Good Intentions And White Middle-Class Femininities: Negotiating Privilege In The Social Enterprise
- Publication Type:
- Thesis
- Issue Date:
- 2022
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Entrepreneurial pursuits appear to offer the promise of success to all. The possibilities inherent in building a business and working outside of hierarchical organisations and traditional roles are fascinating and compelling. A substantial body of scholarship on gender inequality in the critical entrepreneurship field explores entrepreneurship as socially constructed; a gendered practice. More recently, scholars in the field have reflected that research is largely focused on gender and the gendering of organisations, and call for a critical approach that looks beyond gender to consider race and class. Nkomo’s (1992) call to re-write race into organisations implores critical scholars to incorporate race in their work as a central analytical category. My thesis answers this call by beginning from the assumption that race and class are central to critical contributions alongside gender.
For this project, I undertook a digital ethnography over 12 months, studying Warm Hearts, a social enterprise in its third year of operations. My thesis examines the reflection and reproduction of power structures in the social enterprise, defining these structures as white supremacy, capitalism, and patriarchy. I address the complexity of race, class, and gender as social categories through a conceptual framework that incorporates postfeminism and critical whiteness studies. My project incorporates digital ethnography as a novel methodological approach to critical entrepreneurship studies. My contribution is drawn from studying online and digital spaces, reinterpreting the ‘field’ of social entrepreneurship.
My thesis examines the social enterprise as a site that reflects and reproduces systems of oppression, shaped by structures of power. Discourses of ‘opportunity discovery’ see the social enterprise capitalising on the needs of marginalised people, where the prioritisation of innovation contributes to their objectification. The negotiation of race, class, and gender for my participants makes social entrepreneurship a complex practice. Empowerment is pursued as a right, and privilege sits in tension with disadvantage. I challenge the ways women are reduced to one-dimensional traits of ‘sharing and caring’ in the social entrepreneurship scholarship (Lewis & Henry, 2019) by arguing my participants’ work is shaped by a complex relationship to power.
The inclusion of class and gender is key to re-writing race into organisations. This project lays bare structures of white supremacy, capitalism, and patriarchy. With more nuanced understanding of the complexities of power come new opportunities for co-conspiratorship and the dismantling of inequality.
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