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Iran’s Lesson for Social Entrepreneurship

Iran’s Green Revolution, a mass movement in response to possible election fraud, has fascinated the world with its force, speed, and digital fuel.  In trying to find some connection between Iran’s mass mobilization towards democracy with the idea of “disruptive” social change catalyzed by social entrepreneurship, I came across Jeff Traxler’s article “Iran’s Green Revolution and Social Entrepreneurship”, which pretty much put me in my place…. and told me to “stop”.  Traxler argues that social entrepreneurs tend to link their label to figures of social change, and while empowering, this tendency may be actually more detrimental to the movement.

An excerpt:

“In recent years, social enterprise experts have clustered around the theory that social entrepreneurs are special, creating the disruptive social innovations that break down suboptimal social equilibria.  It’s an inspiring definition to be sure, one that no doubt is a boost to the self-esteem of anyone in the movement.  Yet if we look carefully at real-world movements for change, most of it has reflects the work of people who do not self-identify as social entrepreneurs.

“For example, consider how the protest movement is mobilizing.  The core communications media–Twitter, Facebook, blogs, SMS, mobile phones, computers, even the rooftops on which protesters stood to shout–may be tools that social entrepreneurs use, but we (social entrepreneurs)did not create them.  The social benefit resulting from social media is at best a positive externality, a second-order consequence derived from someone else’s disruptive innovations.  It is also useful to reflect upon the protesters’ organizational tactics.  They are not starting social businesses, extending microloans, holding pitch contests or making social investments.  Instead, they are taking to the streets and telling anyone who will listen or watch what they want.  It is a classic display of political force.  Each compelling image from Iran–every impassioned Tweet–is an implicit critique of our naive bubble world where the price of progress is merely a monetary value. If social enterprise is to mature as a movement, we can’t afford to believe our own hype.  The more we insist that social entrepreneurship is a unique agent of historic social change, the less effective–and less credible–we become.”

Traxler’s article throws cautions the culture of uniqueness, which has been the basis of the social entrepreneurship movement.  The term “social entrepreneurship” itself is associated with “Uncommon Heroes” and “Unreasonable People”, which imply a sense of individuality; Ashoka’s more universal slogan “Everyone a Changemaker” suggests that we all have something to contribute in our own, unique way.  Even my own research here at Volans is based on isolating the “unique” variables that make certain social enterprises successful.

While I find this sense of uniqueness essential to the innovation and inspiration that drives the success of social entrepreneurship, I feel Traxler has a powerful point.  When does uniqueness become exclusivity?  And when does exclusivity actually become constraining to a movement?

As Nathaniel Whittemore of change.org responds,

“It’s incredibly easy in any young, vibrant movement like our own to quickly enable a hegemony of thought that becomes its own constraining orthodoxy. To allow this to happen to the social entrepreneurship field would be deeply ironic, considering how much of its appeal is to people looking to harness great tools for changing the world from wherever they come.” (Whittemore)

The article doesn’t aim to strip social entrepreneurship of powerful influence in creating social change, but rather reminds the movement of its limits.  Iran’s Green Revolution teaches us that as much as we like to break down all social movements into a neat metric of a social enterprise’s success of scalability, sometimes we just can’t.  And sometimes to do so would be an arrogant move that proves inauthentic to the change itself and the people involved.

The address for this blog entry is: http://www.volans.com/2009/06/irans-lesson-for-social-entrepreneurship/.

- Emily Yao

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