Keywords

1 Introduction

The purpose of this chapter is to explore the durability of social entrepreneurship (SE) identity gleaned from narrative accounts of SE. Specifically, this chapter draws on in-depth narrative interviews with five leading social entrepreneurs in the United Kingdom to explore the contested nature of this identity in broader third sectorFootnote 1 discourse . These interviews were collected at intervals over a period of 2 years (2010–2011), and were driven by the development of political projects (such as Big Society) aimed at creating a cohesive sense of third sector organisations. As we know from existing research, SEs are at once simply described but also ambiguously identified, and there are many conflicting opinions about the way forward for researchers in this area. Also, we recognise that broader discursive forces have a direct influence upon our understanding of organisational sense-making and identity . The key literatures drawn from in this chapter belong to both discourse and SE fields, in particular this analysis focus on the interplay between discourse , identity and institutionalisation (Battilana and Dorado 2010; Hardy et al. 2005; Maguire and Hardy 2006) . Doing this allows for more clear explication of the discursive factors that influence SE identity at macro, meso and micro levels. As such, I develop an argument that the enforced ‘top-down’ approach to identity shaping by powerful political and economic discourse participants is only partly resisted by social entrepreneurs. In terms of the SE literature, a recent paper by Dacin et al. (2010) has argued that the more profitable way forward in this field is to recognise the way SE works within key contexts. As such, SE becomes a delimited subject, one that can be applied to many different conventional, cultural and institutional frameworks. Alternatively, there are other competing voices in this academic discourse that seek to keep this critical debate alive (Teasdale 2012) . This approach challenges our understanding of SE, and argues that SE is shaped by political, economic-oriented and social-historical discourses. Directly or indirectly, this in turn influences how we (mis)understand SE and the implications of this on how SEs (as part of the third sector) operate in post-Global Financial Crisis economies (Alcock and Kendall 2011; Carmel and Harlock 2008; Mason 2012) .

As such, this chapter takes up some of the challenge posed by both of these current research streams. From the UK experience, a number of interesting developments have taken place over the past few years. A change in Government has not necessitated a sea change in SE policy, rather SE has arguably been placed more centrally at the heart of public sector reform. In some ways, this is a positive sign of recognition of the key role that all ‘third sector organsations’1 (including SEs) have in delivering important services to communities. Significant State resources have been expended on developing this third sector and have arguably been pivotal in fostering new generations of local leaders intent on pushing greater level of community development through entrepreneurship. However, these developments also create issues within SE discourse that require further analysis, especially that regarding identity . The central research questions for this study are:

  • RQ1: What identities are portrayed of social entrepreneurs?

  • RQ2: Are these constructions accepted or resisted?

This research helps to address these questions through the narratives developed by social entrepreneurs in the UK, a methodological approach already used successfully in this area (Jones et al. 2008) . Using a discourse and content analysis frameworks, this chapter utilises this qualitative data to isolate the articulations of resistance to the imposed SE identity. Furthermore, it is possible to identify resistance, and even counter-discourse, among SEs that would be seen as ‘successful’ in terms of their organisational growth and measures of economic and social benefit. The chapter concludes by drawing attention to the key contributions to knowledge arising from the study, in response to the two RQs. Firstly, the study identifies a clear picture of the self-identities of the SE participants, and empirically illustrates the fragmented nature of these identities as shown through the narratives. Thus, this finding aligns with some current research suggesting the SE discourse is, in a broad sense, fragmented. As such, this provides some compelling evidence linking macro-level SE discourse with the micro-level. With regard to RQ2, we find that the reports from SEs combine a hybridised identity that draws on economic concepts of SE, but also resist notions of SE policy as promoted by successive UK governments.

