Managing the dance of enchantment: An ethnography of social entrepreneurship events

Abstract

This article sheds light on public performances as important yet neglected sites for social entrepreneurship’s discursive expansion as a fashionable model for social transformation. It approaches the strategic considerations behind presentations aimed at ‘enchanting’ social entrepreneurship through sophisticated investments in spiritual, aesthetic and bodily involvement, and the impressive staging of Muhammad Yunus as a global hero. On a first analytical layer, these ethnographic insights broaden the explanatory basis for social entrepreneurship’s rising popularity. In academic literature, its recent prominence is either accepted as a given fact or critically explored through the theoretical lens of language effects, while modes of conviction that invest in the ‘extra-textual’ are largely ignored. Addressing this gap, the article portrays how organisational actors charged presentations with aesthetic significance, emotional fervour, spiritual dynamism and sensual pleasure to produce holistic experiences that allow people to connect the concept of social entrepreneurship to a felt sense of being-in-the-world. On a second layer, the analysis problematises the enchantment debate’s tendency to construct a secular–spiritual binary, that is, to perceive enchantment as arising either from powerful acts of managerial manipulation or from a deeply human desire to fill a religious void. Complicating this distinction, the article frames enchantment work in the social entrepreneurship field as an ambiguous ‘dance’ between the secular and the sacred—a paradoxical activity of amalgamating neo-rational considerations with the spiritualised pursuit of a global vision.

Introduction

‘He has changed the world!’, the lady next to me whispers enthusiastically, before falling silent and turning to look at the stage in front of us. We are sitting right in the midst of a crowd of 500 people who have gathered for two days full of discovery, learning-by-doing and connection around the theme of ‘social business’. The huge screen displays a video recorded from outer space by a NASA astronaut who is, as the moderator explains, a fan of Muhammad Yunus, the much-admired inventor of this concept. The video shows the globe in colourful and distant perspectives accompanied by Peter Gabriel’s song Down to Earth. The astronaut had Yunus’ book with him in space and took a photo of it placed in one of the portholes showing the Earth behind. From this angle, Yunus smiles at the camera from above Earth. After this inaugural session, Yunus himself enters the stage. The audience’s nervous chatter stops and the lights are dimmed. All attention is directed towards Him, the ideal entrepreneur, spokesperson for Bangladesh’s poor, Western-style businessman in unfamiliar dress, founder of the Grameen Bank and Nobel Peace Prize laureate. The silence will continue for the next hour, disrupted only by Yunus’ calm narration and occasional laughter.

This ethnographic anecdote offers a first glimpse at how promoters enact compelling visions of social entrepreneurship on stage, thereby attempting to motivate, to inspire and to instill lasting effects in their audiences. The metaphor of salvation that resonates with Yunus’ messianic appearance and the impressive staging of an astronaut as a social ambassador are striking elements in a larger set of more subtle practices aimed at rendering the concept valuable and meaningful. Using precisely such event-based modes of exaltation, promoters seek to create corporeal, spiritual and emotional access to the theme, thus turning a future anticipation into a present bodily experience. Social entrepreneurship events figure as collective spaces in which the concept is not only staged, described and assessed, but also performed, embellished and ‘enchanted’.

In its application to the study of organisations, the Weberian notion of enchantment has been employed to conceptually highlight the managerial work behind sensational presentations that have the potential to captivate and motivate particular forms of action (e.g. Clegg, 2005; Ritzer, 2009). Adopting the lens of enchantment as a form of organisational agency, this article develops ethnographic insight into a series of attention-raising social entrepreneurship events mounted by the networking and umbrella organisation SENA. ¹ The investigation teases out the performative modes by which SENA stages and embellishes the new trope, thereby aligning itself with and pushing forward two as-yet unrelated scholarly discussions: (1) the emergent field of social entrepreneurship studies and (2) the (re-)enchantment of organisational life.

First, it proposes that the existing literature, in its two-fold orientation towards either advancing and/or critically estranging social entrepreneurship sidesteps deeper scrutinisation of the modes of buzz creation by which the concept gains public appeal. The bulk of pioneering work takes the concept’s workability and effectiveness for granted on the basis of anecdotal evidence or idealised case studies (see Dey and Steyaert, 2010, for an overview). Enchantment as organisational agency remains hidden from this scholarly view because authors tend to become complicit in rather than critically attentive to policy makers’ urges to ‘jumpstart serious debate about this important field’ (Mair et al., 2006: 2). Contrary to this trend, emergent critical voices are engaging in exposing discursive politics (Dart, 2004; Nicholls, 2010b) and ‘busting myths’ connected with the concept (Dey and Steyaert, in press; Teasdale et al., 2013), thus lending visibility to powerful acts of conviction that present the concept as a natural answer to unresolved problems. These contributions develop space for counterintuitive insights such as dilemmatic situations (Berglund and Schwartz, 2013), failure and ambiguity (Seanor and Meaton, 2008) and acts of disidentification (Dey and Teasdale, 2015) that emerge from practitioners’ narratives. By grounding analysis almost exclusively in the narrative production of discourse, however, critical contributions confine themselves to scrutinising the ways in which language effects—rather than material formations and physical encounter—contribute to the ideal’s expansion.

In an attempt to broaden the current explanatory base for social entrepreneurship’s emergence as a new source of hope, this article traces how creative acts of shaping collective space have evolved into an effective mode of rendering the ideal concept amenable to bodily response. SENA prepared spaces for situative and affective encounters creating a touch-and-feel experience for an otherwise abstract and distant imagination. By charging the discourse with aesthetic significance, emotional fervour, spiritual dynamism and sensual pleasure, their stagings produced holistic experiences through which people may create imaginative links to personal desires and experiential backgrounds.

The second thread in the literature that this article adds to is the more general debate about organisational enchantment that tends to dichotomise between two different forms of operation. The first is often referred to as ‘secular enchantment’ (Partridge, 2005) and has been associated in the context of organisation studies with a set of powerful managerial acts of manipulation, seduction and hidden persuasion (e.g. Hancock, 2005; Korczynski, 2005; Korczynski and Ott, 2004). By building ‘cathedrals of consumption’ (Ritzer, 2009), by designing enchanting workspaces (Dutton, 1998) or by developing charisma as a leadership trait (Conger and Kanungo, 1998), managers employ sophisticated means of capitalist allurement. In either version, enchantment is subject to ‘secular’ human agency of strategists who remain at emotional distance from their own enchantment project. Against this perspective, more positive accounts tend to see enchantment as a natural essence or deeper order: to be human is to be spiritual. According to this ontological statute, spirituality is not something organisations can consciously develop, manage, measure and control in any straightforward or calculative way (Casey, 2004; Taylor and Bell, 2011), but a ‘subjective, non-rational and fundamental aspect of human experience’ (Taylor and Bell, 2011: 571).

