Is social enterprise part of the elite charade of changing the world?
It’s time for some humble pie
As soon as I’d published my blog post on how market-based incentives should play a greater role in how we solve social problems, I started reading Winners Take All by Anand Giridharadas. The book is about as stunning an evisceration of the current consensus on how to change the world as one could imagine. Theories of change that I ascribe to; people I’ve met, read or watched speak; and organisations my friends work for are all condemned for their part in the great hypocrisy of a changemaking industry that is led and funded by the very people who are responsible for the massive inequality the world faces.
To be fair (to myself), Giridharadas’ critique flows from his experience of a level of elite bullshittery that I have not witnessed first hand — Davos, TED, The Aspen Institute, etc.
But the critique still applies to my work and it gives me pause for thought.
At a time when eight men have the same wealth as the poorest half of the world, Giridharadas’ argument is that we have elevated billionaire businessmen-cum-philanthropists as our saviours. This global elite promotes the false idea that the world’s problems can all be solved by ‘win-win’ solutions. These solutions enable changemakers to ‘do well by doing good’ but never call for a real redistribution of power or money — through taxation, for example. This ‘elite charade’ is status quo preservation couched in feel-good changey-worldy language and it dismisses democratically-elected government as a legitimate tool for social change.
The book has been called ‘superb hate-reading’ by The Guardian’s Aditya Chakrabortty and ‘a hit job’ by David Callahan of Inside Philanthropy.
I wanted to pull out three questions from the book that particularly resonated for me, someone who founded a programme that seeks to develop aspiring social entrepreneurs, the recipients of a fair amount of Giridharadas’ flak.
These are open questions that I don’t necessarily have the answers to.
Do our efforts enable the status quo?
The example given in the book is Even, an app backed by venture capitalists that, for a fee of $260 per year, helps smooth the variable incomes of people in precarious circumstances who have fallen victims to zero hours contracts and/or ‘dynamic scheduling’.
As Mark Kramer asks:
“Isn’t something wrong when investors hope to make millions by asking those on the edge of poverty to spend their own money to fix a problem caused by the profit-maximizing choices of wealthy corporations?”
Is social enterprise just treating the symptoms rather than trying to cure the disease? And, in so doing, are we making it less likely that the disease will ever be cured? In the case of Even, could it be part of a collection of interventions that just about quell the anger and resentment created by unethical employment practices such that nothing is done about those practices themselves?
Another variant of these system-blind social ventures that particularly grates me is those novel ideas that have an instant feel good factor (for the donor/supporter) but, while nice enough as projects, come nowhere near solving the problem they purport to tackle. Think of those ‘haircuts for homeless people’ videos that tend to go viral on Facebook.
Too much social enterprise activity tinkers around the edges, with little thought given to the kind of systemic change required to achieve real justice or lasting change.
Are we too in thrall to the McKinsey method?
Giridhiradas also calls out our inclination to borrow wholesale from the capitalist playbook and adopt the strategy consultants’ way of thinking –simplifying complex social challenges (lest we boil the ocean) and atomising problems into logical issue trees.
On the Year Here programme, we look at the case study of Teach First, one of Britain’s best known social ventures. The birth of Teach First was preceded by a McKinsey project looking at why inner-city London schools were failing and students’ socio-economic background was such a strong predictor of their educational success. The report found that — even in the face of poor school leadership, chaotic home lives, inappropriate housing and a host of other negative factors — good teaching could lessen educational inequality. In short, if a kid from a poor family just had a really great teacher, they could go all the way to a top university. Teach First was born to try to flood the system with more great teachers in order to eradicate educational disadvantage.
After Teach First’s first decade of operations, it had become Britain’s biggest graduate employer, its efforts were making a difference to students’ grades and educational inequality had reduced, especially in London. However, a Centre for London report found that it was, in fact, a multitude of factors that led to this turn around. It seems clear that it will take more than just an influx of great new teachers for Teach First to achieve their mission of no child’s educational success being limited by their socio-economic background.
Sufficient factors are seductive. If we can just get great teachers into the system, we can change the whole picture. Too often, we kid ourselves that complex problems like educational inequality or the housing crisis can be solved by simple solutions. The tyranny of pitching your idea to funders and investors pushes you further and further down the track: My idea is the single thing that can turn this issue around, we find ourselves saying. The social impact world encourages us to be reductive in our problem analyses when the reality is that most social issues are polycausal, dynamic and difficult to pin down.
And the world doesn’t change in linear ways, with countable outputs and measurable outcomes. The Harvard Professor Mark Moore once delivered a talk at my former employer, The Young Foundation, where he challenged us: do you really think the leaders of the Civil Rights Movement were counting the placards or measuring the decibels of their cries for human rights?
