Liminal Economics: Swimming at the Edge of the Economy
“The very vulnerability and openness of liminal space allows room for something genuinely new to happen. We are empty and receptive — erased tablets waiting for new words. Liminal space is where we are most teachable, often because we are most humbled. Liminality keeps us in an ongoing state of shadowboxing instead of ego-confirmation, struggling with the hidden side of things, and calling so-called normalcy into creative question.”¹
West Somerset where we are based and from where we run our social enterprise, Onion Collective, is peripheral geographically. It’s on the edge of the Bristol Channel. The coastline, where Exmoor and the Quantocks reach down to the sea, is rugged and beautiful. It’s an awe-inspiring place to live, but being on the edge is also precarious. The tides here are immense — rising and falling up to 12 metres twice a day — second only to Canada’s Bay of Fundy in their tidal range. Consequently, the cliffs that form much of the shoreline are at constant risk from the sea. In Watchet, this year, one of only two roads into the town has been closed permanently because it is unstable and could collapse. It brings the potential impact of the climate crisis firmly into our consciousness.
Despite its reliance on the tourist economy, West Somerset, is also a place that is relatively unknown. This means it is peripheral economically, as well as geographically. In the current political parlance, it is ‘left behind’ or as we prefer to call it, ‘left alone’. Either way, the market economy doesn’t always work so well here. There are not a lot of people around and many of those that are here don’t have much money. Over the last few decades, an ever more cavernous gap has developed between what the market cares about and what the state can afford to provide.
This context means that it is not just liminal economically because it is on the edge but in that it is a place where the accepted way of doing is being challenged and needs to change. In liminal spaces, out of necessity or circumstance, we can ‘begin to think and act in new ways’.² They are places where experiment can, or must, happen. Often, into such places, come social enterprises and community organisations of all types, responding to the need to create the public and social goods that will not exist if the market is left to its own devices and the state is functionally broken and financially broke.
This means the space we occupy is not just on the edge in the sense of being marginal to the national economy, but that it’s also liminal in the sense of sitting between one economy and the next — at a threshold and caught between two worlds, the one we know (which doesn’t work) and the one to come (which must work better).³ In this context, places like Watchet can be regarded as trailblazers or pioneers of the next economy — beginning to show now that something other is possible. What that next economy will look like remains murky, like the brown sea of the Bristol Channel, but we as a social enterprise aim for an economy in which people and the planet are valued over profit and greed, in which fairness, attachments and community are at the fore. It’s one in which the driving forces better reflect the best traits of humanity — solidarity, curiosity, compassion — and within which the land itself thrives in kinship with all its residents, human and otherwise. Our work is not just to create and apply sticking plasters to a broken system; it is to work towards the replacement of that system with something better.
It’s exhilarating and empowering to feel part of this process of change, even as we recognise the smallness of our role in a transition which will take decades, maybe longer, to be realised. But keeping your footing on the rocks at the water’s edge is also hard work and mentally destabilising. It is characterised by uncertainty, volatility, insecurity. It is riven with contradictions and layered through with unmeetable expectations. Onion Collective is a place-based social enterprise. This is a hard model to make work. We may be able to survive in the rocky economic space that is late-stage capitalism, but we cannot thrive in these conditions, which are, by their very design, built to help us fail rather than succeed.
Social enterprises of all kinds marry an appreciation of business with a concern for humanity. Perhaps the easiest social enterprises to effect in the prevailing economy are consumer- and product-orientated, not place-based. It’s relatively straightforward to make them work — you choose a product that has solid market demand (chocolate, loo rolls, coffee etc) and you sell it, then you use the profit (or some of it) for social benefit rather than private gain. This might be through employing people usually excluded from the labour market, or paying your suppliers a fairer price than the market would tend towards, or using materials that do not harm the planet that would otherwise be too expensive if your goal was only to maximise profit. You can spend a bit more on these good things because you are not trying so hard to feed the private gain motivation that drives decision-making in ‘normal’ companies.
In many asset- or place-based social enterprises the challenge is harder. The prevailing system pushes towards efficiencies, scale, detachment — as drivers of profit — and away from the positive ‘externalities’ that are at the heart of place-based work — community, connectedness, fairness, rootedness. At a community level this is devastating in so many ways. Our economy is run from farther and farther afield and with that detachment comes a lack of concern: think care homes governed by corporates, retail spaces in high streets owned abroad, think banks no longer having local branches, out-of-town supermarkets and DIY stores replacing local grocers and hardware stores. It is a feature of the system that it works away from connection, community and place. Place-based social enterprises attempt to tackle this by prioritising place and connectedness over profit, but they continue to have to operate in a prevailing system that literally is designed to drive those good intentions out.