SENA’s preferred modes of staging social entrepreneurship complicate the subtle tendency to lock phenomena of organisational enchantment within a secular vs. spiritual binary. While organising the events, the actors took a rational approach to the ways in which the concept should be marketed and constantly reminded their followers of its technical workability, yet simultaneously they framed their activities as driven by a sense of imperturbable belief that the audience was invited to share. Thus, their staging techniques moved back and forth between the assumed extremes of secular strategy and ‘non-rational’ spirituality, making a relation of ambiguous co-existence apparent rather than one of mutual exclusion. The activities used to promote social entrepreneurship emerge in this study as a paradoxical ‘dance of enchantment’ in which the calculative, neo-rational means of promoting a new business approach amalgamate with the spiritualised attempt to produce new visions in times of crisis.

The empirical sections of this article guide the reader through the vivid, engaging space SENA fashioned for the potential followers of social entrepreneurship and explore the ‘dance of the sacred and the secular’ (Schmidt, 1995) along four entangled techniques of enchantment. The analysis draws primarily on participant observation done at six public events held by SENA and 3 months volunteering at their office. ² This form of access led to an intriguing account of both the public performances and the ways in which the team planned and reflected on these events. On the basis of the ethnographic material I am working with, my aim is clearly not to examine the practical effects beyond instantaneous enchantment, or the degree to which these practices actually motivated people to turn the concept into reality. The increasing numbers of Facebook followers and participants at the events and the realisation that the same organisations and individuals listed by SENA kept coming back, indicate that the events were indeed successful in the organisation’s own terms. Yet my focus lies on enchantment strategy rather than performance measurement. It is an investigation into the ‘hows’ of staging and creating ‘buzz’ for social entrepreneurship.

Social entrepreneurship between embracement and scepticism

Social entrepreneurship has become a fashionable model for social transformation. The discourse establishes a heroic ‘grand narrative’ (Dey and Steyaert, 2010) that promotes efficiency, business discipline, managerial techniques and financial independence (Parkinson and Howorth, 2008), suggesting the concept to be a more grounded substitute for romanticist philanthropy and welfare policy. Handbooks and practitioner guidelines increasingly pick up on the issue (e.g. Bornstein, 2007; Keohane, 2013), the number of participants at social entrepreneurial events is on the rise, and political institutions as influential as the European Commission (2016) have set up programmes to support social entrepreneurial initiatives and research. The majority of scholarly texts are similar in their celebratory tone, appreciating as they do the concept as a sophisticated means of capitalising on resources to address unresolved problems like poverty or social marginality (see reviews of Dacin et al., 2010, 2011). Scholars whip up spontaneous enthusiasm, employing terminologies relating to utility, rationality, progress and individualism (see Dey and Steyaert, 2010 for an overview). The focus of empirical research lies on individual social entrepreneurs and their motives, managerial efforts and operational decisions, typically analysed by means of case studies (Dacin et al., 2011; Mair and Marti, 2006). These principal accounts of social entrepreneurship are inherently complex in nature. They engage intensely in technocratic reasoning, but also obliquely indicate a ‘messianic social vision’ (Cho, 2006) or ‘quasi-religious makeover’ (Dey and Steyaert, 2010).

Against this unequivocally positive accent, critical studies point to the lack of reliable data that would provide insights into how prevalent and effective the approach actually is (Nicholls, 2010a; Teasdale et al., 2013). Literature reviews find fault with the lack of ‘empirical data’, resulting in ‘anecdotal texts’, and also problematise the ‘heavy focus on conceptual over empirical research’ (Dacin et al., 2010, 2011). In this mode, critical scholars question the empirical grounds on which claims for social entrepreneurship are based and formulate a need for closer investigation into the effects of implementing social entrepreneurial policies (Cho, 2006; Dey and Steyaert, 2012; Roper and Cheney, 2005). While attributing radical transformative potential to the ideal, they problematise the prominence of a utopian, tautological rhetoric within social entrepreneurship discourse, its monological character and the lack of confirming evidence (Cho, 2006; Dey and Steyaert, 2010). Social entrepreneurship’s evolution is not an ‘innocent’ and narrow rational adaptation that produces valued results, but emerges in response to a wider socio-political environment attributing moral legitimacy to pro-market ideological notions (Dart, 2004).

In order to reveal the tactical, performative manoeuvres with which social entrepreneurship is ‘narrated into being’, critical scholars deconstruct political myth-making and examine the policy makers’ rhetorics (Mason, 2012; Teasdale, 2012), accountability instruments (Nicholls, 2010a) and legitimating discourses of government (Dart, 2004; Nicholls, 2010b). Teasdale et al. (2013), for example, traced the production of the ‘growth myth’ by analysing a prominent attempt to count the apparently massive increase in Social enterprises in the United Kingdom on a yearly basis. The authors have forwarded evidence that policy makers changed criteria to gain public attention for social enterprise (for analysis and critique, see Teasdale et al., 2013). Dey and Steyaert’s (2010) critical project expands the exposition of knowledge politics to include scholarly inquiry. The authors delineate that academic discourse, by uncritically adopting utopian rhetorics, powerfully delimits the space for radical enactments of the concept. Often framed as a counter-project to idealistic presentations, investigations into ‘the language of social entrepreneurs’ critically reassess and problematise popular autobiographies (Dempsey and Sanders, 2010) and trace how practitioners make sense of, appropriate or rewrite commonly held assumptions of social entrepreneurship (Mauksch, 2012; Parkinson and Howorth, 2008). They unravel the ambiguous and arduous juggling acts of practically combining the social with the entrepreneurial (Berglund and Schwartz, 2013), but also make it apparent that instead of naively ‘buying into’ grand rhetorics, practitioners engage with this discourse in reflective, playful or even subversive ways (Dey and Teasdale, 2015; Seanor and Meaton, 2008).

When pursuing critical lines of investigation, the (apparently ‘empty’) buzz around social entrepreneurship is treated primarily as a language effect, achieved either by hegemonic control (Mason, 2012), policy discourse (Dart, 2004; Nicholls, 2010a) or, more subtly, through governmental modes of self-subordination (Dey, 2014). In this reading, social entrepreneurship gradually manipulates the meaning-making practices of people mainly by means of institutionalisation and persuasive talk (for a critique, see also Mauksch, in press). The empirical insight evolving from the case at hand is, however, that discursive repertoires of anecdotal reasoning, statistical evidencing, heroic stories and managerial rationality are weaved into holistic presentations engaging bodily realms of emotion and affect. The introductory anecdote provides an initial example of how the powerful narrative of a thought leader unfolds within a sensual and spiritual performance, injecting an irreducible added value to the story that is being told. This circumstance prompts the argument that critical research’s investigations into the intoxicating power of language fall short when it comes to granting analytical space to organisational investments in aesthetics, atmosphere and bodily immersion that help produce and reinforce romanticist sentiments. A deeper look at these practices shows that followership is produced not just by speaking powerfully, but essentially by embedding the glorious story of social entrepreneurship in the physicality and materiality of concrete shared settings.