2 Social Entrepreneurship Discourses

One of the most striking developments in social entrepreneurship (SE) research in the past few years has been the heightened focus on critical analysis of the concept . The conflicting views on both the content of the debate, as well as the presence of a debate at all, provide fertile ground more concerted work on this matter. In relation to the content of current debate, research has begun to explore the very wide scope of critical challenges that SE faces, as a practice and as an idea that remains keenly contested and typically ambiguous. The question of what SEs are and how this information is diffused is seen by some as a direct result of who controls and drives the development of SE. Furthermore, it seems that the broader discussion of what constitutes an SE is clouded by plurality of forms—as well as political interests. For example some recent research has tried to understand the effectiveness of SE policy, especially in the United Kingdom, in efforts to trace how policy supports these organisations, and also goes beyond these boundaries by shaping our knowledge of SE along particular lines (Mason 2012) . This shaping process occurs at the micro-level (individual) and is influenced heavily by the dominant discourse participants in a given context. To this end, researchers are encouraged to explore SE as a contested concept within defined political, social and cultural environments, and to understand that our search for a more unifying SE concept is less crucial than theory building efforts that draw on SE in all its diverse forms and locations .

A consequence of this is the possible rejection of, or at least a reluctance to engage in, developmental policies to encourage the growth of SE and related activities. Naturally, this seems a counter-productive outcome following the resources expended on developing political frameworks intended to support SE. This would also seem to indicate that SEs may seek to disengage with prevailing political structures that offer access to much needed resources to assist them. Furthermore, the notion of SE as an evolving, and self-constructed idea is a strong theme in other work (see Teasdale 2012) , and it is this factor that warrants further consideration in light of the developments in the SE conceptual space. One implication of this research is that, as Dacin et al. (2011, p. 1203) claim, that “[perhaps] as a consequence of these fundamental definitional and conceptual issues, researchers continue to struggle to delineate boundaries of the field…to arrive at a meaningful set of research questions”. Presupposing that our knowledge on all areas of social life is conceivable as discrete enough to exist as unique domains—there appears to be some validity to this point on solid conceptual foundations. Indeed, much debate among SE, and all relevant stakeholder groups, continues on such issues, although that has been no impediment to political support for SE and related-programs . However, it is not definitional clarity alone that preoccupies scholars in this field, and more recent discussion has adopted a slightly different tack in addressing why SE appears ambiguously to different audiences (Mason 2013) . Rather than assuming a stable and enduring SE identity, it should be equally plausible to acknowledge the opposite scenario—i.e. conceptual plurality produces a perceived instability, and this traceable through the texts that are used to inform our knowledge of a discourse. This is one of many possible ways of exploring the meaning of SE. As Dacin et al. (2011) note, there are a number of other unexplored (or under-explored) areas for further inquiry: notably, image and identity and how these concepts relate to SE.

This line of argument provides a significant opportunity for further development through empirical work—an area that has been largely ignored when looking for the voices of SEs and the nature of their self-identification (Cukier et al. 2011) . We remain locked into this debate because the essence of SE is always located at the heart of its practice. Consequently, the identity debate (although entirely valid and worthy of further development) lacks a synthesis between the academic contestation and further detailed evidence from the field. Thus, the first research question under consideration here is :

  • RQ1: What identities are portrayed of social entrepreneurs?

To go some of the way to answering this question, existing research shows that SEs are typically portrayed in a positive way, emphasising their uniqueness and organisational hybridity, and their ability to meet challenges in society that other providers cannot, or will not broach (Harding 2004; Robinson et al. 1998) . As such, they are seen to be an agent of social change in society at large, capable of enacting new solutions and working alongside private, public and non-profit organisations. Furthermore, although scholars have attempted to identify SEs as being intrinsically good for society, they face management challenges in trying to accomplish this work (Cornforth 2003; Diochon and Anderson 2011; Spear et al. 2009) . The development of a management-based literature on SEs has dominated much of the writing to date (Cukier et al. 2011) . Some go further and argue that SEs encounter problems based on their place between markets, and between institutions. One example of this is the ‘heroic’ narrative that often accompanies promotion of SE in a public space and in discourse (Teasdale 2012) . The implication is that SEs would naturally deem themselves to be heroic if their social ventures had been successful, and more easily identify with this perception (Dacin et al. 2011) . Here SEs are portrayed as visionaries and fixers—the idealist-pragmatist hybrid capable of transforming beneficiary communities by acting beyond existing institutional boundaries (Battilana 2006; Battilana and Dorado 2010) . Consequently, the academic discourse on SEs is rather fragmented into paradoxical and/or configurations. SEs are both heroic individuals elevated to a position of social superiority and goodness. Simultaneously, they are hands-on practitioners capable of motivating people and harnessing previously inaccessible financial and social resources—as institutional entrepreneurs. It becomes impossible to distinguish between the many faces of a SE and as Haugh (2012) noted, the field is lacking its own suite of theories to anchor and support research, and this perhaps risks the steady decline into obsolescence as feared by sector luminaries (e.g. Bill Drayton). The time is therefore ripe for more empirical work that seeks some insight into the many-faceted SE identity/identities to offer sway toward a more cogent ‘theory of social entrepreneurship’.

