Skip to main content

Research Repository

Advanced Search

The magical language of un-realistic venture ideas in social entrepreneurship

Barton, M.; Muñoz, P.

The magical language of un-realistic venture ideas in social entrepreneurship Thumbnail


Authors



Abstract

As social entrepreneurship gains maturity, research has begun to explore the less alluring aspects of the field, including the heroic stance of social entrepreneurs, the assumed moral superiority of their intentions, and the misleading emphasis on solutionism. In this paper, we explore a central component of this criticism, which is the construction of un-realistic venture ideas in social entrepreneurs’ pitches for social change. We analysed social venture business plans and the written feedback provided by judges during a social venture competition, and we used speech act theory to analyse the claims and promises triggering judges’ disbelief. We discovered three linguistic artefacts that underlie the construction of un-realistic venture ideas in social entrepreneurship, which we label holism, devotion, and enlightenment. While these artefacts trigger disbelief, they also play an expressive role as they channel both contestation and dreams. We leverage magical realism to forward an alternative explanation of how venture ideas in social entrepreneurship can act as a cultural form of social protest, which can be seen as a historically contingent, modern revolution.

Citation

Barton, M., & Muñoz, P. (2022). The magical language of un-realistic venture ideas in social entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship and Regional Development, 35(1 - 2), 1-23. https://doi.org/10.1080/08985626.2022.2158492

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Dec 7, 2022
Online Publication Date Dec 16, 2022
Publication Date 2022
Deposit Date Dec 7, 2022
Publicly Available Date Dec 21, 2022
Journal Entrepreneurship and Regional Development
Print ISSN 0898-5626
Electronic ISSN 1464-5114
Publisher Taylor and Francis Group
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 35
Issue 1 - 2
Pages 1-23
DOI https://doi.org/10.1080/08985626.2022.2158492
Public URL https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1184775

Files


Published Journal Article (880 Kb)
PDF

Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Copyright Statement
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.





You might also like



Downloadable Citations