Category Archives: nonprofit

  • The links between racial hybridity and organizational hybridity

    July 20, 2012

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    By Tiana Reid, Editor and Community Manager at SocialBusiness.org.

    Hybridity stems first from biology, but it’s come to be known in postcolonial theory as having to do with the fusion between identity and culture.

    Yesterday’s Stanford Social Innovation Review (SSIR) webinar focused on the “Hybrid Ideal,” as it were. The first featured presenter was Julie Battilana, Associate Professor of Business Administration, Organizational Behavior Unit at the Harvard Business School. “Hybrids transcend the boundaries between typical for-profit and notfor-profit organizations, she said at the get-go. “They pursue a social mission while engaging in commercial activities in order to generate revenues.”

    Indian critical theorist Homi K. Bhabha’s concept of hybridity, which centers on it as a site of subversive resistance, can shed light on the possibilities of hybrid organizations such as social enterprise. For Bhabha, as he writes in The Location of Culture, in-betweenness produces a “moment of aesthetic distance that provides the narrative with a double edge, which like the coloured South African subject, represents a hybridity, a difference ‘within,’ a subject that inhabits the rim of an ‘in-between’ reality.” Similarly, Françoise Lionnet uses the French word “métissage” in order to illuminate the strength and subtleties in being on the edge of two (or three, or four) things. In Autobiographical Voices: Race, Gender and Self-Portraiture, she contends that métissage is considered “the site of undecidability and indeterminacy, where solidarity becomes the fundamental principle of action.”

    Hybrid organizations allow for a sense of assertive criticality; there’s a space for a fuller kind of business that doesn’t rely on A or B but melds A, B and C. The SSIR webinar as a whole emphasized that the lines between for-profit and non-profit are being obscured. While many purists consider true social businesses as being completely revenue-generating, Battilana pulled from examples that showed the mix between gaining an independent income and relying on donations. In order to differentiate a spectrum, Battilana used the concept of “integration,” that is, “the extent to which an organization pursues both social and financial goals through the same set of activities.”

    Rather than looking at hybridity as a liminal state, it can exist on its own, as its own—but this doesn’t deny the necessity for organizations to adjust, imagine, transform and even revert. In postcolonial theory, hybridity creates a space for addressing and struggling against oppression and the same goes for social enterprise.

    By breaking through conventional notions of wholeness, social entrepreneurship can thrive through productive—and disruptive—initiatives.

  • Thoughts on SSIR’s ‘Driving Innovation and Impact with Digital Media’ webinar

    May 30, 2012

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    By Tiana Reid, Editor and Community Manager at SocialBusiness.org

    As a community manager for SocialBusiness.org, I was eager and ready to tune in to Stanford Social Innovation Review‘s webinar today, “Leading in a Hyperconnected World: Driving Innovation & Impact with Digital Media.” The line-up was pretty impressive: Ben Hecht, President & CEO, Living Cities; Claire Diaz Ortiz, Head of Social Innovation, Twitter; Steve Downs, Chief Technology & Information Officer, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation; and Regina Starr Ridley, Publishing Director, Stanford Social Innovation Review.

    Essentially, it all came down to this: how can we use digital and social media effectively? By “we,” I’m specifically referring to the collective “us,” those of us who are in the realm of creating social change whether it’s through business, charity, government or civil society. The go-to example for Twitter-meets-transformation is the Arab Spring. Ortiz explained how the events that went on there “took on a new face” because of those who could access the viral information. For instance, the #jan25 hashtag was started by a 21-year-old female student in Egypt.

    Hecht also explored the change-making aspects of digital media and pointed to paradigm shifts. He said there is an “increased understanding that in fact to solve the world’s problems you need to work together because it’s so complex.” Because of the extent of the complications that the world is (and has been) knee-deep in, we can’t rely on one actor; collaboration is key.

    It’s no surprise that people (especially “web-y” people) tend to romanticize the impacts of digital media. In explaining another paradigm shift, Hecht mentioned the ubiquitous argument of how the “means of consuming and sharing news and information is widely democratized and inexpensive.” True. But what about the digital divide? Even if we look within and not across countries, it’s clear that access isn’t at all equal.

    “A report last year by the World Bank estimated that every 10-percentage-point increase in the availability of broadband boosted economic growth by 1.2 percentage points in developed countries,” Iain Marlow and Jacquie McNish wrote in the Globe and Mail in 2010. The global digital divide has similar implications.