Certain types of place-based enterprise face a double whammy. Arts organisations for example, often seek to overcome some of this disconnectedness in place by using culture, especially culture experienced collectively, as a means to connect us, to one another and to ideas and dreams. There is a natural affinity between artists and the kinds of questioning social and economic organisations that characterise place-based work. Consequently, the boundary between the two is often porous. The anthropologist Victor Turner describes how ‘artists tend to be liminal and marginal people, “edgemen,” who strive with a passionate sincerity to rid themselves of the clichés associated with status incumbency and role-playing and to enter into vital relations with other men in fact or imagination.’⁴ It is a description equally applied to many of those involved in community-based enterprises that seek to challenge established structures of ownership, power, land-use and purpose. But culture is not loo roll. It is a public good, vital to human flourishing, and it too exists on the outskirts of the prevailing economic model.
Where cultural social enterprises can more obviously thrive is in places of high demand — in big cities for example, where it may be possible to run a more consumer-based model than a place-based one. There, profits can be put to good use in a social enterprise version of delivery — ensuring wider access to the arts or supporting and championing excluded artists or art forms. In places where the market doesn’t work so well, however, the challenge is harder — in left-alone places, in ex-industrial towns, in poorer areas of cities, in rural and peripheral locations, audiences don’t always have the necessary spending power to create the profit that can then be redirected to generate public goods. It’s a basic market failure, but it cuts to the heart of questions around cultural justice: that who you are, what you have and where you are from should not be the thing that determines your access to culture. It is a deeply privileged arrogance to think otherwise.⁵
Onion Collective, along with many similar community enterprises, attempts to operate in a way that layers all of these market pressures on top of one another. We, for example, are based in a peripheral, rural location, where wages are low, disadvantage is high, social mobility is the worst in the country. Our focus is place-based, community-based and cultural. To be fair, even if you are incentivised by money, it’s very hard to make much profit in this context. But add in a desire to rebuild connectedness, to create culture that brings joy, to do so in a way that is socially-responsible and ecologically-sound and that’s an awful lot of ‘externalities’ to pay for from a failing market. It’s why social enterprises often seek grant support: it is a feature not a bug of the system that they need to fill the market failure gap with something. The ongoing requests from mature social enterprises doing deep transformational and systems change work for long-term, stable, core funding does not reflect a laziness or a flabbiness — it reflects a careful understanding of their vulnerability at the threshold between two worlds and the fact that their educational, community and cultural work is a defining value, not an ‘inefficiency’.
The pressures on all social enterprises are felt hardest in times of economic instability and recession, when the profits available for redirection into social good are reduced, just as they are felt hardest by profit-driven companies in a downturn. In some profit-driven companies, survival can be sought by cutting out the fat — regarded as a good thing in many ways — profits might decline for a bit, or ‘efficiencies’ are found — staff made redundant, perks reduced, more hours worked. But in many social enterprises, the fat, the ‘flabbiness’, is the very reason for existence — it is the profit that has already been redirected into social good. To abandon it in difficult economic times, as if social value is optional, removes their purpose: the system drives them towards failure one way or the other — fail commercially or fail socially.
It is for all these reasons that the end goal cannot be simply to build more third- and fourth-sector businesses within the prevailing economic system, but instead must be system change itself. The ‘sustainability’ and ‘resilience’ of social enterprises will always be undermined by operating in a system designed explicitly to weaken them. Those who think otherwise are kidding themselves. This presents a major dilemma for those of us who work in the current system while seeking a new one. It’s a very uncomfortable rock to balance on and results in an almost continuous state of cognitive dissonance, which is mentally exhausting.
Right now, for example, years of economic pressure have pushed many in our sector to the brink. Covid used up our hard-fought reserves in a dramatic way since most social enterprises were not able to shut down or furlough — we instead faced increased demand, but with dramatically reduced revenue streams (having been pushed hard to become less grant reliant for the preceding years as this was apparently ‘more sustainable’). The political incompetence of Brexit and subsequent governments has continued to weaken the economy, driving up inflation to unmanageable levels. The energy crisis added vastly increased costs especially for many asset-based social enterprises who operate from buildings rejected by the commercial sector as liabilities. And now the cost-of-living crisis is severely undermining even the most basic of consumer markets — people simply have less money to spend, not just on luxury goods but on cups of tea. These challenges are piled highest of all in peripheral places where the market never even worked very well in the first place.