Manipulated or ‘natural’? Enchantment in organisation studies

‘Culture, when it loses the sacred sense loses all sense’, argued Leszek Kolakowski (1997: 72), echoing Max Weber’s proposition that the modern world is characterised by rationalisation and intellectualisation leading to a ‘disenchantment of the world’ (Weber, 1930). In contemporary organisation studies and beyond, the idea of the impossibility of enchantment in a scientific, rational modernity has largely been rejected and replaced by diverse possibilities of ‘re-enchantment’ (e.g. Bell and Taylor, 2003; Casey, 2004; Dutton, 1998). Scholars even argue that re-enchantment has become a key aspect of late modernity (Jenkins, 2012). Against the background of empirical investigations into consumption, leadership and work, enchantment can be framed in two different ways, one of which tends to stress and the other to question the potential of managerial agency in the creation of belief.

The first perspective emphasises that, rather than being ‘just there’ as an unconscious symbolic order, enchanted spaces, discourses and objects are culturally produced, disseminated and maintained (Hancock, 2005). A widely received example of enchantment as a product of human intervention is the workplace spirituality discourse, which typically starts from the observation that modern management acquires ‘some of the language and characteristics of religion, albeit in a secularized version’ (Bell and Taylor, 2003: 330, my emphasis). While pioneers of workplace spirituality have suggested normative managerial control strategies to measure, manage and enhance spirituality and thus increase overall organisational performance (see reviews of Dent et al., 2005; Driscoll and Wiebe, 2007), contemporary critics warn against a further colonisation of individual subjectivity through spiritualisation (Long and Helms Mills, 2010). The latter take a critical look at the tendency of neo-rational management now to utilise religio-affective impulses to uplift organisational performance, such that even the most counter-rational practices ultimately serve conventional rationalities of production and profitability (Driscoll and Wiebe, 2007). They render visible the self-exploitative qualities of measures aimed at associating ‘deeper mission’ and morality with the routines of everyday work. This scepticism emerges most vividly from an article on the ‘dark side of the workplace spirituality movement’ which categorises four potential harms or ‘misuses’ of managerial spiritualisation (Lips-Wiersma et al., 2009).

Scholars arrived at similar conclusions in the field of consumerism. The creation of pleasurable fantasies for capitalist ends, including the employment of aesthetics and other forms of ‘secular magic’, motivated authors to scrutinise the spiritual, almost demonic power possessed by highly stylised ‘cathedrals of consumption’ (Ritzer, 2009) and the ‘Disneyization’ of society (Bryman, 2004). Korczynski (2005), for instance, describes how sales workers influence customers to buy goods through enchanting myths of sovereignty, sociality and quality. Critically analysing the cover image of a PriceWaterhouseCoopers brochure, Hancock (2005) illustrates the necessity of understanding aesthetic products and environments as ‘deeply enmeshed with structural regimes of meaning […] that are capable of serving the ideological requirements of the organisation’ (p. 39). In an analogous mode, scholars have examined the ‘dark side’ of charismatic leadership (for a critique see Calas, 1993; e.g. Conger, 1989), most notably in a Harvard Business Review article that warns against emotional manipulation and the destructive aspects of charisma, insisting that the latter in particular ‘is addictive’, ‘dilutes judgment’, ‘disguises psychopaths’ and ‘fosters collective narcissism’ (Chamorro-Premuzic, 2012).

What is striking about these critical perspectives on the concurrent phenomena of spiritualisation, aestheticisation and charismatisation is that managerial enchantment is presented as lacking deeper interest in ultimate values, and instead creates a beautified pseudo-environment of meaningful action which in fact serves capitalism’s cruellest desires. It evolves as a sophisticated postmodern strategy to influence human behaviour. Even if they diverge from Weber (1930) and his dichotomy between scientific rationality and spiritual enchantment, these accounts largely agree with his vision of a modern business world that has lost track of collective meaning:

There can be no denying that […] the consumer, the abstract individual who seeks happiness in choices and offers no account or explanations for them, has entered the world of organizations […] An ‘enterprise culture’, dynamic, self-confident, attractive and, of course, thoroughly spurious, has become a dominant feature of our cultural landscapes. […] The very nature of management has been redefined: If Henry Ford was the manager of mass production and mass consumption, Walt Disney has become the emblematic figure of our time—the manager redefined from agent of control to orchestrator of mass fantasies. (Gabriel, 2005: 21)

Such reasoning has been criticised for failing to attribute substantial agency to the consumer/employee and her capability to resist managerial take-overs of her body and mind, as for example by reacting with cynicism, distrust and emancipatory action to attempts at spiritualisation (Finch-Lees et al., 2005; Thompson and Findlay, 1999). The manager, however, tends to remain the calculating strategist who seeks, more or less successfully, to guide people into an economically predefined direction.

The second perspective on enchantment problematises the predominance of technical and ‘reductionistic’ approaches (Bell and Taylor, 2003; Driscoll and Wiebe, 2007; Lips-Wiersma et al., 2009; Taylor and Bell, 2011), and instead highlights subjective and experiential aspects of human spirituality (Casey, 2004; Taylor and Bell, 2011). Unlike pessimistic approaches that remain preoccupied with the exploitative dimensions of capitalistic allurement, they hold out the possibility that the modern business world might in fact be radically redefined or ‘re-enchanted’:

Authentic spirituality at work may mean accepting lower profits as a result of integrating spiritual values into the workplace. Morality must guide the means of economic activity, not the other way around […] Authentic spirituality at work involves making the world a better place and not just one’s workplace a better place to work, and definitely not just soothing workers’ psyches. (Driscoll and Wiebe, 2007: 342)

This emphasis on the ‘natural’ and ‘authentic’ emerges in a number of varieties in the field of organisation studies, which nevertheless share common ground in the assumption that belief constitutes culture rather than the other way around. Taylor and Bell (2011), for instance, go back to Clifford Geertz to classify religion as a general order of existence, asserting that by its very nature, being human includes the collective search for the magical, the alluring and the sacred. Likewise other authors highlight the existence of a spiritual dimension concerned with finding ‘meaning and purpose in relations to others and to something bigger than oneself’ and with a search of the ‘souls’ to find ‘nourishment’ at work (Ashmos and Duchon, 2000: 135). It is assumed that the recent managerial awareness for workplace spirituality ties up with a pre-given spiritual configuration among employees. A similar concept lies behind the ‘authentic’ charismatic leader—another Weberian character who transfers features of traditional religious figures to the context of organisational leadership (Weber, 1978). In contrast to visions of the manipulative operator of enchantment introduced before, ‘heroic leadership approaches’ develop the truly self-sacrificing, genuinely humble manager as an archetype (for review and critique, see Śliwa et al., 2012).

