Social enterprise is not social change

Social enterprise and social entrepreneurship (SEE)—a business-inspired approach to solving social problems—has exploded across the United States and the world in the last decade. It has entrenched itself within a broad spectrum of fields, from economic development and urban planning to health and education policy. Since the Harvard Business School established the first “Social Enterprise Initiative” 25 years ago, SEE has rooted itself in more than 100 colleges and universities, anchored by endowed chairs and new courses in elite universities such as Stanford, Yale, Penn, Columbia, Duke, and the University of California, Berkeley. These institutions have helped turn SEE into an industry, funded by $1.6 billion in foundation grants since 2003. However, SEE has done little to solve the systemic social problems it purports to address, many of which have actually gotten worse. In fact, SEE’s rise distracts from and undermines the critical role of an organized citizenry, political action, and democratic government in achieving systemic social change, by offering itself as a private, market-based alternative. SEE is founded on neoliberal ideology: a belief that markets, not government, produce the best social and economic outcomes. SEE advocates construct social problems as knowledgeprob-lems that can be solved by technical innovation driven by competition among individual social entrepreneurs, operating through for-profit, nonprofit, or hybrid enterprises. In contrast, a political approach sees social problems as power problems. Dealing with them requires collective political action by organized constituencies that use the power of democratic …