social enterprise as algorithm

7/26/2019 Social Enterprise as Algorithm

1/21Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1307752

65Trexler

Social Entrepreneurship as an Algorithm:Is Social Enterprise Sustainable?Jeff TrexlerPace University, USA

Social enterprise is charitys web 2.0awould-be revolution as open to interpre-

tation as a Rorschach blot. For social en-terprise to be more than the latest pass-ing fad in doing good, we need a rigorousre-assessment of the link between systemdynamics and social institutions. To thatend this article has three distinct yet relat-ed aims. First, I want to offer a new deni-tion of social enterprise, one that reectsits essential nature as a simple rule withcomplex results. Besides re-dening so-cial enterprise, my next goal is to providean explanation for organizational altruismthat goes beyond latching onto the latestpopular trends. My alternative approachis to nd the basis for corporate charitywithin corporate identity itselfin par-ticular, the historic function of organiza-tional form as a means of modeling emer-gent patterns. This articles nal aim is toexplain how social enterprise can have itsgreatest sustainable impactby makingitself obsolete.

Introduction

Social enterprise is a simple term with acomplex range of meanings. Some ex-perts say that a social enterprise is any

venture that generates earned income for pub-lic benet; others argue that the term denotesnonprots that utilize efcient business met-rics; still more see it as a movement not intrin-sically business-like at all, but rather, entre-

Social Entrepreneurship as an Algorithm: Is Social Enterprise Sustainable?E:CO Issue Vol. 10 No. 3 2008 pp. 65-85

preneurial in the sense of pursuing innovativesolutions to social problems. On the surface

these denitions appear contradictory, yet eachhas a fair claim to the phrase (see the paper byMassetti in this volume for a discussion of theambiguities involved in dening social entre-preneurship and her diagramic construct of theSocial Entrepreneurship Matrix (SEM) as a wayto start to resolve them). Despite all the apparent differences,sustainability is a value that cuts across deni-tional lines. Social entrepreneurs strive to pro-mote a sustainable environment, a sustainablesocial order, sustainable nonprot or for-protenterprisesan array of goals often describedas the triple bottom line.

In part we can ascribe the terms ubiq-uity to the innate appeal of lasting effects; justas capuchin monkeys respond favorably topositive feedback, human cooperation seemsto ourish when people sense that it will havemeaningful results (Brosnan & de Waal, 2004).

What makes sustainability particularly com-pelling in this regard is its inherent promise toavoid lossafter all, an enterprise that meets

the needs of the present without compromis-ing the ability of future generations to meettheirs would seem to embody the ideal of afair return (World Commission on Environ-ment and Development, 1987; see also Boons,2008). However, there is more to the per-ceived value of sustainability than equitableefciency (Stavins et al., 2003). Echoing thelanguage of social networks and other complex

Philosophy

Complexity and Philosophy


2/21Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1307752

66 E:CO Vol. 10 No. 3 2008 pp. 65-85

systems, sustainability also seems to provide ascientic basis for adopting social enterprise asthe new organizational norm. In the words ofPaul Hawken, one of the leading advocates forwhat he identies as the movement emerg-ing out of the natural order:

Sustainability is about stabilizing the currentlydisruptive relationship between earths twomost complex systemshuman culture and theliving world. The interrelation between thesetwo systems marks every persons existenceand is responsible for the rise and fall of civili-

zations... Today, for the rst time in history, anentire civilizationits people, companies, and

governmentsis tr ying to arrest the downspinand understand how to live on earth, an effortthat represents a watershed in human existence

(Hawken, 2007: 12).

It is a noble sentimentand an under-standable draw to a rising generation steepedin network dynamics as a central part of dailylife. The notion that social enterprise is therst mode of organization to respect naturalsystem ecologies provides a theoretical basisfor the revolutionary rhetoric that has our-ished in social enterprise circles since themovements rise to prominence in the late

1990s. It also seems to be a killer app for per-suading people outside the charitable world togive tangible support to the development ofsocial entrepreneurship, whether through rev-enue-generating social ventures or donativecorporate philanthropy. Since the system willcollapse without a commitment to sustainableinitiatives, those who cling to obsolete notionsof prot-maximization and centralized controlare hurting only themselves. Rather than providing a self-evidentproof for social enterprise, however, the appealto sustainable systems raises serious questionsabout its long-term viability. Historians ofsystems theory with no stake in the success ofsocial entrepreneurship have long recognizedthat earlier social theorists incorporated fun-damental elements of system dynamics intotheir organizational models (See., e.g., Bein-hocker, 2006; Sawyer, R.K ., 2005). Not leastamong these precursors of modern theory is

Adam Smith, whose image of the free marketsinvisible hand has itself proven to be a sus-tainable model of how simple multi-agent in-teractions can produce a higher order withoutcentralized control. Contrary to afrming the need for ev-ery business to be virtuous, many systems

theorists support precisely the opposite claim:every enterprise can pursue its own selshends condent that public virtue will emerge.And we need not rely on the metaphors ofSmiths invisible hand or Bernard Mandev-illes Fable of the Bees to nd support forsuch an argument; as physicist Neil Johnsonsuggests in his recent overview of complexity,the most basic levels of nature appear to utilizewhat one might call a combination-of-errorsapproach, in which collective efciency re-

sults from the aggregation of suboptimal ac-tions (Johnson, 2007: 210). For social enterprise to be more thanthe latest passing fad in doing good, we needa rigorous re-assessment of the link betweensystem dynamics and social institutions. Tothat end this article has three distinct yet relatedaims. First, I want to offer a new denition ofsocial enterprise (taking into consideration theabove mentioned SEM of Massetti), one that isdesigned both to distill a concise explanation

of the phenomenon and to explain the diversevalues and ventures associated with the term.The strategic shift in my approach is to moveaway from trying to identify either a prescrip-tive mission or an array of common character-istics. Rather, the key to understanding socialenterprise lies in a fundamental principle ofsystem dynamics: a simple rule can have com-plex resultsand not all of them are favorableto social enterprise as a distinct and sustainablemovement. Besides re-dening social enterprise,my next goal is to provide an explanationfor organizational altruism that goes beyondlatching onto the latest popular fads. Ratherthan asserting that social enterprise is a revolu-tionary disruptive innovation, I posit that so-cial enterprise reects the recurring tendencyof the charitable community to engage instra-tegic symbiotic mimesis, adapting by adoptingwhat it believes to be the traits desired by po-


3/21

67Trexler

tential supportersan approach, I will explain,that is, in the end, unsustainable. In contrast, Isee the root of social enterprise as lying withincorporate identity itselfin particular, the his-toric function of organizational form as a meansof modeling complex emergent patterns.

This articles ultimate aim is to explain

why social enterprise is a transitionalform, animportant but ultimately temporary organi-zational technology. The ethical imperativedoes not derive from any need to stabilize suchexternal systems as human culture and theliving world, nor does it require us to makeunfounded and untenable assertions that allsocial enterprises are chaotic systems or thattraditional markets are not networks. Rather,it ows from the very nature of corporate iden-tity. Every enterprise is a social enterprise; the

time has come to understand why.

Dening social enterprise

Social enterprise is charitys Web 2.0awould-be revolution as open to interpre-tation as a Rorschach blot. If commenta-

tors agree on anything in regard to social entre-preneurship, its, as Massetti described above,the lack of a consensus as to what the conceptmeans. Whereas Massetti supplies her SEMmatrix as a way out of the dilemma of den-

ing social entrepreneurship, I will explore theproblem of denition in order to probe the is-sue of sustainability. Oxfords Alex Nicholls notes that thedenition of social entrepreneurship is oftenseen as contested and unclear, although headeptly reframes this as a dynamic exibilitythat is the basis of [the movements] extraor-dinary impact (Nicholls, 2006: 10.) ProfessorMarthe Nyssens similarly observes that socialenterprise remains a very broad and often

quite vague concept, particularly in the U.S..While her European research group had dis-tilled its own preferred denitioncitizen-initiated community benet with a limits onmaterial benet to investorsshe expresslydisclaims any effort to impose prescriptivecriteria. Instead, the denition is at best anattempt to describe an ideal-type within agalaxy of groups (Nyssens, 2006: 4, 10.)

It is tempting to assume that the con-cepts vagueness is a feature, not a bug, but asa programmatic strategy this is not without itsrisks. As NYUs Paul Light has observed, thelack of an agreed-upon denition of social en-terprise is likely to hurt the movements chanc-es of long-term success. At the very least, he

argues, measurement of the growth and impactof social enterprise will be impossible withouta shared understanding of precisely what weresupposed to measuringan ironic situationfor a eld that exhorts nonprots to use quan-tiable metrics (Light, 2008).

The one and the many problem

To build the case for social entrepreneurship,commentators have attempted to identifyshared traits sufcient to demonstrate the ex-

istence of a distinct abiding pattern. One ap-proach is to construct a denition that hasdecided inspirational appeal but offers littlepractical guidance in setting the apparent

boundaries. For example, the Skoll Founda-tion, one of the leading supporters of socialenterprise worldwide, describes a social entre-preneur as societys change agent: a pioneerof innovation that benets humanitya de-nition that is capable of including any numberof individuals and businesses that social en-

trepreneurs would typically not count withintheir number, such as Microsoft, big pharma orcompanies with patents on toothpaste. Deciding what qualies as a truly so-cial benet becomes even more difcult whenwe factor in historical change. For example, lit-tle more than a century ago urban streets wererife with disease-bearing lth and a sicken-ing stench until the automobile made the citycleaner by expelling its exhaust into the atmo-sphere, which is one reason why ads from theera linked oil companies with nature scenesand fresh airthough it may seem counterin-tuitive today, back then the internal combus-tion engine was green tech.

