Intermediary Organisations and the Hegemonisation of Social Entrepreneurship: Fantasmatic Articulations, Constitutive Quiescences, and Moments of Indeterminacy

Abstract

The rapid rise of alternative organisations such as social enterprises is largely due to the promotional activities of intermediary organisations. So far, little is known about the affective nature of such activities. The present article thus investigates how intermediary organisations make social entrepreneurship palatable for a broader audience by establishing it as an object of desire. Drawing on affect-oriented extensions of Laclau and Mouffe's poststructuralist theory, hegemonisation is suggested as a way of understanding how social entrepreneurship is articulated through a complementary process of signification and affective investment. Specifically, by examining Austrian intermediaries, we show how social entrepreneurship is endowed with a sense of affective thrust that is based on three interlocking dynamics: the articulation of fantasies such as 'inclusive exclusiveness', 'large-scale social change' and 'pragmatic solutions'; the repression of anxiety-provoking and contentious issues (constitutive quiescences); as well as the use of conceptually vague, floating signifiers (moments of indeterminacy). Demonstrating that the hegemonisation of social entrepreneurship involves articulating certain issues whilst, at the same time, omitting others, or rendering them elusive, the article invites a counter-hegemonic critique of social entrepreneurship, and, on a more general level, of alternative forms of organising, that embraces affect as a driving force of change, while simultaneously affirming the impossibility of harmony and wholeness.

Drilling their Own Graves: How the European Oil and Gas Supermajors Avoid Sustainability Tensions Through Mythmaking

“…A third conceptualization widely undertheorized in the sustainability literature concerns a defensive strategy whereby paradox is avoided (Lewis 2000;Smith and Berg 1987). Here, scholars draw from Freudian psychoanalytic theory to demonstrate how individuals respond defensively in tension-laden and anxiety-provoking situations (Dey et al 2016). A defensive response or mechanism refers to ''any policy or action that prevents someone (or some system) from experiencing embarrassment or threat, and simultaneously prevents anyone from correcting the causes of the embarrassment or threat'' (Argyris 1993, p. 40).…”

Fueling Climate (In)Action: How organizations engage in hegemonization to avoid transformational action on climate change

“…A third avenue for future research relates to extending theory on the affective dimension of hegemonization (Dey, Schneider, & Maier, 2016), outside the scope of this study given our discursive emphasis. .]…”

Dash for Gas: Climate Change, Hegemony and the Scalar Politics of Fracking in the UK

“…The second neo‐Gramscian perspective in OMT attends specifically to the operations of linking together disparate demands (Nyberg, Spicer and Wright, ). Drawing primarily on Laclau and Mouffe's () reconstruction of Gramsci's concept of hegemony to analyse politics (Howarth, ), this literature is concerned with the study of struggles beyond a priori class nominations (Contu, Palpacuer and Balas, ; Dey, Schneider and Maier, ; O'Doherty, ; van Bommel and Spicer, ). For example, Nyberg, Spicer and Wright () show how corporations synchronize their interests with those of citizens in influencing the debate on climate change to benefit corporate agendas.…”

“…We add to this literature by explaining how the complexity around environmental issues such as climate change enable political manoeuvring by constructing different scales. Third, and more specifically, we contribute to the emerging neo‐Gramscian literature within OMT by employing scaling to explain the workings of equivalence claims among different and fragmented interests (Dey, Schneider and Maier, ; Nyberg, Spicer and Wright, ; van Bommel and Spicer, ). Different interests can be accommodated by constructing scales to create overlap among differences: for example, the claim that fracking supports both local employment and global action on climate change.…”