Mindful of these perspectives on SE research and the discourse of its identity , and not presupposing their completeness, a further step is now required to determine whether there is a legitimate basis for them to be either aligned with or distanced from, SE identity. For example, we have little or no empirical basis to predict how SE identity is characterised in different contexts, although some very interesting work has already been undertaken exploring identity and narratives . Among the first to tackle to issue of SE discourse and its link with identity were Parkinson and Howorth (2008) and Jones et al. (2008) . Both sets of authors recognised that social entrepreneurs were influenced by a political discourse which was, to a greater of lesser extent, articulated in narratives. The former research focused strongly of the proliferation of already known discourses (i.e. entrepreneurship) and how SE can be evaluated against those competing discourses. Jones et al. (2008) took SE identity and posited three identification categories (Me, Not-Me and Suppressed-Me) that were discernable from narrative accounts. Combined, both works are helpful in providing foundations for more searching questions about the nature of SE identity. This is both for recognising the impact of discursive themes that surround SE as a social activity as well as whether researchers can pinpoint which discourses are accepted, rejected or simply suppressed. To extend these works further, the second research question is proposed .

  • RQ2: Are these constructions accepted or resisted?

This question is important to this study because it sets the empirical basis for determining any validity claims to the four domains described above. Also, it also prompts a closer analysis of the presence of any (or all) of the four discursive themes as described in the articulated inner narratives of the interviewees. As is clear from existing research, SE discourse filters down from macro to micro-levels and is highly likely to internalised at the micro-level. Yet, it is also highly contested as a concept and the next section explains the method for capturing more SE narratives and the analytical techniques required to illustrate both the broader discursive themes and inner narrative identification .

3 Methods

The choice of methods in this type of study was critical, since the broader conceptual discussion above points to a number of conflicting issues which might be captured using a number of approaches. With regard to the first research question, the methodological requirements relate to two components. Firstly, how can discursive themes be identified in a qualitative data set? This relies on the assumption that discourse informs identification, which is rooted firmly in current SE research. Resolving this first issue would allow for a range of themes to be both identified and then synthesised, and lead on to the second component, relating to capturing an identity from the discourse. The second issue concerns the subsequent categorisation of identities from the data set, and examining consonance or dissonance with the prevailing academic views. Both components of this research question are surmounted using discourse and content analysis, and this procedure is described in more detail below. The second research question is more appropriately resolved in the Discussion section, once the narratives have been described in the detailed Findings section.

The remainder of this section address some of the methodological choices made, in particular sample choice, data capture and handling, and the analytical procedures adopted for discourse and content analyses.

3.1 Sample Choice

The five participants used in this study were chosen from a small sample of social entrepreneurs, drawn using a purposive sampling technique and utilising existing practitioner networks. This approach was critical to gaining access to the type of social entrepreneurs that might be considered to be sector ‘role models’, given the degree of local and national success they had managed to achieve. To this end, four participants were captured in the sample, and their anonymity was assured due to their non-involvement in the official UK Government sponsored recognition scheme. The general characteristics of the participants is shown in Table 3.1.

Table 3.1 Respondent and organisation characteristics
Full size table

Although the sample contained a small number of participants, the suits the research requirements of high quality and ‘rich’ data, thus in-depth procedures were designed and adopted to acquire depth.

