Reaching the promised land : can social enterprise reduce social exclusion and empower communities?

In the United Kingdom, social enterprise is promoted as a mechanism to capture the supposed innovation and dynamism of the private sector to (amongst other things) wean ‘Third Sector’ organisations off their dependence on grants and to offer opportunities to ‘empower’ socially excluded communities. In this article, we place current debate (on the potential of social enterprise to meet social needs) in the context of theoretical approaches to the role of the state. Whilst acknowledging some potential for social enterprise to play such a role, we examine the challenges that this entails. We draw on discussions from International Development, particularly in relation to microfinance and community-managed service delivery, in order to question some of the assumptions made in relation to the supposed transformative power of social enterprise, which in turn identifies issues of scale, sustainability, processes of inclusion/exclusion and appropriate external support as crucial factors.