To esh out the denition beyond ab-stract ideals, commentators have also tried tosupplement formal denitions with what they

believe to be common distinguishing traits.The approach is akin what Ludwig Wittgen-stein described as identifying family resem-


4/21

68 E:CO Vol. 10 No. 3 2008 pp. 65-85

blancein other words, eschewing a singlexed denition in favor of a complicatednetwork of similarities, overlapping and criss-crossing among individual examples of theterm (Wittgenstein, 1953, 2001: 66). Expertshave proposed a wide variety of more specicvalues that they see as emblematic of social en-

trepreneurship, such as:

Subsistence on the sale of goods and ser-vices;

Efcient use of grants;

Creative inspiration applied to an unfor-tunate yet stable equilibrium (Martin &Osberg. 2007);

Quantiable metrics;

Initiation and management by private citi-

zens apart from government and commer-cial corporations;

Cooperative engagement among nonprof-its, commercial business and the state;

Organization as a nonprot;

Indifference to organizational form,whether for-prot, nonprot or a mixedcorporate group;

Rejection of organizational form in favor ofproductive networks, or;

The creation of a new organizational formmarked by blended value and limits oninvestors prot (see, e.g., Borzaga, 2004;Dees & Economy, 2001; Light, 2008;Mair & Hockerts, 2006; Martin & Osberg,2007; Nicholls, 2006; Nyssens, 2006).

Given the all too evident confusion engen-dered by the inevitable contradictions arisingamong these possible distinguishing traits, ex-perts have attempted to clarify the concept by

aggregating traits and denitions in relation tothe traditional boundaries between the mar-ket, government and nonprot sectors. Yetthis too gives rise to its own share of confu-sion. An advocates considerable range of in-novative and dynamic international praxis anddiscourse (Nicholls, 2006: 5) is to the critic anad hoc mlange; likewise, when the editors ofone collection of essays preface their book witha three-page small-print chart contrasting the

distinct denitions offered by each other, itraises the question of whether a term that canmean anything means anything at all.

Social enterprise as algorithm

Making sense of the confusion is an all but im-possible task so long as we try to work with-

in the most common analytical frameworks.Words such as change agents, social andeven entrepreneurship are so open to inter-pretation that any denition framed in suchlanguage borders on tautology. Trying to dis-till a set of common characteristics from dis-parate ventures is an analytical strategy that issure to result in a model either too vague to bemeaningful or too exclusionary to be accepted

by a wide swath of practitioners. Likewise,proceeding from the assumption that society is

divided into discrete sectors (partly discussedby May Seitenadi in this volume)no matterhow we try to position social enterprise as amediating, intersecting or self-contained sec-tor, the result is going to raise far more ques-tions than it answers. A more productive starting point would

be to ask how a single concept could coherentlyserve as a nexus for so many contradictory vari-ants. The goal of such an inquiry would not beto reduce social enterprise to a single denition

or set of traits, but to rationalize the emergenceof multiple distinct variations of a single term.Complex systems theory provides a

replicable model for explaining such a pattern:namely, the potential for simple rules to giverise to complex forms. Just as the rudimentarydecision-making rules in ants can give rise to adiverse array of ordered nestssome ourish-ing, some failingsocial enterprise could bethought of as a linguistic algorithmwhose spe-cic instantiations can differ widely dependingon such variables as the user and the context(Gordon, 2004). From this perspective social enterpriseis more than merely a descriptive category it functions instead as a generative code. Therepeated expression of this algorithm acrossdiverse environments produces an array ofdistinct yet self-similar values. In this regardsocial enterprise is an organizational analog tothe Koch curve or the Mandelbrot set; while


5/21

69Trexler

the collective in the aggregate may seem irre-ducibly complex, each particular expressionderives from applying the same programmaticrules (Mandelbrot & Hudson, 2004; Wolfram,2002). Although this may not be the tradition-al way of analyzing organizational form, com-

plex systems modeling provides an invaluabletool for resolving otherwise intractable prob-lems, most notably with respect to irreduc-ible semantic complexity. Take, for instance,

Wittgensteins paradigmatic example of thecomplexity of the concept of chair, whichis susceptible both of seemingly clear expres-sions and borderline cases. Rather than try tocompile a list of similarities and outliers (e.g.,four legs and a seat except when its a bean-

bag), we can now see a deeper logic beneath

the vagueness and apparent contradiction, as aset of relatively simple weighted valuessay,discrete form, primarily for sitting, less forresting pronetakes shape in a diverse arrayof forms. Viewed as a whole, the array of ele-ments in the category chair appears to defyreduction to an algorithmic analysis, yet thisglobal complexity emerges from the recursiveiteration of relatively simpler rules across spaceand time. A similar dynamic is at work with so-

cial enterprise, except here the term functionsboth as a descriptor of the aggregate and thegenerative algorithm. The operative rule is ap-parent in the phrase social enterprise itself,which combines a term linked to the businessworld with a term connoting connections out-side the commercial realm.

We can distill the operative rule into asingle word: hybrid. In a nutshell, social en-terprise combines values from two seeminglydistinct conceptual domains. Embedded with-in the social component is an array of valuesassociated with behavior with an orientation

beyond the market, state or self; likewise, theterm enterprise links to values associatedwith business, commerce, purpose and corpo-rate structure. Fused together, it is a deceptive-ly simple mix with the potential to take shapein a wide range of forms. Viewing these par-ticular expressions at the macro-level can makethe concept appear to be a vague and confus-

ing mess, but each specic instance ows fromthe same impulse to hybridize, albeit shaped

by discrete environmental inuences. View-ing the system as clusters of values that sharediscrete aspects of family resemblance, we candescribe each relatively stable aggregate ofsimilar patterns as a linguistic attractor along

the lines of dynamical systems construct of at-tractors discussed by Goldstein, Hazy, and Sil-

berstang (in this volume; see also, e.g., Cooper,1999: 87). In keeping with current usage, at leastin the U.S., it is possible to map these attractorsin relation to three primary values, althoughthere is a fourth that the movement itself tendsnot to acknowledge. Arguably the most expan-sive pattern is one that results from perceivingentrepreneurship primarily in terms of entre-

preneurial innovation. Whether an organiza-tion actually engages in commerce is beside thepoint; the key value is devising solutions to so-cial problems that go beyond the limits of tra-ditional philanthropy. For example, Ashoka, aleading force in the movement, denes socialenterprise as disruptive innovation in resolv-ing social problems, an expansive denitionthat encompasses groups from Planned Par-enthood and Teach for America to Ethos Waterand American Apparel.

Another approach reects a more com-mercial vision, equating entrepreneurshipprimarily with earned income. From this per-spective a social enterprise is a social business,distinct from mainstream charity in that it es-chews grants and donations in favor of nan-cial self-sustainability. This too is capable of

bridging the for-prot and nonprot divide,both in the form of a hybrid charity/businesscorporate family (e.g., Greyston Bakery andthe Greyston Foundation), charitable micro-nancing of businesses in disadvantage areas(Grameen Bank; Kiva.org; Harlems Abyssini-an Development Corporation) and commercialcorporate social responsibility, such as ProjectRed or Starbucks fair trade coffee. The third is somewhat more narrow, atleast in terms of its relation to corporate law.In this model, social enterprise is synonymouswith nongovernmental nonprot organiza-tions, albeit groups that apply business practic-


6/21

70 E:CO Vol. 10 No. 3 2008 pp. 65-85

es and metrics to their work. Perhaps the mostprominent example of this approach is venturephilanthropy, which transforms the tradition-al rhetoric of giving into social investment; theRobin Hood Foundation, for instance, is a char-ity funded by leading hedge funds that uses itsgrants to promote rigorous standards for social

ROI.The above three patterns or categories

encompass many of the individuals and groupsthat self-identify as social entrepreneurs, al-though the fact that there are any number ofoutliers and shades of difference is perfectlyconsistent with the fundamental underlyingmodel; at base, social enterprise is not a speciccategory but an algorithm or generative code.Some will use the language of a double or triple

bottom line (the difference being that the triple

bottom line breaks out environmental sustain-ability as a separate social purpose), others willeschew nancial rhetoric altogether, but re-gardless of the specic individual differenceseach ows from the hybridization of social andentrepreneurial values, whatever each usermay believe these to be.

The social enterprise bubble

As a working denition of social enter-prise a semantic systems analysis has

a few distinct advantages, not least ofwhich is that it applies a well-established ana-lytical tool for explaining complex aggregates ofdata. Moreover, it does this without imposinga Procrustean norm that forces us to discrimi-nate among competing visions of the eld; it iscapable of explaining why people who believethat nonprots shouldnt be commercial andthose who evangelize about earned income canequally and credibly describe themselves as so-cial entrepreneurs.