The analytical divide in the above debate centres on the ontological question of whether enchantment is primarily an ‘artificial’ product of human intervention, or an expression of a collective and ‘natural’ search for spiritual meaning. While the first angle tends to emphasise the human agency of those in power, the second questions the degree to which enchantment can be pro-actively managed. What both perspectives share in common, however, is a problematic tendency to uphold the Christian theological triad of true religion, false religion and the secular (Balagangadhara, 2014). In the first version, we are asked to interpret even the most subtle efforts of spiritualisation as ‘purely secular’ attempts to reinforce the ideologies of the organisation. The second version instead foregrounds the natural search for ‘true spirituality’ even in supposedly ‘secular’ settings like the workplace.

My analysis explores the middle ground between these two perspectives on enchantment by assuming the pursuit of visions as a fundamental human activity, while simultaneously acknowledging the degree to which enchantment can be invoked, manipulated and enforced. Social entrepreneurship provides an ambiguous case in which the spiritualised vision of reducing social problems through ethics-driven business is best achieved through professionally managed processes of enchantment. I interpret this sacred–secular paradox not as an antagonism, but as a relational tension graphically described by Leigh Eric Schmidt (1995) as ‘a dance of the sacred and the secular, sometimes graceful, sometimes awkward’ (p. 14) or elsewhere as a ‘situation of co-dependence’, ‘in which one cannot exist without the other and where each mutually props up the other’ (Ostwalt, 2012: 258). The enchantment debate provides a reasonable basis for interpreting SENA’s practices, because it introduces a process-oriented, historical perspective which enriches our understanding of how this movement actually evolves in and through human encounter. The remainder of the article draws a picture of two settings that are evident in this productive work: the office as a space for preparation and reflection, and the event as a space for encounter and transmission. By means of these contextual angles, I shall engage analytically with subtle fissures in the enchanting fabric produced by SENA, namely the very moments in which the smoothness of the presentation began to creak and grind. These fissures opened up an interpretative axis that focused on how the tension-laden simultaneity of ‘secular’ distancing and ‘spiritual’ immersion shaped different aspects of SENA’s performances.

SENA and the business of ‘incubation’

SENA’s self-defined objective, in the broadest sense, is to ‘incubate’ social business. Social business is conceived of as a particular social entrepreneurial concept distinguished by a strong focus on financial sustainability and adherence to Muhammad Yunus’ ‘seven principles’ as its fundamentals. Besides holding large-scale conferences in various places around the globe, SENA offers teaching units to business schools and conducts ‘lab sessions’ with companies, municipalities and other institutions. For audiences ranging from newcomers to practitioners, the team produces various forms of advertising material such as brochures, reports and how-to-guides in order to present and disseminate social business as an effective, emotionally liberating activity and as an ethical product. SENA had initially started in 2009 as a consulting and event agency, but after the spin-off of the consultancy team in 2011 it kept concentrating on its second pillar of marketing the ‘social business idea’ as they call it. Connected to this logic is that SENA members do not view their role as being on the ground level of implementation, but rather as ‘distributing the message’ and ‘creating noise’, as SENA publicises its mission.

SENA is not the only organisation of its kind: many national and transnational organisations have appeared with similar aims of elevating and ‘boosting’ social entrepreneurship, Ashoka and the Skoll Foundation being among the most prominent. With the selection of SENA, I posit that the activities of such organisations, whose practices often lie at the intersection between academia, politics and practice, make a fundamental contribution to the emergence of social entrepreneurship. As ‘powerful intermediaries’ (Dacin et al., 2011) and ‘support agencies’, they are important in recognising, labelling and accrediting social entrepreneurs (Seanor and Meaton, 2008) and contribute to articulating the boundaries and priorities of the field. Attention to these practices has been raised by a review article highlighting the

power of virtual networks or ‘imagined communities’ in the social entrepreneurship context. […] Systematic analysis of such networks within and across the scope of each of these foundations and field-configuring events would allow us to consider the potency and possibilities of network effects. (Dacin et al., 2011: 1208, my emphasis)

By organising events with up to 1000 participants yearly and by reaching out to a vast number of countries around the world, these agencies and foundations are highly active in promoting a following for social entrepreneurship. They are ‘paradigm-building actors’ (Nicholls, 2010b). Despite attributing an important political function to events and ‘imagined communities’ (Dacin et al., 2011), social entrepreneurship literature has yet to take an empirical look at the role of these organisations in matters of local incorporation and identity formation.

The ‘dance of enchantment’ was woven into the fundaments of SENA’s organisation, as already became apparent at the beginning of my field research in early 2012. During a coffee break in the office’s homely sofa corner, team members began to collectively ponder what the organisation actually is in institutional terms. Answers ranged from more serious replies that SENA is a ‘competence centre’ to jokey remarks about ‘Yunus’ PR agency’. None of these descriptions, the team concluded in exhaustion, fully grasped what SENA’s work was about. This friendly quarrel itself signalled that rationalising about their modes of work produced tensions with their constant endeavours to keep up spirits and maintain open minds as basic principles. Such definitional efforts found their equivalent in an operational mode of moving back and forth between spirited motivation—an attempt to actually live the ‘sacred’ utopia of social business—and more sober calculations about organisational survival, which allowed the team to explore the limits to realising the ideal. The staff routinely discussed which services (e.g. event participation or informal consulting for entrepreneurs) they would offer for free and to whom, and which services needed to be charged for in order to ensure at least minor financial returns on their investment of time and effort. The ‘dance’ also shaped this engagement on an individual level. Most of the team members had left well-paid consultancy jobs and now worked as volunteers or on short-term contracts, which occasionally caused moments of frustration and uncertainty, considering that SENA demanded their full emotional commitment and dedication, extra work hours and weekend activity. Yet they were tempted to consider this challenging period as symptomatic for evolving social entrepreneurship and their temporary economic insecurities as the price to be paid for meaningful work.

Methodologically, it is worth mentioning that SENA’s orientation towards persuasion, conviction and the creation of followership posed challenges to the critical distance I aimed to maintain during my research. Even though I later established rapport as a team member, in the beginning my ‘naïve (and not so naïve) questioning’ (De Soto and Dudwick, 2000) was negatively interpreted either as a lack of knowledge, or, worse still, as a disinterested compromising of the organisation’s values. I was not granted any ‘licence for oddness or naïvety’ (Okely and Callaway, 1992: 198). When I asked team member Jessie what she thought of Yunus’ insistence that we can do without government welfare, she reacted disgruntled: ‘This is meant as a utopia, not a concrete future vision’, as if I had picked out a text message at random in order to discredit their basic values. Given this lack of conceptual space for the role of a critical outsider, I mastered the immersion/distancing dilemma (Ybema and Kamsteeg, 2009) through an everyday act of physically changing contexts from a participating staff member to an at-home analyst. However, later on, when I withdrew to a politically more passive role and without further insistence on interrogating SENA’s taken-for-granted claims (Emerson et al., 2011), I realised that the team had nevertheless established an alternative kind of critical culture. Although the ‘what’ in form of a social business guideline remained irrevocable, staff members demonstrated a highly reflective stance towards the ‘how’, as shown in the ways they publicly orchestrated the concept.

