engleski

Reflexive Ethnography in Transition: Social Enterprise in Croatia

This text explores the added value of reflexive ethnography for exploring social enterprise in Croatia. We treat ethnography as much, if not more, as a ‘sensibility’ than a ‘methodology’, in the process delinking ethnography somewhat from its anthropological roots and addressing its broader importance as a tool for critical social scientific accounts of complex social practices and social relations. In a post- communist, fast-changing, transition context such as Croatia, researchers on social enterprises inevitably are also enrolled as policy consultants, advisors, advocates, and practitioners, forming close relationships with a small number of social enterprise pioneers. This text revisits the work of a Croatian social enterprise ACT Group, based in Čakovec in the north-west of Croatia which, in less than a decade, evolved from a single NGO to a Consortium consisting of eight different entities. The paper attempts to explore the reasons for ACT Group’s relative success, the specificities of its organisational topography and leadership style, its diversification of activities to engage local resources and address the needs of specific communities, its ability to ‘jump scale’ and play a key role in steering the development of social entrepreneurship in Croatia, and the absence of support from, and partnership with, key segments of local government. The text attempts to combine researchers’ understandings of the organisation with the leader of the organisation’s view of researchers, in an attempt to explore some of the ethical dilemmas and multiple possibilities of ethnographic research into social enterprise in the future.

ethnography ; social enterprise ; social entrepreneurship

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