It permeates the language too — like the not-so-secret rule that there are always ‘three reasons’. Consultant speak is our lingua franca. (Fun fact: an old boss used to say that she would start a sentence “I think there are three reasons” in a meeting before she’d thought of the second or third reason). Consultant-speak signals membership of a club, creating a barrier between the expert and the lay person. Part of me thinks that language is trivial but, perhaps, it can lock people out of the conversation. Perhaps it excludes people who haven’t been to consulting bootcamp, people who this ‘social change’ stuff most concerns.
Have we privatised change?
As I came of age in Britain, traditional vehicles for social change seemed ill-equipped to spark significant change. Protests against the Iraq War, against the increase in tuition fees, or for sensible measures to stem climate change resulted in nothing. Traditional charity, as I experienced it in the first few years of my career, felt like an unambitious backwater of the UK economy. And entering into politics seemed like a bonkers career choice.
The received wisdom is that government can’t innovate so it’s up to the private sector and civil society to clean up the mess. Given that he is the former leader of the free world, the way Bill Clinton describes the Clinton Global Initiative’s non-governmental approach is fairly extraordinary:
“This is all that does work in the modern world.”
He is all but denouncing government as a (let alone the) vehicle for social change.
So much of our collective changemaking efforts now sit outside democratic institutions. Perhaps, by proselytising private social change endeavours like social entrepreneurship we are deepening a democratic deficit. Marshall Ganz, the man behind the Obama 2008 grassroots campaign, argues that social enterprise has incorrectly understood many social problems as knowledge problems that can be solved by technical innovation rather than power problems that require collective political action.
So, where next?
The desire to justify and rationalise our work is understandable. We put so much of ourselves into our work that it would be devastating to think that we weren’t making a difference. So we often take comfort in the micro (Well, I know that I’m having an impact on this individual’s life) to avoid thinking about the big picture. But, if you’re in the social change game, you must think about the big picture. Are you part of the solution? Does everything you’re doing add up to society actually getting better? It was the answer to these questions that led me to leave Zambia and international development in 2008 (clue: the answer wasn’t affirmative).
Here are some of my initial notes to self sparked by reading the book.
Always take the systems view
There are lots of examples of apps like Even and haircuts for homeless people-style social enterprises out there but that doesn’t mean that, by definition, social enterprises are peripheral or tokenistic. Social enterprise can lead to systemic change. Distance learning, microfinance, mobile banking and housing first approaches were pioneered by the Open University, Grameen Bank, M-Pesa and Beyond Shelter respectively. Year Here’s ventures are shooting for systemic change too.
In designing interventions and social business models we need to think deeply about the systemic change we want to see. We should make sure that our social enterprise solutions are always part of changing the system for the better, as well as providing relief in the here and now.
Acknowledge the complexity of social problems
I appreciate the analytical rigour that the strategy consulting-style approach can bring. Indeed, it’s a damn sight better than projects based solely on the passion or misguided assumptions of the founder (which, sadly, also abound). Our efforts should have a disproportionate impact on the social issue we’re aiming to tackle. The analytical approach encourages us to have a laser sharp focus on the problem drivers that might most move the needle.
But we should acknowledge the complexity of the problems we aim to tackle. We should adopt Collective Impact strategies and avoid overly-optimistic claims about our individual project’s potential impact.
Create meaningful accountability with the public
At Year Here, we often say to Fellows: social change happens with people, not to them for them or at them. Indeed Giridharadas quotes the Bahá’í Universal House of Justice:
“Social change is not a project that one group of people carries out for the benefit of another.”
The state and the market have in-built accountability mechanisms — voting and the freedom to to spend your money elsewhere respectively. But civil society has to work to create meaningful accountability mechanisms with the people it aims to help or empower.
And, whenever the opportunity arises, we should use our influence to support and strengthen existing democratic institutions.
A little less big talk
As much as I feel that protest, politics and traditional charity don’t always feel like promising vehicles for change, I take Giridharadas’ argument that we should never give up on government and on democratic movements more broadly. Social enterprise is but one part of the solution. It’s necessary but insufficient — just like government, business, traditional charity, community groups and mass movements.
Having called out corporates and big tech for misusing the language of social change, I think we too should resist the hubris of some social innovation evangelists. I do think that it’s a really exciting place to be but social enterprise cannot change the world alone — and we shouldn’t claim that it does.
No matter how tough it is, I believe we should stay open to these questions and try to build out answers that we feel comfortable with, that we really believe. And if we can’t find those answers, we should stop what we’re doing. I’ll be thinking about Giridharadas’ questions for sometime to come.