3.2 Procedure

A multi-stage, semi-structured interview process was adopted, chosen by virtue of the need for open discussion between researcher and participant about the four major themes arising from the review of SE discussed above. As such, data-rich narratives were captured following three interviews with each participant. Each interview (lasting approximately one to two hours in duration) asked participants to recount their SE ‘story’, and to explain how this story unfolded over time. The interviews were transcribed verbatim from the recordings. The interviews were conducted between 2010 and 2011 in the UK, and in total comprised a document of approximately sixty-six thousands words in length. Once this data had been compiled, it was subjected to analysis as described beneath.

3.3 Analytical Strategy

To analyse the interviews, a two-stage discourse and content analysis was the chosen method and applied to all qualitative data. The first stage relied on a computerised analysis of the data set. This stage comprised condensing the interviews into plain text for each of the interviews, as required for appropriate analysis using the chosen qualitative software package, Wmatrix. The choice of analysis software was taken on the basis of its suitability in dealing with large quantities of text to discern semantic meaning in a critical discourse analysis. Furthermore, Wmatrix utilises statistical procedures to determine the presence of correlations between the frequency of words in texts, and predefined semantic domains taken from the million-word British National Corpus (BNC—for a more detailed exposition of WMatrix, see Rayson 2008) . Thus, the value of this tool is to trace meaning based on a pre-existing set of domains within a given cultural context (the UK), and guides the analyst to further probe micro-level implications (i.e. SE identity). However, previous studies that have utilised a critical approach to discourse analysis of SE using Wmatrix have focused on macro-level impact (Mason 2012) . Consequently, this study takes a different approach, because the focus of the study is linking the macro and micro levels of analysis. Therefore, this technique was used in the first stage as an exploratory tool—to determine and set up the discourses that are found in the data set and how they link to the overall discourse found in the UK through comparison against the BNC. The general discourse is framed as SE discourse in the United Kingdom, and relates to the specified chronology of 2010–2011, when the interviews were conducted.

To complement the initial, automated analysis, the second stage relied on a content analysis performed by the researcher. Thus, having condensed semantic themes from the data set, content analysis permitted deeper analysis of specific language. This assisted with dealing effectively with RQ2, where closer attention needs to be paid to adoption, rejection or suppression of the discourses arising in the academic literature and in wider public life. Using the initial semantic domains identified in the first stage as ‘codes’, the researcher re-examined the full interview transcriptions to pick out key excerpts that linked to each domain. This assisted in pin-pointing the actual language used by the interviewee that shows adherence (or otherwise) with elements of the political discourse. Consequently, this allows for clearly argumentation that links the macro and micro levels of discourse and identity . The following section describes the findings for both stages of analysis.

4 Findings

This section describes the outcomes from the qualitative analysis of the interview data. In keeping with the discussion on the literature, the data was clustered into four thematic domains: political, social, economic, and advocacy which appears to cross through the others. Each sub-section contains an applied discussion of the context within which each respondent composed their response to questions about their motivations, organisational goals and operational environment.

4.1 Discursive Identities

Following the exploratory stage of the analysis, the findings showed clear themes arising from the interview derived corpus. Table 3.2 shows the three dominant semantic domains from each interview.

Table 3.2 Semantic domains per respondent
Full size table

As the table shows, there are some notable similarities between respondents and the semantic domains identified by WMatrix. The most common domains that appear across them are: ‘Business: General’, ‘Belonging to a Group’, and ‘Social Action’. Given the existing SE definitions, it is perhaps unsurprising to find a strong discursive link with business, community and social purpose. This shows that the language of SE remains firmly rooted in these themes although it does not, yet, show us the context within which these ideas are articulated. Interestingly, ‘Government’ appears as a domain linked to some of the responses which positions a political theme alongside the more common and expected SE domains. This suggests that much of SE talk embeds a political element, since the UK Government plays a prominent role in policy and infrastructure support for the sector. At this level of analysis, it becomes clear that three general areas connote to the social entrepreneurs reflections on their practice and beliefs, i.e. social, economic (via business) and political. Lastly, most respondents (although not all) also show a strong connection with a particular issue of advocacy, i.e. ‘People: Women’ and ‘Green Issues’. This acknowledges a separate fourth domain that places advocacy alongside the pursuit of social benefit, and although they may be spoken of in the same context, further examination is required of this relationship. Thus, a four theme identity emerges from the interviews: political, social, economic and advocacy.

