A life in social entrepreneurship: exploring my learning, beliefs and my future through autoethnographical, institutional, motivational and critical lenses

This Doctoral submission uses an autoethnographic approach alongside the academic frameworks of Bricolage Theory and Hybridity Theory (a branch of Institutional Theory) to reappraise a trio of my public works as a ‘social entrepreneur’ over a period of 25 years. This reappraisal depicts me as an archetypal ‘bricoleur’, or handy-person, improvising with the resources to hand, successfully synthesising resources from the disparate worlds of the business, public and third sectors. Exploring both my formative drives and the external contexts in which I built my public works, I suggest how I may have acquired my sense of identity and motivation - my particular way of seeing, interpreting and relating to the world. As I delve into the selected public works, I draw upon literature on Institutional Hybridity to examine the operational and cultural tensions that inevitably arise in businesses that interlace a social mission and a commercial approach. I characterise the finding of creative ways to manage and these tensions over time as a defining attribute of social entrepreneurship in all its forms. I also explore the strategies available to lessen or offset these tensions over time using examples of how my own public works were operationally and culturally re-calibrated over extended periods to in an attempt to rebalance social and commercial objectives over time. To support my analysis, I utilise autobiographical accounts of my own actions and interactions during the development of my own public works. I splice this with a rich body of formal research on bricolage and hybridity in social enterprise plus occasional insights from critical approaches. I conclude with a discussion of what this means for both my next public work and for tomorrow’s social entrepreneurs and I make suggestions for fruitful areas for further academic research.