Abstract
To date, little has been written to illustrate how people come to create an impact enterprise through a process defined by Dumont (2024) as ‘impact work’. Impact enterprise or impact entrepreneurship requires examining the socialisation process and practices deeply embedded in the ‘journey’ undertaken by entrepreneurs interacting and collaborating with other meaningful actors (mentors, investors, and corporate partners) in the social impact ecosystem. The value of impact entrepreneurship lies in addressing socio-economic disadvantage and environmental challenges by creating alternative organizations that strive to implement impact promises.
This book provides an overdue ethnographic account of the lived experiences of impact entrepreneurs-in-the-making and how people produce ‘impact work’. It shines a light on the relationship between collective dimensions of social impact entrepreneurship, the complex practices and socialisation of becoming an entrepreneur, and the management of tensions and competing demands, plural and multilayered motivations in a local context, in the development of projects that help improve quality of life. It deepens our understanding of the silent, interactive and relational aspects of what is going on during the day-to-day entrepreneurial process in an accelerator program. In doing so, it surfaces the hidden contradictions, expectations and tensions surrounding beliefs about norms, values and worth that can be transformed during the process of becoming, which are often neglected in entrepreneurship scholarship. Moving the reader between the voices of impact entrepreneurs and people engaged in social impact enterprises and projects at an accelerator program, Dumont uncovers the culture and logics of ‘impact work’.
Impact entrepreneurship is a growing phenomenon. Recently, USD 1.2 trillion was allocated to impact investments (Hand et al., 2022 cited in Kaya and Orpiszewski, 2025). Impact ventures blend social and commercial goals via an entrepreneur’s capability to transform their ideas. However, we live and work in a world increasingly shaped by competing visions and ‘impact imaginaries’ (Dumont, 2024: 166) of the future, and often contradictory ideas, motives and meaning about impact-making and outcomes. Indeed, impact entrepreneurship has been characterised as a ‘promise’ encompassing a social mission in addition to economic goals, and popularised as the answer to many problems, yet the process of becoming an impact entrepreneur is not so straightforward and requires demystifying, as we discover in Dumont’s book. In particular, Dumont surfaces the hidden contradictions, under-acknowledged collectivism, interactions and negotiations that individual entrepreneurs-in-the-making experience as they find their footings and get the hang of being an impact entrepreneur.
Impact entrepreneurship is not a new concept. The late twentieth to early twenty-first centuries marked increased scholarly and government attention to ‘impact’, including the impact economy, and certifying entrepreneurship education. Social impact training and the development of entrepreneurs via accelerator programs and universities, was a key area of impact investment around the world. Brown University in the United States launched the Nelson Centre for Entrepreneurship in 2016 as a hub for students to study and learn about entrepreneurship and addressing problems via enterprise, which is at the core of impact entrepreneurship. Around the same time, in 2015, the Australian Commonwealth government Office of the Chief Scientist, published the report, Boosting High-Impact Entrepreneurship in Australia: A role for universities. The UK government’s Higher Education Innovation Funding (HEIF) program – ‘running since 2001 to support and develop a broad range of interactions between universities and industry aimed at achieving economic and social benefit to the UK . . . and in 2015, allocated A$350 million, of which around A$35 million’ was specifically to support entrepreneurship training in universities’ (Spike Innovation, 2015: 14).
As university scholars and educators in business management and entrepreneurship, the discussion of impact often requires a deeper look at our culture of change making and engagement in activities and practices shaping outcomes and identities. Indeed, impact making and training is important in the changing world of work and futures of work. At the time of reviewing this book, I was a member of ‘Cohort 2’ Impact Ready Program launched by my university, and, in reflection as a visiting scholar at Brown’s Centre for Entrepreneurship several years ago, and a PhD researcher conducting loosely ethnographic work ‘inside’ an organisation, it perhaps cannot be overstated that understanding, managing and practicing impact is important to ideas about the future-making of decent, equitable work and the everyday.
