ostensibly transforms, by dint of ideological force, third sector organisations and practitioners into economic agents. This paper argues that such a critique chiefly ignores that ‘social enterprise' does not automatically and indeed not fully determine third sector organisations. Asserting that discourse, rather than being imposed on the individual, implies a subject who affirms its power, we argue that discursive conceptualisations of ‘social enterprise' are incomplete without empirical studies focusing on the actual reception of its call in concrete (linguistic) situations. Drawing from a longitudinal research study in the UK third sector, we use Pêcheux's work on dis/identification to illustrate processes of identification, counter-identification and disidentification which refer to how third sector practitioners, to a greater or lesser extent, endorse or reject the discursive invocation. By placing the complex identity work of practitioners at the heart of our study, the article aims to develop a fuller, more ambiguous and politicised understanding of processes of dis/identification, pinpointing how the different patterns perpetuate or transgress respectively the broader (discursive) context in which they are enacted.