In addition, the reference to complexsystems theorya simple rule expressed incomplex patternsresonates with the argu-ments often used to justify claims that socialenterprise is a revolutionary movement. Par-ticularly since the late 1990s, a number of com-mentators have appealed to system dynamicsas the basis for adopting practices that blendpublic benet and entrepreneurship. Whetherthe dynamic du jour is decentralized networks,

chaos theory, the tipping point or the wisdomof crowds, social entrepreneurs have been ad-ept at laying claim to the latest vogue in sys-tems-discourse to indicate the superiority of

blended value. Yet the meme giveth, and the memetaketh away. A systems model of the dissemi-

nation of semantic value does not play favor-ites; that social enterprise has emerged as arelatively common operative metaphor doesnot necessarily indicate that social enterpriseis the ideal form of social organization, anymore than the popularity of the Macarena orSpiderman movies means that they representthesummum bonumof their respective arts. Itmay also be equally likely that the viral spreadof social enterprise rhetoric reects the inter-action of environmental factors that make the

hybridization of these particular values seemadvantageousfor now. When these factorschange, as is inevitable, our language is likelyto change as well (Abrams & Strogatz, 2003;Atkinson et al., 2008).

Rhetorical turbulence

Social enterprise did not arise in a vac-uum. It emerged out of a peculiar array of his-torical circumstances increasingly distant fromthe world of today. The roots of the movement

extend at least as far back as the late 1970s,when scal crises buttressed support for cut-backs in government grants in the West andthe Solidarity movement gave global promi-nence to the idea of what the Polish reform-ers called social enterpriseself-governed,self-sustaining and the fundamental source ofsocial benet (Brand, 1982). The sustainedeconomic boom of the past fteen years didnot only give rise to a new generation of en-trepreneurs applying their expertise to philan-thropy; it also fostered an association betweenentrepreneurship and such adaptive values assuccess, insight, growth and the future.

In this environment the rhetoric of so-cial enterprise spread far beyond the connesof organizations engaged in identiable hybridactivity; it also became a standardized modeof self-description among otherwise non-entrepreneurial nonprots. We see a similarphenomenon at work in the dissemination


7/21

71Trexler

of such descriptors as green, organic and, ofcourse, sustainability, which have emerged asnormative as much through imitation as ide-ology. This is what I referred to earlier as thefourth less acknowledged expression of hybridvalues: mimetic replication of entrepreneurialand public benet language, with minimal to

no impact on organizational behavior. While it is indeed possible for social en-terprise to be a revolutionary new standard thatwill forever change our ways of doing good, itis also possible that social enterprise may turnout to be an organizational equivalent to thehula hoop. Just as each new summer bringsforth a new song that captures the ear of every-one between age two and twenty-ve, evolv-ing political and economic circumstances giverise to new ways of talking about coordinated

action. In the for-prot business world thisis all too familiar; just as atomic businessesourished after WWII and the invention ofthe transistor fueled a tronics boom, overthe past decade we have seen dot-com rhetoricmorphing into Web 2.0 as well as the painfulrise and fall of shared modes of description forhedge funds and subprime mortgages. That social enterprise could provemerely to be a semantic bubble is not as outra-geous as it might seem. All the talk of world-

changing revolution distracts us from a moreunpleasant historical fact: that social enter-prise is far from the rst charitable revolutionwitnessed in recent years. Merely a decade ago,many of the same experts now espousing so-cial enterprise were proclaiming a global asso-ciational revolution that was poised to changethe world forever (Salamon, 1999). However,this revolution in doing good did not champi-on hybrid social ventures but nonprot NGOs,or civil society, which were said to consti-tute a distinct third sector apart from stateand market. It was a paradigm well suited anenvironment that now seems like the ancientpastthe breakdown of the welfare state,waves of recession, the collapse of the SovietUnion and the Eastern Bloc and the imminenceof a new millennium in the standard Gregoriancalendar.

But even this was not the rst socialrevolution. Go back a few more years and youll

nd another way of describing nonprots andcharity. As opposed to a third sector, nonprof-its were partners in public service with gov-ernment in administering the welfare state(Salamon, 1995). Commercial business was asector spoken of primarily in terms of marketfailure, a trope that does not seem surprising

when you consider that this was a time markedby rampant ination, a dormant stock marketand the implosion of industrial manufacturingin the U.S.

In fact, the very terms we use now todescribe doing good reect the linguistic dy-namics of earlier times. Consider, for instance,the word philanthropy. The use of this wordto describe charitable giving reached a criticalmass around the turn of the twentieth century,with the rise of charitable giving by wealthy

industrialists. That philanthropy is a wordderived from Greek rootsphilia, brotherlylove, and anthropos, humanis not a co-incidence; it reects a strategic linkage of theindustrial nouveau riche with the classical lan-guage then associated with the establishmentelite. Similarly, the word social used in thecharitable context is not an isolated novelty. Itis a word that came to prominence in the chari-table world with the early development of so-

cial systems theory in the nineteenth century.Whereas then-traditional charity viewed pov-erty as the result of personal aws, social re-formersincluding the rst generation of aca-demic sociologistsargued instead for seeingsocietys problems in terms of systemic socialdysfunction. Even the analytical language isfamiliar, with analogies drawn from membersand networks found in the society, the human

body and such radically new media as the tele-graph and railroad (Wiebe, 1966; Otis, 1999;Otis, 2001). Akin to turbulent disruptions withinthe economy (Mandelbrot and Hudson, 2004),the language of charity exhibits a tendency toevolve through waves of exploding bubbles,with some collapsing into nothingness, oth-ers leaving signal traces and a few systemicallyreshaping how we think and act (Abrams &Strogatz, 2003; Atkinson et al., 2008; Gross,2007).


8/21

72 E:CO Vol. 10 No. 3 2008 pp. 65-85

A variety of factors inuence how thesepatterns emerge, perhaps the most prominent

being strategic symbiotic mimesis, in whichgroups seeking an infusion of capital adapt tothe perceived interests of potential patrons. Atpresent, this is the rhetoric of entrepreneur-ship, with particular instantiations of reect-

ing, inter alia, the extent of adaptive changeeach actor deems necessary to satisfy the ex-pectations of targeted potential patrons. Otherfactors that inuence the spread of particularmetaphor include the emergence of new me-dia, shifts in status markers, the recognitionof scientic progress, the vicissitudes of poli-tics and the perceived stability of the broadereconomy.

Here is where the analogy to Web 2.0becomes particularly salient. Akin to the ini-

tial mania for the so-called dot-com revolution,Web 2.0 has from the beginning been criti-cized as vague and questionably novel concept.However, with the market downturn, Web2.0s semantic exibility is less of an adaptiveadvantage than another piece of evidence forviewing the idea as just an echo of 1990s dot-com hype. The exponential escalation of Web2.0 can just as quickly become an exponentialimplosion, as negative associations with web-

based social networking cascade into a market

collapse. Like its online counterpart, the sustain-ability of social enterprise is entangled withthat of its underlying metaphor. The more so-ciety tends to associate entrepreneurial valueswith positive feedback, the greater the poten-tial for social enterprise to amplify in waysthat reinforce the perception that the move-ment is a permanent revolution. Yet as busi-ness may lose its appeal, there is also the prob-ability that a cascade transforms into a collapse.In the latter scenario the question facing socialentrepreneurs will go beyond merely deningwhat they are. They will encounter increasedresistance to the very notion of blending char-ity with entrepreneurship, a scenario in whichthe linkage of charity and entrepreneurshipmay become opaque at best.

Limit factors

In the prevailing mythology of social enter-prise, the movement will grow exponentiallyso as to occupy the eld, with the new hybridmodel of a double- or triple-bottom line dis-placing more traditional nonprot and for-prot institutions. Its an attractive, even inspi-

rational vision of social revolution, but it mayhave little bearing on how social movementsand the way we describe them actually evolve.Rather than subsisting in periods of relativestasis with occasional periods of rational revo-lutionary change, the cooperative impulse ex-presses itself in forms that exhibit the custom-ary wild and aperiodic swings associated withcomplex system, with the business trusts andsettlement houses of one era giving way to thecorporation and New Deal in the next.

The remarks in the previous sectionpointed to a few of the key factors that con-tributed to the spike in social enterprise overthe past decade. Yet these positive environ-mental inuences are neither permanent norall-encompassing, and we can already see arange of other values that could interact to cre-ate a cascade in the other direction. Althoughsocial entrepreneurs may not recognize itasis all too often the case in bubble economiesthe conditions for collapse are already in place,

starting with an overt backlash against busi-ness hybrids. The downtown of the economyis arguably the most conspicuous environ-mental shift. Not only is entrepreneurship nolonger a sustainable metaphor for personal andorganizational success, but an upsurge in eco-nomic dissatisfaction can make the very idea ofproting from charity seem inequitable, if notinefcient.

The latter objection points to more asystemic obstacle to the continued diffusion ofsocial enterprise as an organizing principlenamely, its lack of a compelling rationale for in-tegrating business and noncommercial values.

