Social Enterprise and Dis/identification : The Politics of Identity Work in the English Third Sector

Social enterprise has been criticized for discursively transforming third sector organizations and practitioners into economic agents. Such a critique too readily construes the discourse of social enterprise as a deterministic force that encroaches on all aspects of organizational and individual identity. We reintroduce
a sense of agency to discursive conceptualizations through an empirical study focusing on whether and how social enterprise infiltrates the third sector at the level of the subject. Drawing from a qualitative study in England, we use Pêcheux's three-part model of dis/identification as an explanatory schema to conceptualize the ways third sector practitioners endorse or reject the inherent norms and principles of social enterprise. The discussion covers how processes of identification, counter-identification, and disidentification, respectively, perpetuate or transgress the discourse of social enterprise and highlights the implications for future research in this developing field.