December 14, 2007 | Read Time: 1 minute
Social enterprises — the mixing of business and charity ventures — has received a lot of press as the new, big approach to solving the world’s problems.
But Jeff Trexler, a professor of social entrepreneurship at Pace University, in New York, warns that the approach is actually quite old. “Perhaps the single greatest weakness of the social enterprise movement is its belief that it is new,” he writes on his blog, Uncivilsociety.org.
“Instead of an unprecedented revolution,” he writes, “what we might be seeing in social enterprise is just the latest in a series of selective attention cascades, in which a new generation of do-gooders — a web of students, researchers, retirees and emerging entrepreneurs — clusters around an organizational metaphor that seems new to them. What is new, though, is not so much the underlying structure as our awareness of the metaphor itself.”
What do you think? Is social enterprise an old idea dressed in new clothes? Click on the comments link below to share your thoughts.
