Socially Enterprising as a Socio-Cultural-Economic Paradigm
If anyone here is an economist you might want to close your eyes.
To briefly introduce this post I seem to recall Mariana Mazzucato reducing the question down of “What is the economy?” as being a system that fulfills human needs.
My own comment here would perhaps be that there is a wide spectrum of human needs and circumstances — a person needing a pacemaker is generally not in the same order of need as a person who wants a pair of shoes (although depending on circumstances a pair of shoes could mean the difference between life and death).
Anyway, let’s begin.
Our world consists of many different cultures and societies and our economies exist to meet our needs.
Each society consists of people, civil society, businesses and the state.
In a healthy economy they all contribute towards meeting both our ‘shared needs’ and our ‘individual needs’.
Here’s where I’m going to ask you to suspend your disbelief and use your imagination.
Just like the world (planet earth) has volume, mass and gravity. So too does society, culture and the economy.
This is not like dropping an apple. It is more like a gravity well — it pulls towards its centre and is hard to escape.
The material which causes this effect consists of; beliefs, behaviours, norms, cultural expectations, worldviews, myths and stories etc.
This mass is held together by structural elements such as; systems, institutions and laws.
I think that when we look at the world around us we know that we need to fix something. But it may not be as simple as just fixing an economic system!
Everything is much more interconnected than that.
Ok, let’s try leap 2.
Kate Raworth puts forward a view of a sustainable economy with her Doughnut Economy model.
I’m going to bring this into my own model and to keep with the visualisation I’ve used so far here is the doughnut encircling our world.
Now I’m doing this for a reason.
The Doughnut Economy can be seen as moving ourselves away from our current economic paradigm (extractive/harmful) and into an equilibrium between our needs and the world's capacity to meet them.
In this visualisation this becomes represented as an orbit (orbits are a physical state of equilibrium).
I’d like to expand our range of possibility a little at this point.
So far we have mentioned culture, society, and the economy. The Doughnut Economy also begins to reach into aspects of social justice and rights.
I seem to recall Oxfam using the terms; Cultural, Economic, Environmental, Political and Social to create top level categories into which everything we see in the world can fit into
I would like to suggest that the Doughnut Model has corresponding models in these other domains.
Certainly if you read the current thoughts and developing practices within those domains it is evident that similar models are coming into being i.e.
1. some types of behaviour and activity are harmful to society (now evidenced)
2. some types of behaviour and activity are beneficial to society (now evidenced)
3. there is a range in the middle where we can be creative, innovative, entrepreneurial, social and enjoy great freedoms without harming the planet or each other.
So how do we go from where we are to where we need to get to?
How do we create the Doughnut Economy or the Good Society or Democracy 2.0 or any of the other things that we know we can do if only we had the time, resources and political will to do so?
Let’s look for a moment at how a picture of knowing fits together. The negatives (social problems) that we know exist and the positives (solutions and approaches) that we know are workable.
All of the negative aspects within our world (society, culture or economy) all have corresponding positive counterparts.
When presented in this way they represent a flow from one state to another — in effect it’s a type of potential (or a series of bridges). But you can’t just flick a switch and activate it.
You have to put some energy into the system.
What the Socially Enterprising model suggests is that it is possible to bring together the energy of; people, civil society, business and the state to the tackling of social, cultural and economic problems.
By applying ourselves as a society ‘we create’ the movement towards the positive.
In effect we convert our social + cultural + structural issues into a type of fuel.
Our efforts when combined with this fuel move the system forward towards the positive pole.
With this approach we may be able to meet our social needs and dismantle and reconstruct at the structural and institutional level at the same time.
Now for a closer look at the economy.
Today’s economy is extractive and financialised — it converts our needs, lives and environment into money.
How could the economy become generative instead?
The Socially Enterprising network brings together people, civil society, business and the state into a cohesive picture in which economic activity can be viewed in 2 distinct ways.
The Economy — as we have it today (financially driven).
The Social Economy — this describes types of activity and organisations which are pro-social in nature i.e. they include forms of value such as ‘social value’, ‘community wealth’, ‘commons resources’ in their operational models, purpose and accounting.
Credit Unions, Social Prescribing, Social Enterprise, Local Economic Development, Community Assets, Community Development etc all exist within this inner social economy (as would trading activity between each other).
Socially Enterprising as a platform and strategy helps to foster and sustain the growth of socially beneficial activity and the social economy.
At the same time the Socially Enterprising approach has a generative effect on skills, knowledge, expertise, capacities, new ways of working and innovative practices which are of benefit to the outside economy.
Additionally, the boundary zone between the 2 coexisting economies becomes a vibrant space of new; ideas, innovations, activities, and organisations. It is a 2 way street where everything can pass out into each economy and back again.
It is possible to see investments in this zone and the social economy occurring through the Socially Enterprising network itself and a percentage of surplus value could be reinvested in this way.
This zone opens up possibilities of returning value to citizens who participate in the network (citizen stakeholders) or even creating new institutions such a ‘People’s Stock Exchange’ (community and social innovation investment) or a ‘People’s Patent Office’ (e.g. the Honey Bee Network).
The ideas presented here should hopefully also help connect your thinking to other ideas which are already out there:
- public data trusts
- digital public assets
- the commons (in particular the knowledge commons)
- peer production licensing
- public value, how it is generated and for whom
This is all one picture of a future economic system and a way in which we can possibly begin to make the transition.
To bring this post to a close may I suggest watching Roberto Unger speaking here about society, civil society and social innovation as much of his thinking connects with the ideas held within Socially Enterprising.
