Reinventing social enterprise in China: language, institution and strategy

Abstract

This paper views social enterprise development in China as a process of institutional reinvention. This process indicates the foreign concept or practice’s being modified to fit local realities and being combined with local elements to shape a course of development different from that in the home context. In particular, based on a comprehensive analysis of interviews and media reports, this article provides knowledge in four aspects. First, I reveal an updated scenario about how the social enterprise concept is translated. This work identifies systematic variation in the discourse patterns used to distinguish different ways of understanding and discussing “social enterprise” in Chinese. Second, this paper analyzes social-cognitive tensions that complicate and reinvent the perception and use of this concept. Third, I demonstrate how incumbent government officials open up opportunities for social enterprise development. Finally, I discuss how grassroots supporters strategically explore local meanings and political opportunities to facilitate social enterprise development. Besides empirically specifying the reinvention process, this paper downplays the heroic focus in social enterprise studies and invites more researches on common and distinct patterns of how contextual forces give shape to the local form of social enterprises.

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