All you need is love: Affective practices of caring in Social Enterprises

Social Enterprise (SE) concerns tackling social issues or fulfilling a social mission driven by compassion and empathy, underpinned by an ethic of care (Andre and Pache, 2016). However, market-driven societies have become permeated by a business rationale whereby SE success is too often measured by growth (Chell et al., 2010; Davies et al. 2018). This paper examines transformations in the affective practice of caring that two SEs working with vulnerable populations in the UK experienced through periods of significant organizational growth and increasing marketisation. Logics of care are very different from market and business logics, concerned with living as well as possible (Fisher and Tronto, 1990), and affective caring relations constitute those nurturing and interdependent human relationships necessary for living well, framing consciousness through social relations with others within organisations and society (Lynch et al, 2021). In other words, caring is fundamentally relational, consisting of at least two parties –the cared-for and the care-giver–, and involves symmetrical relationship (Block, 2008). In SE caring is evident in the goal of meeting social needs, and a process through provision of care in meeting that social need (André and Pache, 2016). In for-profit business settings personal care ethics have been integrated with organisational care through a relational bureaucracy, designating role-based relationships and shaping organisational norms to regulate caring relationships, enabling their scalability and replicability (Gittell and Douglass, 2012). While useful in developing formal structures to facilitate reciprocal relations and foster a level of caring, relational bureaucracy is underpinned by business goals, contradicting the caring perspective of SE working with vulnerable populations (Tronto, 2017). Our relational realist approach (Somers 1998) draws on ethnographic research comprising participant observation and in-depth interviews with key staff within two social enterprises to understand affective practices of caring, taking account of changes in the ethics of care and thick reciprocity in two social enterprises in the UK. We argue that thick reciprocity that stems from embedded personal relations enable SEs to maintain authentic relations with stakeholders, crucial in maintaining a focus on caring outcomes. In SE A thick reciprocal relations helped to maintain an ethic of care when the organisation came under periods of external pressures from public policies. This compares to relational bureaucratic organisation of SE B, where reciprocal caring structures broke-down when savings needed to be made, leading to an abandonment of social goals and alienation of staff, volunteers and clients. Our findings lead to policy recommendations to maintain embeddedness and caring relationships through meaningful stakeholder engagement and support for collective organizational structures. This recognises the material aspects of power and the transformative potential in the affective practice of caring (Lynch, et al., 2020) and how it is appropriated by ethically-driven employees as a form of resistance to neoliberalisation (Fotaki, 2016)