4.2 Political

Given the preceding discussion concerning SE discourse and this macro-level assessment of discourse in narratives , it is unsurprising to find that SE has a political dimension. The nature of SE activity is frequently drawn into political domains due to the availability of resources, particularly grant-aid and contracting opportunities. To this end, an SEs social aims are often political too, meaning SEs are in a position to service the aims of political institutions as well as independently. In Europe, we have seen a number of studies exploring this inherent political facet.

The political dimension comes through very strongly in the stories of the three respondents. As the quotation below shows, a key part of the SEs orientation is working closely with political institutions, albeit in this instance lamenting the failure of elements of the UK infrastructure to support SE. Recognition is a central aspect of this response, striving to be seen and heard by key political decision makers, as the excerpt below shows:

If we look at our female counterparts in the United States we have seen a trajectory upwards and about forty-eight per cent of all new business starts are women…So a Government agenda, no I think we’ve being pulled by the Government. The previous Government…we have managed to get them to recognize us for sure and we have managed to strategic frame of enterprise on the table in terms of heavily influencing it and also pushing it along to get it developed and to get it I suppose to get it invested in…to take on board that female entrepreneurship should be a priority in terms of their delivery plan… and we were successful at that but it’s all up in the air now again. Respondent A

Here it is evident that the respondent deems themselves successful in the past in engaging with a political agenda through Government initiatives, in this instance championing women’s rights. However the emphasis changes part-way through, which signifies an uncertainty over the future following regime change. So, the emphasis is on political engagement and the value that can be gleaned from this but also being prepared to disengage should the political climate change. SE appears to be about adopting a pragmatic, rather than ideological, political stance and utilising political means where resources and support can assist the organisation and/or cause, similar to prior research (Baines et al. 2010) . The excerpt below reaffirms this but also takes a slightly different tack and concerns more the inability of the organisation to properly exploit Government support:

I’m talking personally about …local labour and training, but problems were in the Labour Government actually, I mean, I think that we’ve seen today immense and significant investment in capital works, whether it’s been housing, whether it’s been schools, whether it’s been hospitals. I think we’ve seen more money going into the physical redevelopment of areas. Have we really maximized the opportunities to developing skills, labour, employment opportunities—no. Respondent C

I think you need hopefully buy-in support from, you know, public sector organizations that are willing to enter into a partnership and promote what you do. We have invested heavily here in terms of I suppose particularly staffing resource and as I see it as our job in many senses, we are there to be the corporate social responsibility agent of private business. So ideally I would like your head and heart but I accept your head in lieu and I may not get your heart but I am pragmatic enough not to worry about that, I will provide your heart. But actually in fairness to a lot of companies they say that they actually want to give the young.

Respondent D

This first component from respondent C shows that the political side of this activity is generally accepted as a reality of doing the job. Specific political ideologies may be only guardedly suppressed if the opportunities created through political and public sector engagement can maximise organisational impact. Of course, this seems entirely credible if we consider that we are also dealing with a general business discourse, as noted in the first analytical stage. However, it also suppresses the idea that SE can operate largely exclusively of the public sector, and the inability to maximising impact is solely down to organisational deficiencies. This is symptomatic of the impact of large scale investment in public/third sector partnerships, and the collapsing of ideological boundaries between the sectors in the UK. Consequently, the way of thinking about SE must connote with the political dimension, even though this excludes SE that works outside of the public policy environment.

Respondent D shows a different side to this theme that weaves advocacy through a discussion on Government support. In particular, attention is drawn to the idea that public sector support can be utilised as a resource to promote the organisation. Also, this respondent uses another concept, corporate social responsibilityFootnote 2 (CSR), and clearly positions SE as an enactor of this for business. This notion is highly contested in both SE and CSR literatures but for these purposes it is a significant shift of focus. Given that SE is seen to be an ambiguous concept, it is ironic that SE is spoken of to encourage the conflation of another idea in public discourse—in this case, CSR. Aside from opening up another debate over the merits of CSR and the position of SE within (or outside) of it, we can see that identifying what is SE is not easily captured because those involved sidestep such easy categorisations. As the above quotation shows, SE is notoriously difficult to pin down because the doing of SE entails a restless shifting from one approach to another. This means no single approach works, and the entrepreneurial method illustrates how the different discursive domains interact at the micro-level as identified in the literature (Diochon and Anderson 2011) .

