By Professor Sophie Bacq
It was that time of the year again. A time in which months of planning, preparation, and reviewing come to an end. A time that blends the excitement of hearing about the latest research in the field with the satisfaction of seeing all like-minded scholars reunited in the same place for two days.
I have always loved conferences. I enjoy sharing thoughts and debating ideas with scholars who share the same passion for a topic, yet always bring a different theoretical, methodological, or epistemological angle to the conversation. And sometimes these conversations do not end, they just pause for a year, until we meet again. This is what happens at The Annual Social Entrepreneurship Conference.
On November 11 and 12, 2016, I flew across the country to attend The 13th Annual Social Entrepreneurship Conference. I first became involved with the organization as a visiting scholar at New York University, Stern School of Business. For a number of years now, I have been honored to serve as its co-director with Dr. Jill Kickul. This year was the first year that we organized the conference at University of Southern California, Marshall School of Business. Besides the perks of enjoying what felt like summer weather for an East Coaster, it was wonderful to meet and work with a new team (thank you Adlai, Abby, Michelle, Nadine, Libby, Ben, and all the volunteers!). The USC students’ level of enthusiasm for and engagement in social entrepreneurship was energizing!
The new, West Coast location was no obstacle for dozens of social entrepreneurship researchers to travel from all over the world—North America, Europe, Southeast Asia, Africa—to spend two days reflecting on social entrepreneurship research, teaching, and our community of scholars. Beyond the usual ‘hot’ topics such as impact measurement and institutional logic tensions, this 13th edition of the conference also emphasized the importance of new theoretical perspectives such as stakeholder theory and identity theory. More than ever, I left Los Angeles with the conviction that the field is growing and our research is advancing.
The Annual Social Entrepreneurship Conference is the oldest research conference on social entrepreneurship and we were fortunate to have one of the conference’s pioneers (then called the International Social Entrepreneurship Research Conference), Dr. Johanna Mair (Hertie School of Governance & Stanford University). Johanna offered an inspiring and thought-provoking keynote address that shed light on how to affect change in a local system. Adopting a social anthropology lens, Johanna offered news ways in which researchers can think of a local system (such as a local village), underlying that small does not equate homogeneous. If we consider social issues as a social process, a gradual, assisted process of transformation emerges, which she called scaffolding. This process of scaffolding has great relevance for future research that aims at understanding social enterprises in their local context, embedded in patterns of interactions that evolve over time to create positive social change.
We were also encouraged to reflect on our social entrepreneurship education practices, with insightful remarks on the millennial generation by Dr. Noah Isserman (University of Illinois) and Dr. Jennifer Walske (University of San Francisco & University of California Berkeley) on ways to scale social innovation that emerges out of class projects. Jennifer stressed the importance of contests to showcase the progress of other teams at a similar stage and to help stakeholders assess relative quality. As universities do play a critical role in early-stage social innovation, the potential contribution of higher education to positive social change is more important than ever.
Dr. Oana Branzei (University of Western Ontario) shared an uplifting message about hope and how her years of research spent in the field (Johannesburg, South Africa, among other places) showed that, despite the most deprived situations, people still hope. And hope is critical in those situations because, as Oana said, “if people can’t imagine tomorrow, no action will be taken.” As such, hope is a distinctive way of exercising one’s agency. That agency can even become material when hope is captured in tangible tokens. As an example, Oana used the highly topical (the conference took place just a few days after the US presidential election) example of the ‘safety pin.’
Dr. Thomas Dean (Colorado State University), in his closing keynote, stressed the fact that current incentives in our societies are misleading people in their decision-making away from environmentally-friendly choices. Highlighting the important untapped research avenues and business opportunities that remain, Tom underscored the amount of work that lies ahead. Instead of discouraging me, his remarks inspired me to conduct more research on the topic and to encourage my students to consider these environmental issues as undisputable societal opportunities, but also as promising business opportunities. Changing the incentives may require changing the norms and institutions, but more than ever I think of social and environmental entrepreneurs, guided by their own passion, hope, and beliefs as powerful ‘institutional entrepreneurs.’
To recognize groundbreaking, rigorous, and impactful research, every year the tradition is to grant a best paper award of $ 5,000 sponsored by D’Amore-McKim School of Business. This year, we decided to reward two very rigorous empirical papers that advance our understanding of trade-offs between social mission and financial sustainability, and the influence of contextual factors. We wish their authors—Eric Zhao & Matthew Grimes (“Staying true to purpose: How commercial pressures affect microfinance organizations’ identity commitments”) and Tyler Wry & Eric Zhao (“Taking tradeoffs seriously: The contextual contingency of social versus financial performance in global microfinance”)—the best with the publication of their impressive research. We have no doubt that it will be published in top management journals in the coming years.
Every year, moments like these mentioned above add to our collective efforts of improving our research, teaching, and scholarly community towards a common goal; this is precisely why this conference is so special to me. Every year we get closer to a better understanding of how to entrepreneurially reconcile the numerous intricacies of thousands of heterogeneous locales who, around the globe, live in poverty and experience social and environmental issues.
So, let’s pause and resume next year!
More information about The 14th Annual Social Entrepreneurship Conference will follow shortly.
