Unlocking Potential: How Simplifying Social Enterprise Research Can Fuel Change
Research papers, specifically those on the topic of social enterprises can be…confusing at times. If you are used to reading them it comes a little easier but if you are not used to it or have not read some in a while it can often feel like a lot of big words and a lot of confusing terms. This is strange because although written under academic circumstances most papers are aimed at helping Social Enterprise Owners, Policymakers, and other academic researchers, where two parties of that list are unlikely to have experience in regular academic reading.
This raises some concerns for the field and during the work on my thesis in the area of Cooperatives and Social Enterprises I found this to be one of the main barriers to knowledge access. The truth is when I was doing it it was my main focus and goal to understand them and ensure I understood them so that I could add to that conversation but most Social Entrepreneurs are not going to have the time to read through large amounts of literature hoping to find some insight. Understandably their focus is their social enterprise and its operations.
The frustrating part of this is that as Social Enterprises become an ever-growing and dynamic area of research the wealth of information available grows with each publication. These are publications that hold actionable insights that could be and should be used as help for social enterprises but we just don’t see that. The research doesn’t often even have to be region-specific and I would even go as far as to say at times it’s the non-region specific information that adds the most value because on more than one occasion I read papers on Social Enterprises in Greece, or somewhere in North America and thought to myself “why aren’t we doing that here”. That’s how good ideas spread but not when they are difficult to decode and buried under jargon.
The solution is for academics and researchers to write for everyone but I do understand that it’s easier said than done because there is an academic standard that needs to be met. With that, research in any field needs to be specific. For example, if I run an experiment I need to be precise in my recording of it so that others can recreate it if they wish. They also need to be able to compare it to other experiments that have taken place and if I’m too generic it could be the same as 10 other experiments that were run similarly and that would just be a nightmare.
Therefore specificity, although sometimes over complicated, has its place.
With that said, this has bothered me for a while. This has bothered me long enough that I wanted to see how this information could be made more accessible to a wider audience. Not an easy task by any means and I’m not quite sure I even have an answer yet but what I do have is the desire to start writing on this blog again giving the potential for a two birds and one stone situation.
