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Abstract:
Social enterprise in New Zealand is immature by comparison with global counterparts. Although there is growing awareness of its potential locally, the structural environment continues to pose challenges. While such enterprises can be viewed as adopting neoliberal market and state logics, they also offer opportunities for social and environmental advocacy towards systemic change. Retaining this capacity will depend on how social enterprise negotiates its emergent identity. By reflecting on some of the 'growing pains' experienced thus far, we can begin to explore the potential for the development of a sustainable and politically autonomous social enterprise sector in New Zealand as a promising form of progressive alternative.
The shifting organisational landscape
Recent decades have witnessed a blurring of the boundaries between government, private business and social sectors, and the emergence of new organisational forms that aim to blend social and environmental aims with business practices (Forth Sector Network, n.d.). Expressions of this trend can be observed in programmes of corporate social responsibility, ethical trading, microfinance, social venture capital, privatisation of social service provision and social assets, public private partnerships, community development, and a preoccupation with sustainability in best practice business models. As this collection of activities has matured it has formalised into what has been termed the 'fourth sector'1 of the economy, after the state (the 'first sector'), the market economy (the 'second sector') and the residual category of the 'third sector' which usually denotes not-for-profit organisations. While capital has arguably become more sensitised to pursuing a 'triple bottom line' that redefines profit by incorporating social and environmental objectives with economic ones (Cordes, 2014), welfare states have at the same time busied themselves with retracting many of their previous functions, leaving the third sector to pick up these up via what Harvey (2005, p.177) describes as "privatization by NGO". In sum, public, private and social organisations can all be seen to have adopted more pragmatic, efficient and business-like modes of operation under the mantle of neoliberalism, new managerialism and third way ideologies, and in so doing so have become increasingly hybridised in their functions and organisational forms (Forth Sector Network, n.d.). While many aspects of the state and the third sector have come to look and function more like businesses, a new and distinctive...