Towards a dialectic view of power-resistance in the UK third sector

Extract (from introduction)

Social enterprise in the UK represents a deeply political phenomenon (Di Domenico et al., 2009; Nicholls & Cho, 2008, Teasdale, 2012). According to Alex Nicholls (2010), during the period of New Labour government (1997-2010) the UK instigated the most developed institutional support structure for social entrepreneurship in the world. Despite social enterprise being widely associated with New Labour and the Third Way, UK policy makers in the new Conservative led coalition government of 2010 continued to provide both rhetorical and policy support to the idea of social enterprise as part of its Big Society philosophy (Hogg & Baines, 2011). The Big Society is partly a strategy designed to contrast with New Labour's big state (Alcock, 2010). But it also draws upon a more conservative strand of political thought which mythologizes a golden past whereby voluntary organisations, co-operatives and mutuals supposedly delivered welfare services effectively and without the need for government intervention (Teasdale, Alcock & Smith, 2012). Hence the Big Society is an "endorsement of the positive and proactive role that voluntary action and social enterprise could play in promoting improved social inclusion and ‘fixing Britain's broken society'" (Alcock, 2010. p. 380).

With this as a backdrop, it becomes arguably that government has for some time already used social enterprise to address its most pressing social problems. On a more political note, one could identify social enterprise within a broader shift toward what can be called post-welfarist regime of the social which advances, while ideologically justifying, the roll-back of the state in its role as a provider of public services. In it is this context that Leandro Sepulveda (2009) has made a very precise, and provocative observation: ""Social enterprised' as opposed to "privatised' public services becomes ideologically more appealing for many and politically less controversial and/or confrontational" (p. 3). Importantly, claiming that social enterprise is linked to post-welfarism, this is not meant to say that social enterprise is necessarily a bad thing. However, where social enterprise is so evidently part of state-orchestrated, top-down forms of social reform, it clearly becomes a pertinent object for critical inquiry.