In addition, within the more tradition-al nonprot mainstream, a growing numberof critics are objecting to social enterprise forwhat they see as its reductionistic nature. Forexample, Michael Edwards Just Another Em-

perorhas garnered signicant attention for itsargument that social enterprise is a rhetorical


9/21

73Trexler

mirage, an appropriation of business jargonthat is inconsistent with the core values of thecharitable sector (Edwards, 2008). Critics of amore postmodern bent raise similar objectionsfrom another angle, echoing the neo-Marxistapproach to systems theory in the Frankfurtschool to argue that social enterprise embodies

the colonization of the life-world by the eco-nomic realm (Humphries & Grant, 2005). Theeconomist Robert Reich argues that hybridventures are as meaningful as cotton candythe glib belief that we can do well and do goodat the same time masks the subversion of thecommon good by the aggregation of wealthand power in the hands of corporate executives(Reich, 2007: 171). What unites these disparate criticalvoices is a shared sense that charity by de-

nition is distinct from commodied rhetoricand valuestrue virtue lies in the communalrealm of Ferdinand Tnniesgemeinschaft, notthe impersonal gesellschaft of contracts, met-rics and trade. Mirroring this critique is theresponse to hybridization by those who see asocial mission as incompatible with for-prot

business (Tnnies, 2001). Once again the opposition is multi-tiered. The most fundamental objection isthat hybridization is inconsistent with corpo-

rate law, in which the standard for assessingcorporate actions is whether they maximizeshareholder value. Here reductionism to thelatter single value becomes the standard (see,e.g., Laughlin, 2005; Woese, 2004; Kauffman,2008); public-minded legislators may haveenacted constituency statutes and other re-forms aimed at allowing corporate managers toconsider the interests of nonshareholder stake-holders, but the driving force of investor mar-ketsparticularly in an economic downturnkeeps the singular aim of for-prot businessthe maximization of nancial return. Organizational theorists extend thisreductionistic approach to their analysis acrossthe organizational spectrum. Contemporarymodels of corporate identity have discarded themetaphor of corporate personality as obsolete;instead, the corporation and its analogs are ag-gregates of inputs, outputs and agreementsanexus of contracts is one prominent image

arrayed so as to minimize transaction costs.Nonprotsreduced in this paradigm to orga-nizations that prohibit the distribution of netprots to insidersform in areas of the econo-my marked by contract failure, while businesscorporations, cooperatives and other aggre-gates with their own default rules dominate in

environments where the rules governing eachprove to be most efcient (Hansmann, 1996). This mode of understanding businessorganization has proven stubbornly resistantto efforts aimed at incorporating social respon-sibility into the corporate DNA. The rhetoricof moral value and social responsibility has noplace in a world reduced to connections and ef-cient exchange; even the apparent victories ofsocial enterprise, such as the mainstreaming ofgreen business and corporate charitycan be

recast as strategic signals that are efcient re-sponses to market realities, such as the risingprice of fossil fuel. Arguments that socially re-sponsible organizations are more protable aresimilarly ineffective, given the relative lack ofquantitative evidence.

The most self-defeating argument,though, is the claim that social enterprise issuperior because triple-bottom-line venturesfunction as self-sustaining dynamic systems,mirroring the global ecosystem itself. Beyond

the fact that such claims assume more thanthey prove, complex systems theory actuallysupports the proposition that social benet can

be a positive externality of selsh proteering. Consider the inuential systems-basedargument made by Fritjof Capra, whom move-ment advocate Paul Hawken lauds for pro-viding a strong conceptual underpinning forsustainability (Capra, 2002). Capra groundsthe need for hybrid business practices in thenature of living systems, in which networks ofcomplex interactions produce novel emergentproperties. For Capra, the spontaneous emer-gence of new order (Capra, 2002: 116) is, inthe words of Alfred North Whitehead, na-tures creative advancethe key property ofall living systems (Capra, 2002: 117). Extrapolating from this principle,Capra argues that business organizations failto adhere to the animating principle of natu-ral sustainabilitythey are life-destroying,


10/21

74 E:CO Vol. 10 No. 3 2008 pp. 65-85

not life-enhancing (Capra, 2002: 128). Theproblem lies in the formal structure of busi-ness itself, which consists merely of the rulesand routines that are necessary for the effectivefunctioning of the organization (Capra, 2002:121). Whereas the life of a cooperative enter-prise subsists in informal emergent structures

marked by creativity and higher values, todaysbusiness focuses solely on reductionistic ele-ments, such as prots, shareholder value, mar-ket share and return on investment (Capra,2002: 126). The corporation as designed issoulless and mechanistic; blind to the alive-ness of its communities business fails to con-sider social benet, thereby fostering cascadesof destruction throughout the social web. This argument may seem convincingwithin the social enterprise movement, but at

its core it is self-refuting. Indeed, the self-re-futing nature of Capras perspective curiouslymimics the self-refuting nature of Capras ownconsisting commitment to a version of quan-tum mechanics, that of his teacher GeoffreyChew, although Chews bootstrap approachhas long been discredited within the physicscommunity (see, e.g., Woit, 2006). Within adynamical systems model, the emergence ofsustainable order does not require that eachparticular part of the system exhibit the same

traits as the desired holistic outcome. To thecontrary, as Capra repeatedly observes, one ofthe dening traits of an emergent pattern isthat exhibits radical noveltyfeatures thatare not previously observed in the complexsystem under observation (Goldstein, 1999:50).

Far from being alien to contempo-rary capitalism, this very dynamic of radi-cal discontinuity is central to the metaphorsand principles that economists from AdamSmith to Friedrich Hayek have identied as thesource of social benet in free markets: indi-viduals and businesses pursue their own endsand, mirabile dictu, constructive good emerg-es out of chaos, selshness and vice (Taylor,2004). Arguments based on the emergenceof self-sustaining ecosystems are unconvinc-ing precisely because they do not answer thequestion of why a business must internalize anethic of social responsibility. It is not enough

to say,paceCapra, that nature uses rule-basedprocesses and destructive crisis points as thefulcrum for the mystery of spontaneous order(Capra, 2002: 118). The Occams Razor con-clusion from natural sustainability is that me-chanical corporate rules and asocial proteer-ing are critical components of the emergence of

good, just not the parts that do-gooders like.From this perspective, assertions that

business must reect the natural order canseem nave, if not incoherent. As BernardMandeville (1714, 1723) rhapsodized in hisclassic Fable of the Bees,

Fools only strive To make a Great an honest Hive.

Tenjoy the Worlds Conveniencies, Be famed in War, yet live in Ease

Without great Vices, is a vain Eutopia seated in the Brain.

Social enterprise as transitional form

Social enterprise is at a crossroads. Onepath leads to an all too common fate forelements in a mimetic cascade, from

slang and viral video to civil society and settle-ment housesmass diffusion followed by col-lapse. Yes, the social enterprise movement willpersist to varying degrees, from a cadre of ad-

herents to traces of its characteristic language.Its also possible that certain policy goals em-

braced by the movement may thrive due to fac-tors largely outside the movement itself, suchas the effect of rising oil prices on funding foralternative fuels. However, the movement de-ned by remaking the nonprot and for-protworlds in the image of social ventures will per-haps dramatically recede, a twenty-rst cen-tury heir to hippies, Beats and Fourierites. But this is not inevitable. The core

weakness of the movement to hybridize is notthat it strives to emulate sustainable systems,but that it does not provide a coherent reasonto integrate seemingly disparate values. In-fusing nonprot rhetoric with the language offor-prot businessmetrics, ROI, capi-tal marketsthreatens to betray the very es-sence of the nonprot as a space apart fromcommerce. At the same time, grafting a chari-table ethic onto for-prot corporate enterprise


11/21

75Trexler

seems inconsistent with the law and logic offree market capitalism, in which social goodemerges from the pursuit of selsh ends.

Rather than dismissing so-called tradi-tional organizations as obsolete, the social en-terprise movement would have a sustainablelong-term impact by highlighting the ethical

complexity of existing corporate constructsin short, every enterprise is a social enterprise,

just in different ways. In this regard social en-terprise is a revolution, just not in the sense of

being wholly new. Rather, it is a returningthe literal translation of the Latin revolveretothe dynamic of corporate life itself. To understand why, we need to changehow we think about corporate form. Caprasreductionistic image of corporate formalitiesthe soulless rules of corporate governance and

asset allocationunites all parties in the so-cial enterprise debate, even as they differ onthe value of infusing this dead letter with asocial spirit. What no one realizes is that theprogrammatic code of both nonprot and for-prot corporate identity functions as a hybrid-izing algorithm.

The emergence of civil society

Earlier we noted that the rhetoric of socialmovements is turbulent. This semantic tur-

bulence, like that in nancial markets or thegeneration of hybrid ventures, exhibits fractalpropertiesits swings and spikes are self-sim-ilar, owing from the expression of a commonvalue. The impulse to hybridize is the root ofall forms, and not merely coincidence or somevague mystery of the world. Rather, it is thedening property of corporate form. The phrase social enterprise providesa clue as to the how this came to be. The term isactually not new; its just the latest variation ofa long series of constructs that attempt to inte-grate reductionistic and emergent values. Themost inuential of those constructs is civil so-ciety, a term that in its recent heyday provedto be susceptible to interpretation as social en-terprise. Contrary to what todays so-calledexperts claim, however, civil society does notrefer narrowly to such things as NGOs, non-prots or a voluntary sector between state andmarket. Rather, civil society is a programmatic

legal metaphor designed to model emergenceas is the corporation itself. That civil society is a metaphor foremergence becomes apparent when we lookpast its present use among NGO advocates.Aristotle coined the phrase in the treatise com-monly known as The Politics, although this

too obscures the true signicance of the work.The word translated politicsin Greek,

politikeliterally refers to the city, or polis,a phenomenon that Aristotle is struggling tounderstand. Aristotles fascination with the citylies in what he perceives to be its metaphysi-cal distinctiveness (Politics, I). Apart from thecity, people enter into cooperative arrange-ments that are at base reductionistic aggregatesakin to a koinonia, or legal partnership. In a

business partnership, two or more individualsenter into a contract to share the prots fromcommerceunlike the modern corporation,the partnership was not a discrete entity butan aggregate of individuals whose rights andresponsibilities were set by the agreement. Afamily, for Aristotle, is merely a koinonia inwhich two individuals unite to produce off-spring and to manage household assets. Avillage is a koinoniaconnecting several house-holds; like other partnerships, the village is

nothing more than a simple aggregate, with nodistinct properties or values beyond its con-stituent parts. The city is different. It consists of busi-nesses, families and villages, yet it is self-suf-cient, so to speak, emerging for the sake of life

but existing for the sake of the good life (Poli-tics, I: 8). This root of this higher ethical pur-pose is the citys distinct metaphysical char-acter; the koinonia politikethe partnershipof the cityis not merely the sum of it parts,

but it is a whole that is prior by nature toits constituent elements (Politics, I: 11). This,Aristotle observes, makes the city the inter-personal extension of human identity. Just asthe human is a self-sufcient unity with itsown distinctand ethicalexistence beyondthe mere components of its body, the koinonia

politikeemerges out of the routine interactionsof connected elements to create a higher mean-ing for them all.