4.3 Economic

The second element of this SE identity is the economic basis for much of the activity undertaken by these social enterprises. So although its presence is unsurprising, it is interesting to note how this economic factor is embedded in the responses, especially in terms of a business focus. This is illustrated in the excerpt below:

I think actually the motivation—the bottom line is your balance sheet and that can enable you to do the borrowing part and financing in going forward, but for us it was that but it was also about basically having a shop front window for entrepreneurship in the U.K. Something that was actually substantial in terms of delivering on our mission in regard to being able to influence and to be able to, I suppose, raise awareness and captivate people’s attention and show that you are serious. You have to be serious and that means that you have to have something that is sort of different from the usual. Respondent A

Here it becomes evident that the business component to SE is heavily imbued with the organisation’s social mission and ideology, so it becomes a fully visible and accepted part of SE identity . The economic theme may be both expected and secondary in order to social elements, but it is spoken about as an enabler—a ‘shop window’ for the mission and the ‘bottom line’ approach is unavoidable. The notion of ‘seriousness’ is also connected to this idea, that to fully pursue the social goal and raise awareness (‘to captivate’) is also to enact the means necessary to do so. Not all respondents responded in the same spirit, with some indicating that the business-case is actually weakened by the stipulation to work with other sectors. This illustrates a rejection of part of the economic identity, where using social enterprises in partnership with the public sector does not produce desirable outcomes:

Government is very much why don’t you talk to the voluntary sector about how you might be able to do things in a better, more appropriate way and its gone quite the opposite. But we see this in a number of local authorities because the first thing they do is to track little contracts thinking they might be able to make some savings because they can have an overhead which is not actually expanding much they bring little things back in house and keep the people on the same terms … we will just see how it plays out or just cancel them.

Respondent E

People would be steeped in working for the public sector and when people say to me “Oh he knows no different between public and private”—let’s be honest about it I have the same beliefs, the same values, when I worked for [the public sector] as I do here. It’s different, of course it is, in a sense of the local authority in my particular world was break even as much, was not necessarily making a profit, but the same business principles ought to exist.

Respondent D

With regard to the possibility of a social/economic dichotomy, and especially how these competing claims are reconciled, it is clear that a much more pragmatic view is taken, as the account above shows. Simply, the values from one context have been taken and applied to the ‘private’ sector—the social entrepreneur in this example equates SE with private sector work but draws on public sector values to do the job. This arguably shows that the social entrepreneur relies on a flexible approach to tackling key problems, and can adopt, adapt and apply ideas from different contexts.

4.4 Social

Many SEs have intrinsically social outcomes to their operations, even those that have an environmental core aim. The social components of the narratives comes through very strongly, as we would expect from SEs, although the nature of their social focus is very interesting. The presence of pragmatic realism comes through very strongly in the two accounts below:

On our track records we felt that we needed to look at the model of our offer really and what would enable us to equip as an organization or to be much more effective at you know lobbying and influencing on our agenda, which is primarily about recognizing the female entrepreneurship in an untapped market in the U.K.—probably worldwide really but particularly in the U.K. and that female entrepreneurs that grow and sustain enterprise make you know, if there are policy initiatives which are directed at female entrepreneurs the likelihood is that you are going to have a huge trajectory upwards. Respondent A

We have re-orientated this business as a social enterprise which sounds dramatic in one sense in terms of reorientation; actually corporately it was very simple because the ethos and culture was already here, in many senses I would say was steeped in social values and always has its focus on the young people rather than making loads of money as a private business. Respondent D

