Voluntas DOI 10.1007/s11266-016-9766-4 BOOK REVIEW
Barinaga Ester, Social Entrepreneurship: Cases and Concepts Studentlitteratur AB, Lund, 2014, pp. 201, Kr. 237,00. Andrea Bassi1,2
Ó International Society for Third-Sector Research and The Johns Hopkins University 2016
Background of the Authors The author is a professor in Social Entrepreneurship at the Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy at the Copenhagen Business School.
Purpose and Organization of the Book The book is organized in two autonomous but interrelated parts and contains sixteen chapters (eight in each part that are mirroring each other). The author choose eight topics (issues, aspects) of the management of a social entrepreneurship: starting up, scaling up, building partnership, mission drift, conflict resolution, rethinking scale, social value/social impact assessment, and application for funds. Each of these issues is illustrated in the first part of the book (Cases in Social Entrepreneurship) using the technique of the ‘‘case study’’ narrative, taking as an example a ‘‘real’’ case of a ‘‘concrete’’ social enterprise in Stockholm. However, in the second part of the book (Concepts in Social Entrepreneurship) the same topics are analyzed from a more theoretical point of view implying some key sociological concepts, such as actor-network theory and symbolic capital, framing processes and social movements, embeddedness and economic quantification, logic
Book Review Editor: Silvia Ferreira. & Andrea Bassi
[email protected] 1
Department of Sociology and Business Law, University of Bologna, Strada Maggiore, 45, 40125 Bologna, Italy
2
School of Economics, Management and Statistics, Piazzale della Vittoria, 15, 47121 Forlı`, Italy
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of fields and conflicts, interest and rationality, networks and social capital, valuation of performance, and theory of change.
Summary and Statement of Claim(s) The main aim of the book is to create a space for the confrontation and the dialogue between theoretical assumptions in social and political sciences, on one side, and practical knowledge and down-to-earth examples, on the other side. The book uses theory to open up the complexities of practice and to recognize the social embeddedness of everyday entrepreneurial decisions. The author affirms that social sciences matter because what they say about entrepreneurship does have practical implications.
Critique It must be said that the book is not a classic scientific text. It is more a handbook for undergraduate and graduate students. Its main strengths consist of its original structure with two mirror faces calling each other and a narrative that builds a continuous dialogue between the first (empirical) part of the book and the second (theoretical) part. The main weakness lay in the choice of the theoretical framework, that is based mainly, if not exclusively, on the work of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and his school of thought (with his followers). His well-known theory of ‘‘habitus’’ has been highly questioned and criticized in the social sciences debate and in sociology in particular, showing its limits and narrowing. Even if the idea to present and comment several sociological concepts in the second part of the book—following the empirical examples illustrated in the first part—is remarkable, this attempt fails, in my opinion, due to the lack of theoretical comparison and confrontation. For skilled sociologists and social scientist, it is a well-known acquisition that a single theory, or approach, or school of thought, cannot nowadays be sufficient to explain the complexity of the reality, especially in the social realm. It would have been very useful if the author—for each concept analyzed in the second part— would have offered different (and often opposite) theoretical points of view. For example, the concept of ‘‘social capital’’ is mentioned with the reference exclusively to the work of Bourdieu, whereas it is well know that there are at least two other different approaches to the topic: the one of James Coleman and the one of Robert Putnam, just to mention the most famous ones. Moreover, the concept is a very complex one, articulated in ‘‘bonding social capital,’’ ‘‘bridging social capital,’’ and ‘‘liking social capital,’’ but of this wide debate across several social sciences there is no mention in the text. Another example could be the theory of organizational life cycle. In the first part of the book, the case study is narrated following a typical life cycle of an organization: the start-up phase, then the growing phase, then the crisis phase that can conduct to a stabilization phase or a new growth phase or a failure,
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and so on, but the author does not mention any references to the wide scientific literature on ‘‘organization life cycle.’’
Relevance of the Book Given the above-mentioned considerations, the book could be useful for undergraduate and Master students as it offers an overview of the main managerial challenges a social enterprise will be facing during its organizational life, with the support of many empirical examples.
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