How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas
Bornstein, David (2004).
New York: Oxford University Press; 256 pages. $30. ISBN 0195138058.
This effort to delineate and highlight the role of social entrepreneurs leads to some confusion. Although Bornstein and leading social entrepreneurs want to advance the professionalization of socially entrepreneurial roles and make these activities more “scientific,” i.e. systematic, evidence-based, and amenable to generalization, the book’s characterizations veer towards the personalistic rather than analytic. The book is sprinkled with references to “specific and rare personality types,” “obsessive individuals,” “idea champions,” and other labels that defy any effort to understand the motivations driving social entrepreneurs. Bornstein in fact rejects the argument that social entrepreneurs are defined by their use of business acumen for social ends, arguing instead that they are distinguished as transformative forces for systemic change. This blurring of individuals and impacts complicates these definitional efforts. The conflation of the citizen sector with civil society, voluntary associations, nonprofit sector, nongovernmental organizations and other non-market and non-state entities further weakens the argument. As a result, the boundaries of the concept are not clearly established: while we understand Bornstein is portraying something important and distinctive, we are not sure how to decide who fits the social entrepreneur category and who does not.
Attendant to these definitional dilemmas, Bornstein tends to emphasize the personal character and agency of the individuals he studies as the definitive factors bringing about change. As a result, the very real infrastructure of government regulations and programs and business investment and expertise shaping and supporting social entrepreneurs is slighted even though his accounts often note how the government changes the rules of the game, funds projects, and so on. Although Bornstein traces the development of the citizen sector to major historical changes, that sector is shaped by government policies and sustained by government decisions on tax policy, service delivery and other mundane matters. This analysis excels at bringing the politics of ideas to the foreground in analyzing social change and innovation but too often the link between ideas and institutional contexts is neglected.
There is a certain urgency underlying the quest to determine how to build frameworks and infrastructure that will support the development of more social entrepreneurs and sustain their efforts. In an effort to develop a systematic analysis of social entrepreneurs, there is a tendency to slap organizational theories and concepts on top of the field material rather than using these tools to organize the findings and suggest new questions. As a result, some arguments are disconnected, with insufficient consideration of their implications. The blueprint argument is one of the more egregious examples: it describes the harvesting of “pattern setting ideas” and promising practices but the purposes and mechanisms are unclear—is it about transferability, or policy learning, or diffusion, or prototype construction, or even replication and testing of different practices? The emphasis on “building the mosaics,” with frequent references to the Grameen Bank “blueprint” for microcredit programs, highlights the issue of how context-specific these practices are and the limits on the extent to which they can be transferred. Even the emphasis on system design rather than problem-solving strategies begs the question of how this differs from policy analysis. Indeed, it suggests that social entrepreneurs are closer to political entrepreneurs in that they are adept at coordination, building coalitions, generating cooperation, and persisting in the face of counter-pressures and resistance.
To his credit, Bornstein takes on the issue of evaluation and accountability. When groups are small, the effort to evaluate their impacts is not cost-effective. However, Bornstein looks at groups who have scaled up, which means their ability to attract and retain supporters and funding is contingent on their ability to demonstrate their effectiveness. This seems obvious but some involved in promoting social entrepreneurship resist these efforts by claiming their value-creation activities are unique and distinctive, ill-suited for conventional evaluations and implicitly exempt from them. As Bornstein points out, the problem is not evaluation per se but the lack of an appropriate metric for assessing social entrepreneurs’ activities. In the absence of such tools, the “capital allocation” dilemma will permit the underfunding of promising ideas and activists. This argument shifts the question from whether to how we evaluate such efforts—an interesting and important question for social researchers. However, to move towards a more analytic and systematic understanding of what accounts for effective social entrepreneurs, it would be necessary to focus more on failures as well as on successes. Otherwise it is not clear whether one has identified the necessary and sufficient conditions of effective social entrepreneurs—conditions present when success occurs, but not failure.
This book is heartening and thought-provoking. The shortcomings should be seen as an agenda for further thinking and research, not as fatal flaws. It is a sure-fire read for undergraduates seeking to do good and do well; it is a provocative if incomplete argument that graduate students can embrace, critique, build on, test, and integrate with other knowledge. In everyday life, people will stop you on planes and in supermarkets to ask about the title and what the book says. Few books are able to speak to so many audiences so passionately and fluently.
Reviewer Information
University of Colorado at Boulder
Susan E. Clarke is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Colorado at Boulder, with a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina. She teaches and conducts research on public policy, urban politics, and the politics of ideas. She is currently an editor of Urban Affairs Review and Director of the Center to Advance Research and Teaching in the Social Sciences (CARTSS), a campus-wide interdisciplinary program at the University of Colorado.