The following ethnographic sections demonstrate how the ambiguity between spiritual flow and grounded calculus shaped the strategies of public staging with which SENA publicly constituted social business as a powerful way of reorganising the global economy. I shall tease out four intertwined techniques of presentation. First, SENA actors placed emphasis on spiritual identification, leaving only scant space for calculative assessment, while simultaneously emphasising conservative notions of ‘method’ and ‘technique’ as an effective shortcut towards reaching creative solutions. Second, they staged Muhammad Yunus as the movement’s spiritual leader and unifying symbolic reference, but struggled to eliminate sentiments of religious belief and naïve admiration. Third, they sought to design appealing events around the theme of social business while avoiding excessive aestheticism, pointless symbolism and kitsch. And fourth, they involved people corporeally through emotionalisation, sensualisation and theatrical play while maintaining an aura of feasibility.

The dance of spiritual conviction: just do it! … in our ways

At and outside of the events, SENA presented social business as a universal philosophy that should be initiated through an act of spiritual identification and a can-do attitude. In this way, SENA members asked their followers to walk the same path they had already walked: by leaving their jobs and founding SENA they had taken the first step towards making social business happen. The message at the event presentations was that one should start with oneself, to first believe in social business and then act on this belief, before worrying about practical implementation and before levelling any critique. SENA worked intensely with visual images of entrepreneurs actively involved in their new business activities—milking a cow, sewing a sari, installing a solar panel—accompanied by slogans directly addressing the public: ‘Start in your own neighbourhood! Do it with joy!’ The bonsai tree—resembling the poor in need of a bigger pot in order to grow—kept appearing in different settings along with metaphoric success stories of individuals who had reached self-actualisation and personal advancement by ‘just doing it’.

But the process of establishing a social business, and the understanding thereof, was not as free-floating and open as it appeared from the loose-style rhetoric and the constant reminders of joy and creativity. On the contrary, SENA strictly adopted the Yunusian model as the only feasible way of developing and running a moral enterprise. Yunus’ (2011) book Building Social Business, a widely disseminated text written in the authorial voice which contains the full set of principles and a range of foundational episodes, was presented on huge PowerPoint presentations, displayed for sale in the entry hall, and frequently mentioned during speeches. In SENA’s negotiations with other actors, it was implicitly expected that those really interested in social business should know the publication and design their ideas in accordance with the pre-given definition. During informal discussions, SENA actors often interjected with the question: ‘Have you already read Professor Yunus’ book?’ Job interviews started with questions about the interviewee’s knowledge of the concept, and it was noted positively when an applicant was well-informed. It is in these dimensions that SENA’s performative invocation of looseness, release and independence merged with conservative notions of an almost biblical guideline set in motion by established methods of business development.

Resembling this complexity of the events, the recurring plea to release oneself into open-ended ‘mind-blowing’ stood in awkward contrast to the sessions’ rigorous methodological design, their tough time framing and a strict orientation towards ‘output’. ‘Try to think about solutions, not about problems. Think positive!’, SENA member Alex reminded us with a broad smile before opening the lab session. After 10 minutes, I sat in a focus group discussing migrants, during which the following short conversation took place:

First participant: Speaking of asylum seekers, we shouldn’t forget that some of them are traumatised. They need psychological treatment before they can work at all. I also see a problem in speaking of ‘the’ asylum seekers in general terms. These people have very different cultural backgrounds. I think we should be more concrete in whom we are addressing.

Second participant: Yes, but we should also keep in mind that social business offers opportunities rather than forcing them into work or something like that. If our idea works for some and not for others, it’s fine.

Third participant: I agree. We should also stop problematising the problem even further, and instead think about how we can create such opportunities.

Moderator (in the back): You have 30 minutes left.

This short situation illustrates that SENA designed the workshops in a way that avoided any form of substantial debate or scepticism, opening up a space instead for positive motivation and activation. Without the moderator’s intervention, we had quickly and tacitly internalised the expected pro-active ‘stop thinking’ attitude. The underlying philosophical assumption was that what socially deprived people lack above all are opportunities for entrepreneurial action. Alternative vantage points, such as psychological or critical systemic reasoning, were treated as boundaries to thinking that prohibit creative thought. The neat time agenda and the pursuit of pre-given consecutive steps from brainstorming to idea development led to a situation in which we perceived participants who raised doubts as slowing down the productive process and asked them to keep their thoughts for later. Those of us who became keenly involved stood under a double pressure to ‘be creative’ and to design a convincingly rational, face-saving solution.

Deep belief and pleasure, a sense of well-being, inner identification and spirited engagement became the positive dictum underlying the events, signalling that one should first of all feel the power of social business within oneself. Yet, at the same time, SENA took appreciable effort to shape and design the sessions in such a way that participants quickly internalised this attitude and pursued the required ‘steps in thinking’ in the desired order. The ‘secularisation’ element in this game manifested in methodological devices like time management, brainstorming techniques and prepared sheets to be filled out containing elements like cost structure, customer relations, revenue streams and distribution channels. Here enchantment work meant administering a controlled flow of happenings through which recipients would unconditionally share a spiritual vision, but do so in managerially pre-shaped ways that directed people how to believe, in whom to believe and how to act upon this belief.

The dance of devotion: submit to our leader, but do so decently

This inner activation was inherently connected to the presentation of a global leader as a primary source of identification. During the events and beyond, SENA made creative use of the international cult that has emerged around Yunus since his receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006. Along with symbolic imagery of salvation—as illustrated in the astronaut session—SENA had devised intense motives of devotion and commitment. Yunus’ outstanding personality and appeal was developed through a conglomerate of allegoric homage, ritual symbols, honorific speeches and the rhythmic retelling of founding stories. An Economics Professor from Bangladesh, he was staged as the movement’s unifying and all-embracing figure. The events were filled with images of Yunus, often in the form of portraits, and nearly all of the speeches contained a symbolic or ideational reference to his person. The seven principles were handed out at the events in a handwritten format signed by him, like golden rules inscribed into the spaces in which the participants gathered. We were surrounded by the thought leader’s quotations on the walls (‘I want to create a world without poverty’) and carried them on colourful postcards that came with our conference bags.

