SOCIAL ENTERPRISE INCUBATORS AND NEOLIBERAL GOVERNMENTALITY: A FOUCAULDIAN DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

Abstract

The research examines how social enterprise incubators (SEIs) operate as technologies of neoliberal governmentality through critical analysis of the discursive formations that organize them. Social enterprises, considered as a means of solving social issues with entrepreneurial solutions, have increasingly been the object of praise and incubators are important infrastructures to support them. This celebratory rhetoric has, however, been misleading in relation to hidden layers of neoliberal rationality. Using Michel Foucault’s notion of governmentality, this paper examines how SEIs disseminate entrepreneurial norms, disciplined selves and reinscribe neoliberal logics as social innovation. Through a qualitative Foucauldian discourse analysis, we looked at documents, websites, mission statements and public notices from ten SEIs in the UK, North America and Australia. Particularly salient themes revolved around are self-governance, performative metrics and market-based solutions to social problems; and the depoliticization of structural inequalities. The results indicate that, while SEIs provide valuable resources and legitimation for social entrepreneurs, they act as arenas of ideological replication in which the social becomes subordinate to market logics. The paper argues that problematizing SEIs as technologies of governmentality disrupts their apparent neutrality and urges for the cultivation of more critically reflective praxis in the social innovation ecology. Implications are made for researchers, policy makers and incubator managers about the socio-political assumptions embedded in support infrastructures.

Keywords: Social enterprise, incubators, neoliberalism, governmentality, Foucault, discourse analysis, entrepreneurship policy