12/21

76 E:CO Vol. 10 No. 3 2008 pp. 65-85

Two thousand years later the citys de-ning paradoxa discrete whole irreducibleto the mere sum of its partsis routinely de-scribed today with far less metaphysical bag-gage (Batty, 2007; Holland, 1995: 1). The city,with its order and identity spontaneously ap-pearing from the discrete interactions among

its constituent parts, has become a familiar ex-ample of the natural phenomenon now knownas emergence, in which the behavior of largeand complex aggregates ... is not to be under-stood in terms of a simple extrapolation of theproperties of a few separate parts (Anderson,1972, 2008: 222). We now know enoughabout the emergence of collective propertiesthat we do not feel the need to ground themin a distinct prior essence, and we are able torecognize the phenomenon in a wide array of

contexts, from families and small towns toanimals, plants and inanimate natural forces.Rather than making the city an object of philo-sophical speculation, we can sing of a city thatnever sleeps without feeling the urge to medi-tate on the paradox of a city that never sleepseven though all its denizens do.

Nonetheless that should not obscurethe historic signicance of Aristotles descrip-tion. His use of a programmatic legal meta-phor is a classical analogue to contemporary

scientic approaches to analyzing emergentproperties in complex systemsit is, in itsway, a direct predecessor of current research inunderstanding cities through cellular autom-ata, agent-based modeling and fractals (Batty,2005). Previously the metaphors for a self-sufcient higher order tended to be religiousin nature, most notably the Hebrew divinecontract that linked separate family tribesinto a sacred unity. The partnership of thecity, on the other hand, provided a replicablemodel for emergent identity that transcendedcultic loyalties. It did so by describing key el-ements of the process of emergence in acces-sible non-mystical termsby connecting andconstraining agents in a certain context, suchas large-scale population bounded by its physi-cal geography and common name, a city couldfunction as a supervenient order that shapedthe very people and relationships from whichit emerged.

Contemporary communitarian versusliberal public policy debates should also notdistract us of the fundamental insight embed-ded in Aristotles rhetoric of the good, whichforeshadowed contemporary notions of pub-lic norms that are ideally irreducible to privateinterests, particularly those dened by wealth,

family or personal inuence. The analog be-tween civic good and individual values reectshow each derives from the ratio of differenceimplicit in emergent identityjust as personalideals reect the impulse, grounded in our veryconsciousness, to rise above the deterministicdrives and limits of our material being, the koi-nonia politikeaspires to something more thanthe parochial narrowness of subsistence liv-ing. The adaptive capacity of Aristotles

model of emergent civic form made it wellsuited as a programmatic construct for cosmo-politan Rome. The Latin translation, societascivilis, was equally a legal metaphor reectinga partnership framed by urban citizenship. Thefull history of the evolution of this concept is

beyond the scope of this articleits inuenceon adaptive Christian networks framed bykoinonia, city metaphors and a higher unitywhere two or three are gathered in my nameis worthy of its own book; for our purposes

sufce it to say that the model of a social orderunifying contractual routines with a transfor-mative identity connections took shape in adiverse array of forms. Arguably the most sig-nicant development in the evolution of civilsociety as an organizational metaphor was theconceptual separation of emergent identityfrom city, church and empire. We can tracethe direct roots of the modern form to a seriesof events that now seem unrelated. One sig-nal moment in this history was the formationof the Cluniac monastic network, which useda common charter, rituals, clothing and struc-tured multi-tiered governance to create whatwe would now recognize as a multinationalcorporation with its own distinct brand, au-tonomous from the jurisdiction of feudal lords,

bishops and the Pope (see, e.g., Tierney, 1964:28-9). An equally revolutionary moment fol-lowed in the twelfth century, when law stu-dents in Bologna co-opted the classical Roman


13/21

77Trexler

law concept of a universitasto create a uniedcommon identity distinct from themselves asresidents of their home cities. (Berman, 1983).These corporate archetypes provided a real-world model of the phenomena discussed inthe Aristotelian writings that, not coinciden-tally, enjoyed a twelfth-century revival of their

own.As Brian Tierney documents in his his-

tory of corporate divisions leading up to theReformation and the rise of fractious nation-alism, the notion of a self-sustaining identitytransformed out of its constituent elementsgrew considerably less esoteric with its em-

bodiment in a replicable legal form. Hybridsand metamorphosis became a recurring themein scholarly writing; the Church formalizedstatus as a distinct collective entity while

churches and secular powers declared them-selves distinct from the Church; even cut-ting-edge artistic theory analogized the depthcreated by three-point perspective to the col-lective will emerging out of interactions in citygovernment (see, e.g., Alberti, 1991). By the time Thomas Hobbes wrote hisclassic analysis of social theory in the mid-sev-enteenth century, Aristotles narrow focus onthe city as the archetype of emergent form wasno longer viable. Instead Hobbes describes a

nation as made up of private systemes of c-titious and articial bodies, each of whichmimics the relation between whole and partsevident in the human sense of self as a well asthe collective political order (Hobbes 1651,1996: 155-65). Writing in a time of bothglobal joint-stock trading companies and vio-lent sectarian conict, Hobbes adapts Aristo-tles metaphor of the koinonia politiketo modelan ethical identity that keeps the constituentparts in check, as individuals and groups ne-gate their own self-interest to connect withina higher unity (see, e.g., Mahoney, 2000; Lilla,2007).

In explaining this model Hobbes didnot, as is commonly assume, coin a unique newimage of a social contract the explain the ori-gins of the political order. To the contrary, hewas merely translating the Latinsocietas civilisinto an English phrase that captured the sameimage of a legal contract and a higher collective

identityan image that the frontispiece to Le-viathan illustrates by depicting citizens unitedliterally within the person of the king (Hobbes1651, 1996). What is most revealing about Hobbesreference to a social contract is not the meta-phor itself, which would not at all have seemed

new to peers literate in Latin, but the wayit evinces a subtle yet signicant shift in themeaning of social itself. Years earlier theso-cietasAristotles koinoniawas a mere com-posite, a partnership that was nothing morethan a contractual aggregate of individuals. Bythe seventeeth century, however, society be-spoke the greater whole, which itself emergedout of self-sufcient legal entities emergingfrom connections among individualseach ofwhom was envisioned as a higher self distinct

from its bodily organs and natural drives. Acomplex array of self-similar identities pat-terned on emergence, society, in short, wasfractal. Within a relatively short period of time,this acclimation to systems of articial entitiesdened by connection and constraint generat-ed a shift in the meaning of civil society itself.Cultural observers stopped limiting the scopeof civil society to the state; instead, it becamethe corporate realm of solidarity that set

men over the animals and the basic life of mate-rial existence (Seligman, 1992: 33-34)Ar-istotles koinonia politike as the market norm.By the time of Hegels Philosophy of Right,civil society has become the realm of corporatemarket relations, through which the atomisticindividual makes connections outside the fam-ily and in so doing mediates the ethical normsthat reach their highest expression in the pub-lic good.

The emergence of corporate identity

The diffusion of the emergent civic partner-ship from the state to private corporationsis signicant for reasons that go beyond his-toric curiosity. It is this very period, from thegroundbreaking social theory of the ScottishEnlightenment to the rst modern corporationstatutes, that formalizes the hybrid structureof contemporary corporate identity, from theprivate corporation as a ubiquitous legal struc-ture to the commercial brand.