Taking respondent A first, it is clear that the social aspect is spoken of as a measurable variable (‘our track record’) as much as a core principle. We also see here that the social is conjoined with the economic through particular language (‘an untapped market in the UK’). The social entrepreneur accepts an economic identity as part of the social, that are also a feature of advocacy achieved through political means (i.e. ‘if there are policy initiatives…’). This shows a lack of clear distinction across thematic domains, in terms of how the practical implementation is achieved. Respondent D explains that their organisation started life as a business but then states the social values, ethos and culture are the key feature of the social enterprise. This is more in-keeping with an expected SE identity, where core social values form the basis for the organisation’s orientation irrespective of its structure or legal form. Furthermore, this shows that SEs do not necessarily associate an organisational form with SE per se, and as we might now expect, social entrepreneurs are more open to different choices in how they organise their operations. As such, they accept a clouded social identity in order to suppress one that is more clear cut—and probably be easier for other interested groups to recognise and support. The final section discusses these findings in more detail and proposes the next directions that further empirical work on identity might take .

5 Concluding Comments

This chapter has presented the idea that SE research looking into identity and self-identification could do worse than continue to explore the internal narratives of social entrepreneurs themselves. In support of this, the data analysis above illustrates how social entrepreneurs do not necessarily, or easily, self-identify with any particular interpretation of SE. Moreover, the picture forms of a fragmented SE identity, one that portrays conflict across a number of discursive domains. As the overview of the literature argued, these discursive domains tend to fit within four (admittedly rough) categories: social, political, economic and advocacy. The latter category does not appear as distinctly in the data as the other three. Rather, it appears interwoven throughout the political, economic and social domains. Given the cultural and political context within which the interviews took place, it is clear that there are some components of SE identity that are either rejected or suppressed. The current literature shows that UK discourse on the ‘third sector’ and ‘social enterprise’ has been created to support and simultaneously ‘shape’ how SE is understood (Mason 2012, 2013; Teasdale 2012) . Only part of the analysis supports this view in the current study. At the level of discursive domains, it becomes clear that very strong, over-riding themes apply to the narratives told by the interview participants. This confirms that SE identity contains at least three/four elements, however it becomes implausible to suggest that these are temporally ‘fixed’. Instead these components are used together in combination to reflect an idea of self-identity—for example, social/economic and economic/political—and these may be used to link to other concept and ideas, such as CSR. This fragments the picture we often try to capture of what SE is, because the data here shows that although we can sketch some general factors that make the concept (partly) whole, the individual case shows how malleable identity is or can be. When addressing their self-identity, participants utilise these conceptual fragments in a strategic and pragmatic way, portraying themselves as enactors of social or environmental change that keep these competing ideas in check. Notably, this does not help in the pursuit of clarifying what SE is, moreover it provides some further empirical credence to the idea that SE is not a discrete domain in its own right. Rather, SE ‘bleeds’ into other domains of thought and social activity. The experiences of the social entrepreneurs in this sample show that ideas and values in private (corporate) and public sectors are transferred across to ‘add value’. A tone of realism is deployed in the data to show that this process, sometimes referred to a social bricolage in this context, is simply more reflective of how the job is done (Di Domenico et al. 2010; Phillips and Tracey 2007) . This is in place of the neat, perhaps overly deterministic, definitions that are used in scholarly and political environments.

This study contributes to existing research by extending both Parkinson and Howorth (2008) and Jones et al. (2008) . It does this through connecting the discursive (macro) and individual (micro) levels through social entrepreneur narratives, and then pushing further to illustrate which discursive domains are accepted, resisted and suppressed. Specifically, this chapter has tried to illustrate how these three possible responses are articulated together, explaining how the micro-level analysis can re-cast how we see the major discursive themes. Future research needs to extrapolate this kind study much further and wider to compare the inter-cultural differences/similarities in SE discourses, particularly focusing on emerging economies in South Asia and Central and South America. These emergent discourses where so much developmental work is on-going in the SE field should be understood in light of the lessons learned in Europe and to a lesser extent, North America where the SE idea is rather more entrenched in political and social history. This will allow for a much clearer, global overview of SE discourses without getting lost in the meaning making debates that happen in very specific cultural frameworks.