Social entrepreneurship, governmentality & the Left

This paper offers a critique of the location of social entrepreneurship in the imaginaries of an advanced liberal social economy . Social entrepreneurship is used in a broad sense to refer to innovative, sustainable solutions to social problems, and this paper is agnostic towards organisational structures or the use of earned income which might be understood to circumscribe the practice of social enterprise. This chapter therefore, rejects Reiss’ (1999,1) assertion that social entrepreneurship refers simply to the “application of sound business practices to the operation of non-profit organizations” and is closer to the social innovation school of thought advocated by Dees & Anderson (2006). By doing so, the author asserts the need for nation states to take an active role through policy innovation and the co-ordination of the social economy