14/21

78 E:CO Vol. 10 No. 3 2008 pp. 65-85

As with all forms of the civic partner-ship extending back through Aristotle to thereligious state, private corporate identity arosea means to model emergence and to use it as atool. As an organizational medium it exists ona continuum with art, music, dance and othermodes of expression that utilize rules, connec-

tions and modes of distinction to create novelpatterns. Viewed from the global perspectivethese forms appear to be a whole unto them-selves; art for arts sake transcending the mun-dane is but a more poetic analog of a corporate

brand that is legally distinct from its sharehold-ers, managers and patrons. At the same time,all of these forms consist of separate elementsthat viewed in themselves are routinethearticles and bylaws of a corporation may seemmechanical and soulless on their face, but they

play the same role in generating a transforma-tive unity as musical notes on lined paper orthe mathematics of linear perspective. The connection between emergenceand corporate identity was more apparent toprevious generations of legal scholars, wholived in an age before hyper-specialization andthus were more familiar with the arts and met-aphor. The paradigmatic expression of this linkwas the metaphor of corporate personality, animage now dismissed by reductionistic corpo-

rate academics. What the present generationhas lost by discarding this language as a merection is the central role ofctiocreative art,from the Latin for making or shapingin theculture of contemporary entrepreneurship. Far from being obsolete, Blackstones(1765-69) paradigmatic description of thelaw of corporate personality is the modernanalogue to Aristotles koinonia politiketo-gether they function as the Demotic and Greekin the Rosetta Stone of corporate hieroglyphs.Like his predecessors, Blackstone used meta-phors to model a phenomenon that we wouldnow describe as an emergent identity, a patternwith properties distinct from those of its sepa-rate parts. As Blackstone indicates, the corpora-tion arose as a counterpart to the commercialpartnership, which under the law of the daywas merely an aggregate of its constituent in-dividuals; once a partner left the partnership

dissolved. What the architects of corporateform discerned was that the corporation cre-ates an identity that its distinct from those as-sociated with it at any one point in timeit isone whole out of many persons, because:

when they are consolidated and united into a

corporation, [the members] and their successorsare considered as one person in law: as one per-

son, they have one will, which is collected fromthe sense of the majority of the individuals: thisone will may establish rules and orders for theregulation of the whole, which are a fort of mu-nicipal laws of this little republic; or rules and

statutes may be prescribed to it at its creation,which are then in the place of natural laws: the

privileges and immunities, the estates and pos-sessions, of the corporation, when once vested

in them, will be for ever vested, without anynew conveyance to new successions; for all theindividual members that have existed from the

foundation to the present time, or that shall everhereafter exist, are but one person in law, a per-

son that never dies: in like manner as the riverThames is still the same river, though the partswhich compose it are changing every instant(Blackstone, 1765-69).

Whatever the additional utility of the

corporation and its analogs, this ratio of dif-ference between whole and parts is the root ofits coherence. The corporations name givesit a distinct identity apart from its individualmembers; the rules contained in its charterdocuments work together to create the highercollective order that members in their natu-ral persons... could not have had (Blackstone,1765-1769, Bk. 1, Ch. 18). Since Blackstones day the image of thecorporate person has become a clich. The in-tellectual fascination with corporate personal-ity evident in the works of Hobbes, Blackstoneand other writers centuries ago has largely dis-appeared; while corporate personality may bea recurring image in popular culture and prac-ticing law, theorists tend to dismiss it as littlemore than a distracting folk metaphor. How-ever, as Marshall McLuhan observed more gen-erally in his analysis of clich as archetype, thisis precisely what makes corporate identity so


15/21

79Trexler

inuential. Corporate form is effective in prop-agating an identity dened by the difference

between whole and parts precisely because weno longer nd it unusual (McLuhan, 1970).

Whatever use we may make of the cor-poration in reducing costs or maximizing ef-cient production, its core coherence derives

from its perceived integrity as a form distinctfrom its constituent elements. To this end,corporate law encodes the dynamic of connec-tion and constraint depicted in the metaphor ofa koinonia politikea partnership of the cityor social contract. On the one hand, it con-nects people through a common name, sharedpurpose and synchronized interaction; it evenlinks people across time by enabling these ele-ments to survive the loss of any one participantin the venture. In additional, the law establish-

es the contours of an adaptive mechanism forcollective decision-making; individuals mayhave their differences, but after exchanging in-formation they make a choice directed towardre-synchronizing action.

At the same time, corporate law also es-tablishes a set of constraints that work togetherto resist reduction of the whole to select parts,particularly through opportunistic self-serv-ing behavior managers and controlling share-holders (see, e.g., Kraakman et al., 2004). The

hallmark of the modern corporationlimitedliabilityis one such constraint; by creatinga rewall between corporate obligations anddirectors assets, the law signals that the cor-poration is not equivalent to its managers. Fi-duciary duties perform a similar function. Theduty of care and the duty of loyalty each estab-lish that a director must serve a higher interestthan their own; in a way contemporary corpo-rate theory has yet to grasp, every corporationis to some degree a nonprot corporation, inas-much as even managers who are shareholdersmust rein in their private interests to benet anentity that is greater than themselves. Like social enterprise, corporate lawfunctions as a generative algorithm that takesshape in a diverse array of forms. It is at itsmost basic level the contemporary analogue ofthe classical notion of civil societyit servesas a means to leverage emergence as a tool, andthis tool in turn reshapes how we think andact.

The effects of this dynamic are evi-dent in the course of corporate history itself.Through the early nineteenth century, thecorporation in law was a quasi-public entity;as Blackstones chapter illustrates, the termwas synonymous with charities, churches andcorporate ventures granted charters because

they served the public good. It is precisely thisaspect of corporate form that contemporaryadvocates of civil society overlook when theymistakenly assume that Alexis de Tocquevillewas referring only to nonprots in his land-mark description of American voluntarism. Inreality, de Tocqueville was describing an arrayof cooperative enterprises seen at the time asproviding public benet, many of which wewould now categorize as for-prot businesscorporations.

The emergence of differentiated cat-egories within organizational lawbusinesscorporations, professional corporations, non-prots and so forthreects the same sortof clustering that we saw in the emergence ofdistinct wells of attraction within social en-terprise. In certain key details they appeardistinct, such as different rules for asset distri-

bution or different default structures for gov-ernance. Yet they are all self-similar, coded togenerate a new discrete identity from constitu-

ent elements, albeit to varying degrees. At base, corporate form is not just a setof connections and default rules. It is an orga-nizational technology programmed to createa discrete new identity. Twenty-ve hundredyears ago this identity seemed unfathomable,even miraculous, something capable of beingunderstood only if anchored to a deity, city ornation. Over time the anchors became morevariablean identiable monastic order, an ac-ademic universitas, a churchuntil eventuallyit became so familiar as to be credible wheretwo or three people gathered together under acommon name. Today the corporation is notthe only organizational medium that expressesdistinct identity (McCracken, 2008). We havegrown so acclimated to organizational me-dia that mimic emergent identity that the lawtreats even the commercial partnership as adiscrete entity for certain purposes, while var-ious contingent circumstances have sparked


16/21

80 E:CO Vol. 10 No. 3 2008 pp. 65-85

the creation of equally distinct corporate enti-ties, such as the limited liability company. The

brand name itself is an extension of the corpo-rate name as a mode of creating a novel identi-ty; every time we encounter a logo we perceivea self-subsisting set of properties rooted in amodel of emergence.

The emergence of social enterprise

That corporate form represents an identitydistinct from its owners and managers is a le-gal principle so basic that we have lost sight ofits signicance. Limited liability, duciary du-ties, the maximization of shareholder value asopposed to the personal enrichment of insid-ersthese corporate clichs are all normativeinstitutions designed to establish a corporateidentity that is more than the sum of its parts.

They are as much an extension of naturally oc-curring emergent form as Aristotles model ofa city partnership or our internal sense of self(Whitehead, 1929, 1979; Dissanayake, 1992,1995; Strogatz, 2003; Bloom, 2004).

Isolating the root of corporate identityin a programmatic model of emergence opensdramatic new possibilities in both our theoryand practice of organizational life. For the bur-geoning research in managerial leadership andsystems theory, the embedding of emergence

within corporate form provides an organic ba-sis for integrating dynamic systems researchinto corporate life (McKelvey, 1999; Hazy et al.,2007; Richardson, 2008). Moreover, it adds anew dimension to our understanding of orga-nizational law, which to far too many scholarsseems little more than a routinized clich un-worthy of serious academic attention (McLu-han, 1970). What professed business expertshave yet to realize is that the same creative im-pulse we see in the creative arts animates allforms of corporate life; the Renaissance corpo-rate consultant who nurtures an appreciationfor science, mathematics, literature and art ac-tually has a competitive edge in understandingthe nuances of corporate design. In itself, a metaphorical model of emer-gent properties does not necessarily entail anethical commitment, any more than a hybridform of collective properties emerging fromconnected atoms given a moral character to

water, ice and steam. However, the creationof a coherent emergent from human elementsis a different environmental predicate, and theresult is a complex and seemingly contradic-tory array of identities all deriving from theimpulse to rise above the mundane. On the in-dividual level, our conscious ratio of difference

between whole and part takes shape in norma-tive values that resist reduction to otherwisedeterministic forces; we strive for immortality,curb our appetite for food, deny that smok-ing will hurt us, negate our sexual drives andengage in sex without regard to consequence(see, e.g., Whitehead, 1929; Bloom, 2004).On a wider scale, groups of individuals cre-ate connections and constraints that not onlyextend these personal values but create newcollective properties. For instance, whereas

economies tend to exhibit turbulent swingsand the scale-free concentration of wealth inthe hands of the relative few, we create mod-els of society designedat least in theorytogenerate a steady rise in wealth distributed toall and health care is not an allocation of scarceassets but a fundamental human right.