So we find ourselves in a confusing position. We need the economy to recover and people to have more money to spend, at the same time as we are called, as Buckminster Fuller extolled us, to be the architects not the victims of the future. The shift to a post-capitalist economy is unlikely to happen calmly and serenely, but rather through a protracted period of recession and decline that undermines public confidence at multiple levels. This is perhaps beginning to happen already — driven by increasing acceptance of the incompatibility of the prevailing system with planetary and human survival. But we are only at the start if at all — a profit and growth narrative holds firm in the mainstream, used to justify ever more detrimental treatment of those nearer to the edge of the economy. In this context, should I wish for a strong economic recovery from these last few difficult years, to temporarily stay the pain — for our business, our staff, our community? Or do I want to see the system brought to its knees no matter the devastation? It’s distressingly hard to work towards that goal.
The role of funders in all of this is just as complex. The endowments that enable many funders to continue to support those organisations working towards systems change are bound up tightly in the ongoing stability of current economic structures. They too, therefore, must question how they operate in that liminal space, as shown so bravely two months ago by the decision of Lankelly Chase to close itself down in face of the insurmountable contradiction at the heart of its continued existence. Progressive funders undoubtedly recognise much of what I have written here — it is precisely why they provide financial support — to address the fundamental market failures and systemic conditions that mean social enterprises and other third sector organisations need support to deliver. More and more they also talk in terms of system change, recognising the depth of the challenge, again driven by the obvious incompatibility of this economy with planetary survival and social and racial justice. But they also, almost without fail, expect their fundees to present a route to ‘sustainability’. They want us to say confidently how we will thrive in the prevailing system, even as we work together to replace it.
Sometimes, faced with all these contradictions, it feels like that huge tide has swept us out to sea — our heads held barely above water. Perhaps ironically then, when things do get a bit too hard, I tend to go to the ocean. (Well, the Bristol Channel, but the effect is the same). The sound of the waves, the rolling stones, the horizon: there is something about being at the edge of the land that has a way of making me see things differently. It grounds me to be by the sea in this place that is so familiar it’s in my bones. Looking out to the expanse of water literally reminds me of the safety of the land on which I place my feet, where I am rooted and secure but it also reassures me of the sense of movement and change that just keeps going. Somehow the liminality in this context becomes more grounding than destabilising.
If it’s after about May and the water is bearable, I leave the safety of the shore and swim in the Channel. It can be perfectly still, almost blue, quite beautiful, and it gives a sense of calm to swim out as far as I can, away from the land and to look back at my little piece of home from a different perspective. It reminds me of the size of things in which we are small and the long time frames in which we operate. My favourite thing though, is to swim when it’s not so calm, when the sea is bit choppy, the wind is up and the waves block and unblock my view of the horizon. I like that bit right at the threshold of safety where I should probably turn back, but instead go a little further out, just to push at the edge. It’s when I feel the most free. I’m describing the behaviour, I guess, of an ‘edgeman’ — the same behaviour I witness daily amongst my fellow travellers in the sector, who can’t find purpose except by pushing at the edges of what might be possible. For us all, the liminal space is indeed a place of risk and vulnerability, but it is also what gives space for something new — it is where the hope is — that ‘stunning space of almost-ness’⁶ that we can’t help but keep swimming towards — where things are different and we can all feel free.
- Despite my general agnosticism, I am grateful to the Centre for Action and Contemplation, LIMINAL SPACE, Between Two Worlds, April 26, 2020, for the clarity of articulation that helped me reflect through their meditation on what liminality means. https://cac.org/daily-meditations/between-two-worlds-2020-04-26/
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Victor Turner, “Liminality and Communitas,” in The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Chicago: Aldine Publishing, 1969), pp. 94–113, 125–30. Abridged.
- A side note: many family-owned and locally-driven businesses in the everyday economy of a place operate much like social enterprises. They too don’t necessarily ‘thrive’ in this economy, judged by traditional metrics, but they can survive and they often do so by holding tight to their attachments despite the economic pressure not to. As the Covid crisis unfolded in communities, the true values of many of our local businesses, not just the social enterprises themselves, were revealed to be about so much more than economic gain, clearly driven as much by purpose as by profit. In Watchet, for example, our locally-run green grocers and butchers offered a life-line of food to the town — delivering food to front doors and reducing the need to travel. Our pubs and cafes were redeployed to provide meals to the elderly, vulnerable and hungry. Our local Co-op worked with our volunteer community response team to devise a system where volunteers could take payments at the doorstep — meaning we could reach more people more quickly but without overburdening the already busy shop workers with the need for phone payments. The pandemic response demonstrated very obviously that social purpose and human kindness can as much be driving economic forces as profit margins and personal wealth. But this is despite not because of the economic system, which prioritises the latter, and actively works against the former.
- Christine Finn, Liminality, Edge, 2017: https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27094
