Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the moral language of doing business in the social welfare economy as experienced through my involvement with policies, practitioners and research within a European Commission funded project studying "successful social enterprises".

Paper long abstract:

Social enterprising combines the "best of both worlds": solidarity and freedom, safeness and innovation, cooperation and independence. In this paper I look at how such business ethics talk is a way to imagine the European economy as "social", as well as how this language is reassembled, translated and adapted by third sector practitioners and researchers to fit with our/their own moral evaluations of the social economy. My argument will build on three related (ethnographic) examples that aim to explore how the value-laden rhetoric of social enterprising is made to cohere with everyday practices of social service provision and making money.

First, by looking at the business of selling recycled bags in the city centre of Vienna, I will explore how entrepreneurial morality in work integration enterprises, such as creativity or innovativeness, becomes meaningful through locally constructed antagonism with corporate for and not-for profit competitors. Second, these liberal values stem from the (moralizing) demand for social entrepreneurs to do good by doing business. By imagining non-liberal principles as productive innovations to the liberal agenda, these discourses reconnect with classic debates in anthropology on the interested nature of solidarity, from Marcel Mauss to Mary Douglas. At the same time and thirdly, I will look at how academics like me, from across the social sciences, have studied businesses, social movements and the third sector in the past and are now trying to deal with the empirical, normative and imagined scenarios of "welfare hybridity".