For a non-state corporate entity, wheth-er nonprot or for-prot, ignoring the embed-ded ratio of difference between whole and partcan have dramatic consequences, particularly

in the form of unwanted and burdensome gov-ernment regulation. It is here where the rea-soning of todays business managers and theo-rists has had its greatest negative effect. Theimage of a unity distinct from its constituentparts is encoded in the DNA of our for-protcorporate entities, yet business leaders persistin reducing corporate identity to the materialenrichment of its executives and shareholders.The resulting backlashboth in public criti-cism and waves of new expensive and rigorousethics rulesis akin to the reaction against theRoman Empire when it conated Aristotlesmetaphor of civil society with paganism andlater, Christianity; each represents the reduc-tion of a higher unity to the private privilege ofone part. A more sustainable corporate strate-gyin the sense of maintaining the autonomyof the corporate enterprise as a self-subsistingand self-regulating organizational formrec-


17/21

81Trexler

ognizes that the rules and routines of corpo-rate form exist to do more than to generate andallocate nancial return. The business part-nership already functioned as an aggregate ofprot-seeking individuals, and that model isno longer the norm. Every element of corpo-rate identityits name, its brand, its people,

its productsshould in some way work to re-inforce the image of a whole beyond the parts;the more that people perceive the business pri-marily as a scale-free aggregation of prots en-riching insiders, the greater the likelihood thatsociety will at some point act to make the busi-ness something more. A similar principle applies to nonprotidentity. The difference between nonprotand for-prot entities is one of degree, not ofkindthey are both extensions of the corpo-

rate model of emergence, albeit with distinctwells of attraction. Whereas for-prot entitiestolerate a certain, though not all-encompass-ing, degree of commerce and personal enrich-ment, within the nonprot universe the imageof a form beyond nance and private intereststends toward the absolute. This means thatnonprot design requires even more rigorousattention to rhetorical effect. Nonprot andother ostensibly charitable organizations thatdene themselves primarily as businesses

as is all too often the case with organizationsattracted to social enterprise by the mimeticbandwagon effectrisk fostering the suspi-cion that they have in some way betrayed thecore values of their higher mission, regardlessof whether there is actually any wrongdoing.Conversely, nonprots that proceed as if theyhave no relation to the mundane equally gen-erate distrust, inasmuch as people intuitivelygrasp that the higher order cannot emergewithout connections and constraints. As a hybridizing algorithm, social en-terprise is an adaptive response to the loss ofcoherence in corporate identity. A variety offactors have worked together to shape themovement as it current existsmimetic mir-roring of dot-com and 2.0 rhetoric, the im-mediacy of electronic technology (McLuhan,1964), the integrative effects of globalization(Putnam, 2001; Friedman, 2007). The mostinuential factor, however, is the diffusion

of corporate form itself. What had once beenthe prerogative of priests and civic leaders has

become a social norm; we now live in a worldwhere plugging into the hybridizing algo-rithms of corporate form is an all too familiarexperience. In this environment bifurcatingthe world into prot-maximizing businesses

and idealized nonprots becomes unsustain-able; it literally does not make sense to a risinggeneration accustomed to joining things to-gether so as to create something new. But this does not mean that social en-terprise is itself a wholly novel concept. It isinstead a reection of what already exists. Eversince modern corporate law formalized a con-ceptual diversion between nonprot and for-prot entities, movements have emerged toinfuse a public spirit throughout the whole of

our organizational system. As we noted earlier,social enterprise is just latest of these move-ments, and like its predecessors it lacks a struc-tural basis for embracing hybrid values. Un-derstanding social identity as a programmaticmodel of emergence eliminates this problem.In todays corporate world every enterprise be-comes a social enterprise once it creates a legalentity or recognizable brand. That people feel the need to advocatefor hybrid ventures is a symptom of how famil-

iarity has obscured our perception of all formsof corporate identity. At base, social enterpriseas a discrete movement is akin to adaptivemorphogenesis in the biological realm, whereforms evolve in the gap to facilitate missingconstructive behaviors (see, e.g., Roughgar-den, 2005). Among animals this is, it wouldappear, an unreective process, but within hu-man societyitself a means of modeling adap-tive transformationthere is at least the po-tential for self-awareness. The core question for facing social en-terprise is not so much whether it will last buthow best to exhibit what corporate life should

be. At a certain level the continued existenceof social enterprise is more or less guaranteed,much like there are still a few priests whospeak Latin, charities called settlement housesor NGO workers who self-identify with civilsociety. But social enterprise ostensibly seeksmore than mere survival as a semantic trace. If


18/21

82 E:CO Vol. 10 No. 3 2008 pp. 65-85

social enterprise is to be truly sustainable, itmust nd a way to become more than just thelatest permanent revolution to experience aturbulent upswing and precipitous decline. One common suggestion for increas-ing the impact of social enterprise is to createnew separate social institutionsa social stock

exchange, social venture capital funds, a sociallegal entity. As advocates note, such endeav-ors could offer substantive advantages for in-dividuals who want to self-identify as socialentrepreneurs. Besides signaling their valuesand providing a standardized structure forintegrating commercial business with social

benet, formally recognizing a discrete socialenterprise sector could result in a less costlyand burdensome operating environment thancurrently existssocial entrepreneurs argu-

ably would not face the same pressure to maxi-mize solely the nancial value of shares, norwould they have to comply with the often ar-cane restrictions on business activity and protdistribution imposed on tax-exempt charities(Wexler, 2006; Billitteri, 2007).

Yet for all the strategic benets of sep-arate social entities, the movements great-est contribution would be to remind us whatcorporate identity already isand then fadeaway. The rst and arguably most important

step toward this end would be to stop speak-ing of a division between social business andexisting non-prot and for-prot structures.Not only is the distinction untenable, it effec-tively concedes that social enterprise is a nicheunto itself; by assuming a conceptual divide

between social and business values, it framesthe discussion in a way no argument for hybridenterprise can win. Instead, advocates for themovement need to explain why existing enti-ties already embody hybrid valuesand howour failure to grasp this fuels the regulatory in-efciencies and PR debacles that ventures of alltypes seek to avoid. The movement would also benetfrom explaining the process of transformationthat is central to all corporate identity. All form

blends separate elements into a greater whole;to maintain their integrity, for-prots andnonprots alike need to learn the art of corpo-rate composition. That some reduce business

to shareholders while others view nonprotsas non-market entities indicates the degree towhich the leaders of each so-called sector donot comprehend the objects of their ostensibleexpertise. Beyond rethinking group identity, so-cial enterprise could also secure its legacy by

highlighting the social dimension of other or-ganizational technologies. As noted in an ear-lier section, society is a fractal concept; we haveused the ratio of difference between whole andparts to create a universe of self-similar hybrids.From this perspective speaking of a double- ortriple-bottom line is redundant; money andstock are themselves intrinsically social me-dia, with their value emerging out of complexinteractions and constraints (Taylor, 2004).Once again, the methodology must shift from

differentiation to inclusioninstead of graft-ing social concerns onto other metrics, whatwe need instead is to explain how social andnancial values are the same.

There are, of course, other useful ap-plications of corporate identity as a pragmaticmodel of emergence, but their overall effectshould be the same: to make social enterprisea transitional form. It brings together valuesthat we should not have torn apart, and oncewe learn its deepest lesson it will become ob-

solete. While this might seem like a failureto those who champion the movement as apermanent revolution, disappearance in thiscontext would be a mark of its success. Its onething to change how people talk about groups,quite another to transform how we think.

Conclusion

The emergence of social enterprise reectsa systemic breakdown in our under-standing of an organizational medium

that has become ubiquitous in contemporarylife. We have become so adept at creating newidentities that we no longer know ourselves,and social enterprise has appeared to remindus of the way things already are. Corporateform in its complexity is more than a mirror ofemergence in nature; it is, to quote McLuhan,an extension of the self (McLuhan, 1964).

We are all hybrids, every one of us, from themoment of our birth (Whitehead, 1929;


19/21

83Trexler

Bloom, 2004). When we remember this, andlive accordingly, the work of this movementwill be done.

ReferencesAbrams, D.M. and Strogatz, S. (2003). Modeling

the dynamics of language death, Nature, ISSN

0028-0836, 424: 900.Alberti, L.B. ( 1991). On Painting, M. Kemp (ed.),

ISBN 9780140433319.Anderson, P.W. (1972, 2008). More is different:

Broken symmetry and the nature of the hierar-chical structure of science, in M.A. Bedau andP. Humphreys (eds.), Emergence: Contempo-rary Readings in Philosophy and Science, ISBN9780262524759, pp. 221-29.

Aristotle, Politics, J.Trexler (trans).Atkinson, Q.D., Meade, A., Venditti, C., Greenhill,

S.J. and Pagel, M. (2008). Languages evolve in

punctuational bursts, Science, ISSN 0036-8075,319(5863): 588.Batty, M. (2007). Cities and Complexity: Understand-

ing Cities with Cellular Automata, Agent-basedModels, and Fractals, ISBN 9780262524797.

Bedau, M.A. and Humphreys, P. (2008).Emergence:Contemporary Readings in Philosophy and Science,ISBN 9780262524759.

Beinhocker, E.D. (2006). The Origin of Wealth: Evo-lution, Complexity, and the Radical Remaking ofEconomics, ISBN 9781578517770.

Berman, H. (1983). Law and Revolution, ISBN9780674517769.

Billitteri, T.J. (2007). Mixing Mission and Busi-ness: Does Social Enterprise Need a New LegalApproach? Highlights from an Aspen InstituteRoundtable, http://www.nonprofitresearch.org/usr_doc/New_Legal_Forms_Report_FINAL.pdf.

