hybridity « Social innovation meets business revolution

Prayer on the Housetops, Jean-Leon Gerome, 1865

Orientalism Orientalism is one of those books that changed the world. And in my undergraduate education, probably around my third year in university in Montreal, I was exploring beyond my traditional International Development Studies courses, and found myself in both a Gender and Postcolonial Lit class and a Theories of Difference English course. It was then that Orientalism changed me, too. Orientalism is a concept developed by postcolonial theorist Edward Said and is also a book published in 1978 under the same name. For Said, orientalism is “a manner of regularized (or Orientalized) writing, vision, and study, dominated by imperatives, perspectives, and ideological biases ostensibly suited to the Orient.” It’s essential to think about when entrepreneurs talk for or even about marginalized subjects. Orientalism creates objects, especially, as we see in Gerome’s piece, in art. It’s the way we (read: The West) talk about, present, re-represent and imagine the Other. Hybridity Hybridity is a term typically attributed to being developed to the postcolonial intellectual Homi Bhabha in his 1996 book The Location of Culture. It can be, and it is to me, a little more optimistic than orientalism. Hybridity, as you can imagine, is an in-between state. Or rather, an in between process. “The borderline engagements of cultural difference may as often be consensual as conflictual; they may confound our definitions of tradition and modernity; realign the customary boundaries between the private and the public, high and low; and challenge normative expectations of development and progress,” writes Bhabha. Hybridity can be creative, it can also be a site of resistance so think about productivity and creativity when you’re straddling two worlds, whatever those worlds are. Maybe it’s business and social good or maybe it’s the United States and Kenya. Subaltern Antonio Gramsci’s idea of cultural hegemony laid the grounds for the postcolonial concept of the subaltern as it is viewed today. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is maybe the poster woman for “subaltern” as a concept and she insists that

“subaltern is not just a classy word for “oppressed”, for [the] Other, for somebody who’s not getting a piece of the pie. . . . In post-colonial terms, everything that has limited or no access to the cultural imperialism is subaltern — a space of difference. Now, who would say that’s just the oppressed? The working class is oppressed. It’s not subaltern. . . . Many people want to claim subalternity. They are the least interesting and the most dangerous. I mean, just by being a discriminated-against minority on the university campus; they don’t need the word ‘subaltern’ . . . They should see what the mechanics of the discrimination are. They’re within the hegemonic discourse, wanting a piece of the pie, and not being allowed, so let them speak, use the hegemonic discourse. They should not call themselves subaltern.

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.