Yet, producing change, and how the art of transformation and impact actually unfolds is the subject of continued interest and debate. As highlighted by Dumont, when introducing the co-founders of Seal – the social impact accelerator where he spent ‘hundreds of days’ conducting fieldwork as an external observer and the subject of his book − ‘they doubted the entrepreneurs’ capability to transform their ideas into impact enterprises’ (2024: 1).
Indeed, the gap between human intention and what humans actually end up doing is often very large. As one well-known aphorism notes, ‘There’s many a slip “twixt cup and lip”’. Adopting a more elevated theoretical posture, Schutz (1972) made the same point in the course of developing a critique of Max Weber’s rational action model. Schutz (1972) argued that Weber’s view that human action involves a straight line of connection between intention, action and the post-facto rational explanation of that action failed to take account of many problems. Those problems begin with Weber’s dismissal of ‘non-rational’ motivations like ethical values and emotions. These observations help to frame my review and discussion about Dumont’s book, Impact Work: An Ethnographic Journey into the Making of Impact Entrepreneurship (2024).
Dumont’s ethnography of impact entrepreneurship consists of hundreds of days in the offices of Seal and spans seven chapters. It follows multiple cohorts of entrepreneurs during their everyday practices and routines in Seal’s acceleration’s activities, interacting with mentors, investors and other cohort members in the ‘performance of impact work’ (Dumont, 2024: 164-5). As an external observer, Dumont examines how cohort members are selected into the acceleration program, and the emergence of the development of types of impact entrepreneurs via analytical archetypes inclined toward the social demands and those commercially oriented (in Chapter 4). Starting the program with the narrative and idealistic value front of mind, ‘an explicit promise to have a positive impact on society’, while achieving the goal at Seal, ‘to gain business skills’, might imply an inner conflict that cohort members navigate. Yet, it also describes a delicate balance of undertaking a transformational process at both an enterprise project level and the identity work of cohort members.
Dumont’s ethnography is grounded in the theory of organisational socialisation which helps explain the impact entrepreneur’s journey: ‘Seal’s role as a socialisation organisation enabling entrepreneurs to learn the ropes of impact entrepreneurship through the socialisation activities of the acceleration program’ (2024: 78). Dumont skilfully unearths the struggles of the Seal participants. Through Santiago, Tony, Luc, Alfonzo, Luis, Rodrigo, Pablo, Berta, Roger, Leo, Marc, Lola, Jorge, Sophia, among others, we gain insight into the challenges and contradictions they face, while learning how impact entrepreneurship works, and how cohort members navigate their socialisation. This includes working their way through their own beliefs about their impact project, understanding funding and investors, articulating problems and value, integrating business models and commercial demands, partnering and evaluation.
Mentors are the key gatekeepers developing impact language, discourses and norms, that are deeply embedded in impact entrepreneurship socialisation. They help shape the identity formation of cohort members becoming entrepreneurs through Seal. Through analysing relational work and the infrastructure that occurs in the matching of cohort members with mentors, Dumont uncovers coexisting visions of the future and the realisations of collective action central to the performance of impact work. For this reason, the book makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of entrepreneurship as a field and practice by critically examining impact-entrepreneurship-in-the-making. This behind-the-curtains look and attention to the lived experiences of impact entrepreneurship socialisation processes, highlights collective social relations and practices that individuals engage in. Dumont’s ethnography draws attention to collectivism, complexity and dynamism of ‘impact work’, while at the same time, deconstructs the image and myth of a lone entrepreneur
This book will be of interest to organisational ethnographers and students studying how to carry out research from inside an organisation, and to understand how different groups of people contribute to organisational life and new venture creation. Some attention to the gendered context of accelerator programs and incubators would have been interesting to include, to read more about as a background to this ethnography – for instance, how many women impact entrepreneurs complete training, how has this changed over time, and, what of their age and parenthood status? Indeed, answers to these questions and the impact work of women entrepreneurs in a variety of locations over time would be a worthwhile study to follow on from this important book.