As an unwarranted side effect, the excessive veneration of Yunus produced an ambiguity and contradiction within a presentation of social business that simultaneously highlights the power of rationality, individual choice and self-determined action. The staging of the leader itself evolved in a tightrope walk between stimulating spiritual identification and quietening blind faith, as became evident when SENA actors distanced themselves from ‘religious’ overtones, such as we see in the following field note:

Thomas pointed his cursor to a photograph distributed by a social business network in Facebook: ‘That’s unfortunate …’. Visible in the photo was Yunus sitting in a panel discussion. The aspect that embarrassed Thomas was a halo of light around his head. Another photo taken from a different perspective showed a lamp in the background, invisible in the first picture, that created the halo. Thomas explained why he thinks this photo is ‘unfortunate’. ‘We really don’t want to create a “Church Yunus” as some critics might argue. That is definitely not our aim’. He pointed to another photo: Yunus on a stage, raising his arms, a gesture similar to what a priest would do. While looking at the photo, Thomas raised his eyebrows and said that he is puzzled by the fact that other organisations in the field distribute such images.

In this conversation, Thomas made me aware of the potential dangers the organisation faces if followers translate the focus on Yunus into religious followership, and assumed a critical distance to imagery attributing messianic qualities or extramundane powers to their inspirational leader. Thomas used the word ‘unfortunate’ to imply that such imagery could lead the movement in a critical direction—Yunus should be celebrated as a socially oriented businessman, and not as a prophet. During another chat, Thomas wondered what might happen to the movement when Yunus ‘heaven forbid … falls ill, or even dies one day. He is over 70’. But why is the staging of Yunus so important to SENA that they accept the potential dangers of being stamped as a quasi-religious ‘Church Yunus’ and of failing after his death? It is striking that SENA focused on personification whereas other players such as the Skoll Foundation or Ashoka routinely list a large group of awarded ‘hero’ entrepreneurs, thus engaging in what Dey and Steyaert (2010) call ‘messianism without a messiah’.

By way of an answer, I interpret SENA’s active encouragement and enforcement of Yunus’ glorification as a powerful and well considered means of creating followership—of enchanting the discourse in the face of cultural and political ambiguity. The jokey comment about the ‘Yunus PR agency’ already reflects the degree to which the promotion of Yunus was a choice triggered not only by honest adoration, but also by awareness of the ‘selling power’ of his appearance. Not only did his personality provide a basis for spiritual identification, he also served as a role model for various locales and for an extremely diverse set of people. Starting from his vision, SENA could establish a universal mission which had the potential to attract high calibre business personalities, but also social workers, nurses and municipal employees. The rich symbolic repertoire attributed to his person—resembling both a cosmopolitan businessman and a humble representative of a poor Third World country—provided a meaningful link between a ‘Western’ elite business culture and social grassroots in the Global South. Yunus’ success as an entrepreneur, the size and reach of the Grameen Bank, his public appearance often described as calm, self-effacing and absorbing, his simple vocabulary, his accent, but also his translatability into a ‘different’ kind of leader—all of these attributes helped stage Yunus as the movement’s unifying symbol.

SENA thus engaged in managing the leader’s appearance in such a way that it allowed the broadest possible range of identification, yet sought to control the boundaries of interpretation. Somewhat paradoxically, SENA actors made excessive and strategic use of emotionalising imagery, rhetorical overstatements and spiritual metaphors, but abandoned what they classified as naïve glorification. This mode of enchantment work featured a balancing act of subtly spiritualising Yunus through efficacious attention-raising measures, without however blundering into the ‘Church Yunus’ trap that would render the concept vulnerable to ridicule and abuse. The tipping point at which a decent form of spirited conviction morphed into more excessive and unwanted forms of belief was subjected to continuous renegotiation around the aesthetics of staging.

The dance of aesthetics: create beauty, not kitsch

Another bundle of activities under the paradigm of ‘creating noise’ for social business lay in the purposeful and meticulous aestheticisation of the events. SENA put a lot of effort into selecting a beautiful and special location, and into light settings and the arrangement of the chairs, tables and other equipment. Before the events, considerable time and effort was spent on carefully preparing the space, ranging from choice of location, selection of rooms, draping the walls, and arranging the furniture, to finely adjusting the light settings. SENA actors conversed about rooms, which ideally were well-shaped and close to each other so that participants would not lose their ‘spirit’ when they moved from one hall to the next. The following story, probably even an emergent organisational myth, resembles the crucial importance of architectural setting. When preparing one of the bigger events, the team had difficulties in finding a location. Due to other large congresses, the city was overbooked. They ended up with a fair hall without any natural light, so that the atmosphere—as later confirmed when skimming through photos—had a clinical and artificial feel to it. Even I could tell it was not as sparkling as in other events, which had taken place either in revamped industry halls or in very modernistic glass buildings. A fair hall, it seemed, did not qualify for such a distinctive event. This instance of imperfection re-emerged on several other occasions as a negative or at least sub-optimal example.

Details also played an important role. SENA coherently articulated, prepared and designed the event locations by displaying design features infused with tactile and sensual components that symbolically related to social business: a table made of books (a recycled table), illuminated globes, fresh orchids and little bonsai trees, vegetarian food, organic lemonade, fair-trade coffee, colourful graphical documentations of discussions and recycled paper as workshop material. To announce breaks the event organisers used an Asian gong. In the ‘room of ideas’, people used colourful chalks to draw social entrepreneurial concepts on a blackboard, creating a huge picture of flowers, animals and fountains surrounded by emotional handwritten slogans: ‘Respect the camel!’ and ‘Connecting generations’, or ‘Produced by mothers at home’.

When Yunus himself entered the stage, he usually wore his modest Bangladeshi outfit and talked in a soft, thoughtful voice, which created an aesthetic imagery redolent of social figures like Mother Teresa, the Dalai Lama or Mahatma Gandhi. Even though I reminded myself of my role as a participating researcher, I felt myself completely immersed in his speech, captivated by Yunus’ calm and clear sentences, his distinctive Bengali accent, and what I perceived as a remarkably simple and ‘grounded’ appearance. One of the stories starts with 42 impoverished Bangladeshi women whom he gave 27 dollars as a credit out of his own pocket (Yunus, 2008). As always, the story is full of challenges, but turns out to be a success in the end. The borrowers manage to create their own businesses, which elevate them from being beggars to business ladies. This is to demonstrate that not only Yunus’ presence on stage, but also his stories were aesthetic in nature, and through their repetition gained an almost ritualistic character.

Yet SENA went far beyond staging Yunus’ powerful speeches, developing instead a whole symbolic toolkit connected to his person. In one of the annual events, SENA even integrated a huge Yunus face composed of Post-it notes by an artist (similar pieces were later made of Steve Jobs, Marc Zuckerberg and Larry Page). Most strikingly, the symbol YY appeared in each and every corner. The two Ys refer to Yunus’ name and can be easily symbolised by spreading the index and middle fingers of both hands, like a double peace sign. The symbol was presented in various forms, such as huge light installations, little red YYs on the walls, YYs on the material that was distributed or YYs shown by participants on photos (sometimes by spreading both arms into the air, which created an impressive image when performed by hundreds of people). It was also audible when followers shouted out ‘YY’ in short videos distributed via the Internet. Being a unifying marker resembling the brand Yunus, and a flexible greeting that carries the message of social business, the YY had become a natural and integral part of SENA’s marketing.