Blackstone, W. (1765-69). Commentaries on theLaws of England, http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/blackstone/bk1ch18.htm.

Bloom, P. (2004). Descartes Baby: How The ScienceOf Child Development Explains What Makes UsHuman, ISBN 9780465007837.

Boons, F. (2008). Self-Organization and sustain-ability: The emergence of a regional industrialecology, Emergence: Complexity & Organiza-tion, ISSN 1521-3250, 10(2):41-48.

Borzaga, C. and Defourny, J . (eds.)(2004).The Emergence of Social Enterprise , ISBN9780415339216.

Brand, Horst. (1982) Solidaritys proposals forreforming Polands economy, Monthly LaborReview, ISSN 0098-1818, 105(5): 43-6.

Brosnan, S.F. and de Waal, F.B.M. (2004) A concept

of value during experimental exchange in brownCapuchin monkeys, Folia Primatologica, ISSN0015-5713, 75: 317-330.

Capra, F. (2002). The Hidden Connections: Integrat-ing the Biological, Cognitive, and Social Dimen-sions of Life into a Science of Sustainability, ISBN9780385494717.

Cooper, D. (1999). Linguistic Attractors: The Cog-nitive Dynamics of Language Acquisition andChange, ISBN 9781556192029.

Dees, J.G., Emerson, J. and Economy, P. (2001).Enterprising Nonprots: A Toolkit for Social En-trepreneurs, ISBN 9780471397359.

Dissanayake, E. (1992, 1995). Homo Aestheti-cus: Where Art Comes From and Why, ISBN9780295974798.

Edwards, M. (2008). Just Another Emperor? TheMyths and Realities of Philanthrocapitalism, ISBN9780981615110.

Friedman, T.L. (2007). The World is Flat 3.0: A

Brief History of the Twenty-First Century, ISBN9780312425074.

Goldstein, J.A. (1999) Emergence as a construct:History and issues, Emergence, ISSN 1521-3250, 1(1): 49-72.

Gordon, D. (2004). Ants at Work: How an InsectSociety is Organized, ISBN 9780393321326.

Gross, D. (2007).Pop! Why Bubbles are Great for theEconomy, ISBN 9780061151545.

Hansmann, H. (1996). The Ownership of Enterprise,ISBN 9780674649705.

Hawken, P. (2007). Blessed Unrest: How the Largest

Movement in the World Came into Being and WhyNo One Saw It Coming, ISBN 9780143113652.Hazy, J.K., Goldstein, J.A. and Lichtenstein, B.B.

(2007). Complex Systems Leadership Theory:New Perspectives from Complexity Science onSocial and Organizational Effectiveness, ISBN9780979168864.

Hobbes, T. (1651, 1996). Leviathan , ISBN9780521567978.

Holland, J. (1995). Hidden Order: How AdaptationBuilds Complexity, ISBN 9780201442304.

Humphries, M. and Grant, S. (2005). Social en-terprise and re-civilization of human endeavors:Re-socializing the market metaphor or encroach-ing colonization of the lifeworld? Current Issuesin Comparative Education, ISSN 1523-1615,8(1): 41-50.

Johnson, N. (2007). Twos Company, Three is Com-plexity, ISBN 9781851684885.

Kauffman, S. (2008). Reinventing the Sacred: ANew View of Science, Reason and Religion, ISBN9780465003006.

Kraakman, R., Davies, P., Hansmann, H. and Her-
http://journalseek.net/cgi-bin/journalseek/journalsearch.cgi?field=issn&query=0028-0836http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0140433317/welcometokurt-20http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0262524759/welcometokurt-20http://journalseek.net/cgi-bin/journalseek/journalsearch.cgi?field=issn&query=0036-8075http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0262524791/welcometokurt-20http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0262524759/welcometokurt-20http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=157851777X/welcometokurt-20http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0674517768/welcometokurt-20http://www.nonprofitresearch.org/usr_doc/New_Legal_Forms_Report_FINAL.pdfhttp://www.nonprofitresearch.org/usr_doc/New_Legal_Forms_Report_FINAL.pdfhttp://www.nonprofitresearch.org/usr_doc/New_Legal_Forms_Report_FINAL.pdfhttp://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/blackstone/bk1ch18.htmhttp://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/blackstone/bk1ch18.htmhttp://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=046500783X/welcometokurt-20http://emergence.org/http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0415339219/welcometokurt-20http://journalseek.net/cgi-bin/journalseek/journalsearch.cgi?field=issn&query=0098-1818http://journalseek.net/cgi-bin/journalseek/journalsearch.cgi?field=issn&query=0015-5713http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0385494718/welcometokurt-20http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=1556192029/welcometokurt-20http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0471397350/welcometokurt-20http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0295974796/welcometokurt-20http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0981615112/welcometokurt-20http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0312425074/welcometokurt-20http://emergence.org/http://emergence.org/http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0393321320/welcometokurt-20http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0061151548/welcometokurt-20http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0674649702/welcometokurt-20http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0143113658/welcometokurt-20http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0979168864/welcometokurt-20http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0521567971/welcometokurt-20http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0201442302/welcometokurt-20http://journalseek.net/cgi-bin/journalseek/journalsearch.cgi?field=issn&query=1523-1615http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=1851684883/welcometokurt-20http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0465003001/welcometokurt-20http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0465003001/welcometokurt-20http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=1851684883/welcometokurt-20http://journalseek.net/cgi-bin/journalseek/journalsearch.cgi?field=issn&query=1523-1615http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0201442302/welcometokurt-20http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0521567971/welcometokurt-20http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0979168864/welcometokurt-20http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0143113658/welcometokurt-20http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0674649702/welcometokurt-20http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0061151548/welcometokurt-20http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0393321320/welcometokurt-20http://emergence.org/http://emergence.org/http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0312425074/welcometokurt-20http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0981615112/welcometokurt-20http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0295974796/welcometokurt-20http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0471397350/welcometokurt-20http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=1556192029/welcometokurt-20http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0385494718/welcometokurt-20http://journalseek.net/cgi-bin/journalseek/journalsearch.cgi?field=issn&query=0015-5713http://journalseek.net/cgi-bin/journalseek/journalsearch.cgi?field=issn&query=0098-1818http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0415339219/welcometokurt-20http://emergence.org/http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=046500783X/welcometokurt-20http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/blackstone/bk1ch18.htmhttp://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/blackstone/bk1ch18.htmhttp://www.nonprofitresearch.org/usr_doc/New_Legal_Forms_Report_FINAL.pdfhttp://www.nonprofitresearch.org/usr_doc/New_Legal_Forms_Report_FINAL.pdfhttp://www.nonprofitresearch.org/usr_doc/New_Legal_Forms_Report_FINAL.pdfhttp://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0674517768/welcometokurt-20http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=157851777X/welcometokurt-20http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0262524759/welcometokurt-20http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0262524791/welcometokurt-20http://journalseek.net/cgi-bin/journalseek/journalsearch.cgi?field=issn&query=0036-8075http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0262524759/welcometokurt-20http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0140433317/welcometokurt-20http://journalseek.net/cgi-bin/journalseek/journalsearch.cgi?field=issn&query=0028-0836


20/21

84 E:CO Vol. 10 No. 3 2008 pp. 65-85

tig, G. (2004). The Anatomy of Corporate Law:A Comparative and Functional Approach, ISBN9780199260638.

Laughlin, R. (2005). A Diffe rent Unive rse, ISBN9780465038282.

Light, P. (2008). The Search for Social Entrepreneur-ship, ISBN 9780815752110.

Lilla, M. (2007). The Stillborn God: Religion, Politicsand the Modern West, ISBN 9781400043675.

Mahoney, P.G. (2000). Contract or concession? Anessay on the history of corporate law, GeorgiaState University Law Review, ISSN 8755-6847,34: 873-93.

Mair, J., Robinson, J. and Hockerts, K. (2006). SocialEntrepreneurship, ISBN 9781403996640.

Mandelbrot, B. and Hudson, R.L. (2004). The (Mis)Behavior of Markets: A Fractal View of Risk, Ruinand Reward, ISBN 9780465043552.

Mandeville, B. (1705). The Fable of the Bees, http://www.xs4all.nl/~maartens/philosophy/mandev-

ille/fable_of_bees.html.Martin, R.L., and Osberg, S. (2007). Social entre-

preneurship: The case for denition, StanfordSocial Innovation Review, ISSN 1542-7099,5(2): 28-39.

McCracken, G. (2008). Transformations: Ide n-tity Construction in Contemporary Culture, ISBN9780253219572.

McKelvey, W. (1999). Complexity theory in organi-zation science: Seizing the promise or becoming afad? Emergence, ISSN 1521-3250, 1(1): 5-32.

McLuhan, M. (1970). From Clich to Archetype, ISBN

9780670330935.McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding Media: TheExtensions of Man, ISBN 9788114675352.

Nicholls, A (ed.)(2006). Social Entrepreneurship:New Models of Sustainable Social Change, ISBN9780199283880.

Nyssens, M. (2006). Social Enterprise: At the Cross-roads of Market, Public Policies and Civil Society,ISBN 9780415378796.

Otis, L. (1999). Membranes: Metaphors of Invasionin Nineteenth-Century Literature, Science andPolitics, ISBN 9780801865275.

Otis, L. (2

social enterprise as algorithm

Documents