    However, even if not everyone has access to the same information—and access to how that information is disseminated—”ideas can go viral,” as Hecht confirmed. I mean, just look at the #Kony2012 campaign. And so, during the webinar, there was talk about real-life engagement, so to speak. That is, what happens to all of this online action, networking and communication? Where does it go?

    Hecht asked, “How do you go beyond short-term media and move it into the long-term commitments that are needed for change?” Aptly, Ortiz responded: “Socia media is the tool. There has always been a tool.”

  • The problems with so-called “conscious consumerism”

    March 21, 2012

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    By Tiana Reid, Editor and Community Manager at SocialBusiness.org

    Is “conscious consumerism” an oxymoron? While the social business and social enterprise spaces have allowed for somewhat of a rebirth of a socially centered business model, materialism can’t be the motivation for innovation.

    As an editor and community manager, I come across – and write about – dozens of purpose-driven companies. Some like FoodCycle and MyBnk Fair Finance are service-oriented, meaning that their direct line is working with people toward social and environmental justice.

    Many social businesses, however, are product-focused. Everything from bracelets made out of bona fide ammunition to one-for-one shoe products and fair trade fashion lines make the cut here.

    How does consumerism and materialism fit into an industry that, perhaps, makes profit from pain? Undoubtedly, many social enterprises reinvest a significant portion of their profits to further the social benefit. What are the implications of encouraging consumers to buy – regardless of the outcomes?

    Invisible Children’s Kony 2012 campaign has been criticized for being problematic for a number of reasons including, but not limited to blind clicktivism, misrepresentation, the use of good/evil language, spending habits, the “White Savior Industrial Complex” as novelist Teju Cole called it, their emotional tourist strategy, the lack of Ugandan participation and the not-for-profit’s militaristic approach to arresting Joseph Kony.

    “Yes, it’s great that social media is buzzing with something about human beings instead of bright, shiny objects,” Forbes contributor Anthony Wing Koster wrote earlier this week. “And it’s great to think of the internet as an engine of altruism instead of materialism.” Really?

    The video goads buying Invisible Children’s products to “make Kony famous.” The ‘Kony 2012 Action Kit’ is $30 and comes with “Everything you’ll need to take part in our KONY 2012 campaign,” according to the online store. What’s more, “People will think you’re an advocate of awesome.” Awesome. Moreover, the Kony bracelet is dubbed as the “the ultimate accessory” and the model in the image is black, which is significant since most Ugandans couldn’t afford a $10 bracelet, and most people in the video on the “activist” side weren’t people of color. Both products are sold out.

    In 2012, recent UC Berkeley Business Administration graduate Rosalind Chu expressed her internal back-and-forth debate when deciding what career to pursue. In a post called “Excess, wealth, and materialism and how that fits into a career in social enterprise,” she wrote: “society — American society especially – breeds a culture of excess, consumption, and materialism. We are bombarded daily with new products or new ‘somethings,’ and are constantly reminded of how awesome it must be to be rich and wealthy.”

    But are the problems of consumerism exempt from social business? Of course not, but what would an ideal version “conscious consumerism” even look like?

    Consumption – conspicuous or not – must slow right down in order to make up for the dirt in our air, our oceans and our lives… I mean, ideally, the story might go like so: if I need (or, okay, really want) to buy a new lipstick/t-shirt/pair of shoes, I’ll opt for buying the product from an ethical producer rather than from a corporate giant with opaque production practices. But maybe, really, I’ll get both, but I’ll feel better for having also chosen the former.

    Environmentalist, activist and writer George Monbiot said that “[g]reen consumerism has been a catastrophic mistake.” He argued that cause-conscious campaigns – whether hybrid cars or poverty-alleviating shoes – draw in people’s self-interest in that those products will help to beef up your social status. Furthermore, he emphasized the need to crusade for our values rather than conforming to the status quo, an apathetic politically hollow atmosphere. In essence: structural change is needed to mitigate the mess we’re all in.

    While I push for the accessibility of fairly produced products, I just can’t wrap my head around buying yet another thing I don’t need, bought from the convenience of my sweatshop-produced MacBook. But, too often, it comes down to the question of “What’s worse?”