In one particular situation, however, this symbolic equipment proved fallible. A well-known comedian and former doctor passed the huge YY installed on the stage and opened his speech with a joking reference to sex chromosomes: ‘I am not so sure what these two epsilons mean, but recollecting my medical knowledge I have to say: That doesn’t work!’ The audience responded with cautious applause and some amusement, while a SENA colleague next to me whispered that she did not like his ‘arrogant behaviour’. The incident was forgotten, but for me it stood out as one of the rare moments in which a person publicly pointed to and wondered about what had become a habitualised element of noise-making.

Even though SENA worked hard to create richly symbolic and compellingly artistic events by including, for instance, a group of performing drummers, dancers, an opera singer or a calligraphist in its stagings of social business, the team members were constantly aware of the danger of ‘failures’ in this aestheticism. One afternoon, I joined a small group joking about a short poem one of the thought leaders had spontaneously composed in broken English during a larger event, while accompanying a video that showed a range of beautiful nature settings. The staff members watched the event’s video documentation and burst out in laughing at the almost fairy-tale narration, which made little sense once the audience focussed not on the impressive visual experience, but listened carefully to what the speaker was saying. I shared their amusement over a set of clumsily arranged metaphors that bore no clear relation to the social business theme. I realised that the poem had failed to match up to aesthetic standards, which became even more obvious after the event once a spatio-temporal distance was established that prompted such moments of reflection. Analogous situations occurred when team members kicked up a fuss over the Post-it Yunus face, which was too obviously an attempt at glorification through the power of imagery, or discussed a photoshopped picture of an Indian entrepreneur holding a cow on a lead. The cow and its surroundings had apparently been ‘cleaned’ of dirt and plastic waste in order to create an aesthetic experience free of eyesores and disturbances.

Similar to the leader’s spiritual presentation, the spectrum of symbolism and aesthetics that were employed was marked by negotiable extremes at which the performance was either not compelling enough (as in the case of the fair hall) or too excessively focused on presenting beauty (poem), devotion (Post-it face, YY) and perfection (cow photo). The considerations behind the performances indicate that SENA sought to prepare unique and aesthetically pleasing experiences while avoiding accidental drifts into superficiality, vacuity or kitsch. At times, an artistic spirit was allowed to evolve with performative spontaneity, as for instance in the participants’ chalk drawings, while at other times, creativity had to be tamed and directed towards the prime task of creating functioning businesses. The field notes thus exhibit the co-emergence of enchanting aesthetico-symbolic repertoires and simultaneous efforts at rationally exploring the limitations of atmospheric involvement.

The dance of bodily engagement: let your body speak, but keep control of it

It was part of the basic rationale of social business events that participants were not just passive consumers of the social business message, but had an active role in reproducing it. SENA used state-of-the-art workshop tools that physically engaged their audiences in order to make them ‘experience’ the concept within their bodies and minds. A first illustration of this guiding principle is the fact that the conference bags had been handmade by prisoners, meaning we carried a social product about with us throughout the entire event. In these bags, we found paper speech balloons saying ‘Speak to me about …’ which we were asked to fill out and stick onto our backs, so that other participants would feel motivated to start conversations about our personal aspirations. In smaller events, we were sometimes requested to write individual ‘wishes’ on prepared cards. People responded with ‘enough food for all people’, ‘governments should invest in social improvement instead of war’, or ‘equal access to education for everyone, independent of social status, nationality, or ethnicity’. For the rest of the day, we were surrounded by our handwritten wishes pegged along a ‘washing line’ stretched above our heads, or pinned to the walls.

Another detail around the theme of incorporation, which a participant made me aware of, is that Yunus wears clothing produced by one of his social businesses, handmade by Bangladeshi weavers. Whether or not this is true, the rumour alone conveyed the aesthetic information that yet another, quite visible component in the room resembled a social business product. Likewise SENA members were easily recognisable at these events, because many of them wore shawls produced by a befriended social start-up which was also frequently introduced on stage. Wearing the shawls signalled that SENA actors, like their role model, implemented the concept in numerous dimensions of their professional and private lives, incorporating it to the extent that they apparently even dressed in a social business way. In keeping with the principle that the social business philosophy should pervade the most fundamental realms of life, we had no other choice than to sip fair-trade coffee, drink organic lemonade made from baobab fruits and eat the exclusively vegetarian food. ‘Veggie’ and ‘organic’ were not options, because they were the only options available.

The workshop sessions were directed towards producing a ‘real’ business idea and contained various physical elements such as writing down buzzwords to be pinned on flipcharts, discussing, drawing and even theatrical acting as the crowning conclusion of the idea generation process. By the end of the migrant workshop mentioned earlier, we had developed the idea of an ‘education’ gym—a space which combines physical exercise with language classes and other learning opportunities. When it was our turn to present our solution in front of the masses, we engaged in a theatrical performance, with two persons ‘playing’ the founding social entrepreneur and the gym visitor who, after physical exercises, eagerly engages in grammar lessons. Groups who did not opt for a play drew a colourful sketch of their idea, verbally explaining and excitedly advertising the functions and effects of their enterprise. Thus, the design of the workshop not only guided us into a mode of creative production, as implied earlier, but also made us bodily perform social entrepreneurship as new converts and missionaries. In other words, the corporeal had served SENA’s project of seeding and spreading in a two-fold way. By means of our bodies, we had sensually experienced and incorporated, but also reproduced, staged and performed social business.

Yet similar to the work on spiritual identification, SENA’s focus on the feeling and sensing body and its active involvement could easily shift in a critical direction in which participants in their diverse states of excitement lost track of the events’ more ‘profane’ aspects. During the migrant workshop, for example, one participant suggested an exercise that ought to help us to empathise with how migrants might feel and to share their realms of experience. To the moderator’s surprise, he asked us to stand up, form a circle, and to close our eyes for a little while—a technique he had learned in his professional psychological work. While opening our eyes again, we started sharing. Each of us uttered spontaneous comments: ‘my husband is a migrant from Syria, still experiencing racism after years of living here’, ‘I am a social worker seeking job opportunities for migrant clients. That way, I have gained some insight into their problems’. In the sharing round, one could tell that this process of opening up had worked for some and not for others, and sentiments were different. Especially the ‘touching’ component of this exercise instantly produced an anthroposophical, esoteric feeling and some participants’ comments stood out either by being embarrassingly intimate, or by raising issues like racism which brought about silence, and which the collective could hardly ‘work on’ with the given tools.

