engleski

From ‘hero’ to ‘zero’: Some lessons from ‘unsuccessful’ social enterprises in post- socialist societies

The paper aims to use the cases of ‘unsuccessful’ social enterprises from several post-socialist societies in order to identify most common obstacles that social enterprises face. Experiences from post-socialist countries indicate that social enterprise sector is developing slowly and somewhat lagging behind the leading Western societies (EMiS, 2015). This is by no surprise result of a complex transformations that have been occurring in the process of consolidation of democracies. Social enterprises are still not numerous and the fluctuation in the sector is quite obvious, with significant numbers of social enterprises disappearing within three years. Both the literature and non-academic discourse focus on those ‘usual suspects’ examples of success stories or best practices of social enterprises to explore and identify some key factors, which are meant to serve as model and inspiration for others, as being copied from the Western approach. Attempts to explore ‘failed’ social enterprises are still quite rare in academic literature (see Seanor&Meaton, 2008). Recently, some discussion on failure in social enterprises are encouraged within some social enterprise networks and support structures (such as in UK and Mexico) whose approach is to embrace the ‘failure’ and use it as a learning tool. This paper aims to focus on those ‘unsuccessful’ cases, that are largely neglected in the literature, and to explore their perspective to find what are the main obstacles they had been facing both in the internal functioning but also in regard to external eco-system. The paper relies on experiences of ‘failed’ social enterprises to explore the obstacles that social enterprises had been facing. paper adopts an exploratory approach based on qualitative interviews. It uses flexible and unstructured in- depth interviews with key respondents and relies on narratives and storytelling to capture personal perspectives of actors and their interpretation. The paper will use data collected through the research project “RISE - Realities in Social Enterprise”. The study aims to find what lessons social enterprises learn from that process and to identify what are internal and external factors that are disadvantages for social enterprises endurance and development. The study is in particular interested in finding patterns – both internal and external that may serve to better understand organisational and contextual disadvantages and to offer new perspectives on building more supporting ecosystems.

social enterprise ; social entrepreneurship ; post-socialist societies ; social economy ; democracy,

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