"Everyone a Changemaker": Social Entrepreneurship, Hegemony and the Fantasy of Social Change

The global recession has markedly increased the possibilities for imagining alternatives to the status quo. In this article we take a closer look at social entrepreneurship to gain a minute understanding of the sort of utopia the concept conveys. Taking its cues from utopian studies and affect-oriented theorizing on hegemony, this paper investigates the articulatory practices of social entrepreneurship support institutions to illuminate how social entrepreneurship is established as a desire for a better way of co-existence. Charting the discursive and fantasmatic mechanisms which render articulations of social entrepreneurship either hegemonic or marginal, our findings suggest that semantic vagueness and ambiguity, in conjunction with fantasies of inclusiveness and business acumen, and a pointed focus on pragmatic solutions form key ingredients for dominating the field of discursivity. Pinpointing how the hegemonic articulation of social entrepreneurship deliberately forecloses political interventions into the socio-political edifice, the paper concludes that the utopian moment of social entrepreneurship is essentially anti-political: although satisfying the longing for a (impossible) state of future fullness, SE conflates the realization of future possibilities with the application of well-established, micro- or macro-level formula, which effectively eschew a more radical and daring break with existing parameters of the ‘possible'.