Unlike the previous examples of a halo or a Post-it face, the participant’s intervention was not mentioned in negative terms by SENA members, apparently because it still worked well within the overall design of a performance targeted at imagination, positive motivation and breaking the ‘boundaries of thinking’. Yet it demonstrates the impossibility of controlling the effects of opening oneself up in a bodily manner. Inviting participants to ‘let their bodies speak’ was connected to the imperative to take even the most bizarre, absurd or emotionally intense reactions seriously, to digest them and to work with them. Moreover, SENA’s offer to render one’s deeper thoughts and worries visible was given a varied reception by the crowd, as was apparent when people abused the speak-to-me-about stickers by using them as a marketing tool for their own purposes (e.g. advertising their company) or simply failed to use them. Involving the bodily powers of the sensual, the emotional and the affective proved to involve yet another sensitive task: negotiating between immersing people in vivid experiences, while simultaneously maintaining their ‘worldly’ anchoring in the more technical aspects of doing business.

Conclusion and future outlook

My research into SENA’s staging techniques is in many ways like an empirical continuation of those critical attempts that seek to unsettle the sense of inevitability resonating in optimistic campaigns for social entrepreneurship. It provides snapshots of the largely overlooked human labour and ‘extra-textual’ means of advertising from which the emergent discourse of social entrepreneurship derives its public appeal. It thus provokes a shift in perspective from the usual suspects in such an analysis—entrepreneurial practitioners—to the ideational politics of macro-organisations which, by profession, convince people that social entrepreneurship is a favourable option for responding to ‘problems’. Such analysis has the potential to overcome a tendency in which social entrepreneurship is studied through the lens of either discursive power or (counter)sense-making in individual entrepreneurial narratives, thus shifting the question to how the concept becomes a new source of collective hope.

This new kind of empirical material reveals minutiae of enchantment work in the arena of social entrepreneurship, which on a closer inspection takes the form of a highly ambivalent ‘dance’ packed with suspense. Every now and then the enchanting performance falls in danger of revealing the fact that it is ‘made’. In the very moments in which creativity dupes technique, Yunus transforms into Jesus, aesthetics evolve into kitsch and bodily involvement creates unwanted results, the overall project of enchantment runs the risk of failing. Enchantment thus emerges as a balancing manoeuvre between a deeply felt belief in a vision—accompanied by investments in aesthetics, creativity and play, and the inevitable need to strategise this vision—by means of reflection, analysis and control. The conclusion to be derived from this observation is that whereas the literature on organization studies implicitly assumes a distinction between managerial and ‘natural’ kinds of enchantment, lived reality dramatically blurs such distinctions. Momentary fusions between the assumed extremes produce a harmonious and graceful dance in some moments and discordant tones in others.

To sum up, ethnographic exploration of SENA’s activities sensitises the scholarly community to agentic powers that endow the concept with emotional value and living meaning, without however degrading these either to mere ‘secular’ acts of manipulation or unconscious attempts at ‘filling a God-shaped void’ (Landy and Saler, 2009). The empirical amalgam or ‘relational tension’ that creates a movement for social entrepreneurship is thus structured by both a sociological constitution capable of embedding the individual search for deeper meaning, and powerful human actors proficient in triggering and manipulating people’s sense-making processes and searches for identity. Moving back to the bigger picture, I shall finally relate the contribution at hand to existent strands of research and pose suggestions on how potential future research may build on insights won in this study.

First, enchantment as a mode of theorisation invites a closer examination of the as-yet implied notions of ‘paradigm-building’ (Nicholls, 2010b), ‘messianism’ (Dey and Steyaert, 2010), and ‘imagined communities’ (Dacin et al., 2011), in order to catch analytical hold of the collective, sociological and transnational aspects of social entrepreneurship’s emergence. An increasing number of studies have examined country-specific manifestations of social entrepreneurship (e.g. Douglas, 2015; Littlewood and Holt, 2015), while pioneering comparative work seek to relate between social entrepreneurship’s diverse regional manifestations (e.g. Kerlin, 2010, 2013). Expanding these threads of analysis, enchantment is one of the possibilities for scholarly communication about the ways in which social entrepreneurship gains appeal as a ‘globally applicable’ approach transcending national boundaries.

Another future direction lies in the new imaginary opened up by social entrepreneurial enchantment. While there have been notable examinations of social entrepreneurship-as-discourse and social entrepreneurship-as-managerial-practice, the ‘fantasising’ aspect of the new trope has largely been neglected. Social business’ promoters are keen to point out that the ideal has not yet found its ‘box’ because, being ‘so new’. ³ Such argumentation prompts closer scrutiny of the neophilic modes through which social entrepreneurship is espoused as a project of the future (Dey and Steyaert, 2010). Land and Taylor’s (2014) exploration of the ‘Do Lectures’ as group spectacles through which an ‘even newer’ spirit of capitalism is produced by business forerunners, offers a glimpse of the spaces for theorising that open up once the focus is directed to elitist visions that are not yet ‘discursively settled’ or made materially manifest in organisational practice. Another interesting source for expanding on the imaginary qualities of social entrepreneurship is provided by theoretical projects that pose the ‘impossibility of the Open Society’ (De Cock and Böhm, 2007). Liberalist fantasising, in this Žižekian reading, produces closure rather than ‘real’ openness. By rhetorically pronouncing unrestricted imagination while technically eliminating radical thinking, SENA’s tension-laden performative routines exemplify how limits of the thinkable are socially produced.

Moreover, given on the basis of this study that social entrepreneurship events form a favourable ground for persuasion by linking the concept to actors’ bodily and emotional realms, the question arises as to what happens once the participants leave the event’s heated atmosphere. Transferring the lens of an agentic ‘dance’ to the context of social entrepreneurial practice presents a possibility of engaging with dilemmas, frictions and tensions (Berglund and Schwartz, 2013) in a less static and more processual way that distinguishes, in a temporal sense, between different states of re-/dis-/enchantment within the trajectory of a social enterprise. How do social entrepreneurship ‘converts’ uphold the ‘enchanted’ aspects of their work and avoid feelings of disillusionment? Herein lies the opportunity to continue a long-standing anthropological interest in relations between the spectacular and the mundane (Palmer and Jankowiak, 1996) that re-emerges in organisational inquiries engaging with the relation between Luhmannian ‘episodes’ and operational routines (Hendry and Seidl, 2003), or with liminality as a realm in which the practice of the everyday is suspended in order to be transformed (Czarniawska and Mazza, 2003).

Finally, the different normative perspectives that have been associated with enchantment—by being both a fundamentally human process of hope-seeking and a phenomenon of capitalist manipulation—suggest a morally complex view on social entrepreneurship. The concept is neither the ethically neutral technique of improvement suggested by buzz creators, nor just another phenomenon of expanding neoliberal ideals implied in critical streams of social entrepreneurship literature. The case of SENA shows that social entrepreneurship serves as a template for a rich set of ethical positions ranging from a critique of financial capitalism to an alternative angle on the erstwhile ‘needy’ as capable persons. Since it may ultimately serve highly diverse attempts to change social conditions, the normative assessment of social entrepreneurship has to build on sensitive on-the-ground observations of real-world effects for aspirational target groups.