 Assalamu alaikum students. In this module we have a video talk on the dark side of social enterprise. It's a pleasure to talk about my research on social entrepreneurship and it builds on joint work with Professor Peter Dason and a graduate student, Darren Kent, both in the School of Business as well. And I'm going to talk about something that I'm quite cynical about which is the topic of social enterprise or social entrepreneurship and really focus on the dark side of social entrepreneurship. Now I have to say I've said already that I'm a cynic but I have to tell you why. So social enterprises are sprouting up and they're coming up everywhere. And there's like fruit flies, many of them, because they're born to die, right? We have just such an abundance emerging all over the world. But the problem is that we make an assumption that they're emerging for altruistic reasons, that there's some good involved here. The other thing is that we're also very outcome focused. But yet our research evidence proving their outcome is very, very limited. In fact, I can think of just a few social enterprises that are creating large big scale systemic change. And in my opinion, that's a problem because there's so many of them forming. And so what I want to do is talk about three areas. One is are these assumptions of altruism still warranted? Secondly, how do we address the issues of the myth of impact? And then finally, three ways in which I believe the social enterprise agenda is becoming corrupted. The first way is the advancement of ulterior motives. The second is the exploitation for private gain. And the third way, and I find very, very interesting, is to explore the unintended negative consequences of doing good via social enterprise. So those are the three areas that I'm going to focus on. Keep in mind that the rhetoric of people who do social entrepreneurship work is very, very grand today and very, very ambitious. And so it's against that backdrop that I urge you to consider the darker side of some of these issues and things that we're going to talk about. So the first one is about the advancement of ulterior motives. So when I work with folks in government and private corporations, one of the things that I repeatedly hear about is some of the old type of dialogue around greenwashing that used to occur when we talked about CSR. So it's about ticking a box and not really giving much attention to the motives or the means by which we do it, but ticking a box to say that the outcome's been achieved. And in my opinion, that's very problematic. The second is that most of the problems that we face today and many of the solutions that are proposed come about from a sort of complex embeddedness of history, tradition, culture. And we often ignore that. A great example that I read about recently was on the formation of garrison communities in Jamaica. And this is where they set up social housing. What happens is politicians come together and they form unhealthy or maybe healthy robust deliances with criminal gangs and business entrepreneurs. And what they decide to do is they set up social housing projects for people. It looks like on the outcome side that it's actually doing some social good, but then they control votes. Drug trafficking, there's all kinds of other sort of activities happening that we wouldn't really judge or evaluate as being prudent or successful. And so we have to say, why does this happen? And it didn't happen overnight that a social entrepreneur came up with this great idea and said, let's start a social housing scam. But what's happened is in post-slavery days, these communities evolved and now they're just taken for granted in the communities in which they're embedded. And so we need to keep in mind the long sort of trajectory in history that causes these types of things to happen. The other is that there's a huge amount of exploitation that occurs for private gain. And so we need to be asking our question, whose interests are best being served when we set up and found social enterprises? You know, are we setting up the best interest of a community or are we setting up the best interests of the people being served or the people providing the service or good? And I'll give you an interesting example. I was recently at a meeting with a number of people from Queens and a number of people from the local community. And at that meeting, we were sitting around a table and people were talking about the issue of poverty and what we can do in the Kingston community about poverty. And someone jumped up from a local nonprofit and said, you can't talk about that topic. We do everything regarding poverty in Kingston. And a colleague sitting at the same table said, chimed in, he said, I beg to differ. I think there's enough for to go around for everyone. Okay. Think about that for a moment because a lot of times nonprofits claim this space and they claim it to slice up pieces of the pie. Is it really worth slicing it up or should we be thinking of broader more holistic approaches to working together as opposed to having overlap of resources that are being spent to deal with a specific topic or issue? I'm going to turn now to five unintended negative consequences that I think are pretty interesting. One is that I think that doing social good can often have unforeseen circumstances. So I remember being told a story by Peter Block who said that in New York City, they had created a social enterprise to help homeless men on the streets of New York. And could they create some type of program to get them off the streets with jobs in housing? In doing so, they launched a social enterprise. They were successful. The indigent homeless men were off the streets. But what happened after their success? One is that crime in those same neighborhoods escalated. The second was crimes against women also escalated because the mere presence of the men to begin with prevented a lot of this crime in the first place. So that's why I argue that we need to sort of look at a more holistic systemic view of when you do social good in one arena, it actually may have a negative spillover effect in another. And that's something important for us to always think about. The other thing I think is that social enterprises have to often make tradeoffs and these choices between the social mission and their for profit mission. And that can become questionable. The other is that governments will often abdicate responsibility now that they feel that people in the social space are actually taking over some of the responsibility for different problems that we face. So things like privatization of water. And in the U.S. right now, especially in Detroit, water, municipal water is being privatized. And is that really a good thing? It might be, but it's risky and we don't know if that should be the case. Traditional charities are being demonized and facing huge legitimacy challenges. So one of the biggest transformations I've seen in some of the research we're doing in philanthropy is that traditional charities as we know them are now having to become like businesses. And I'm not sure that's also a good thing or even appropriate. And one of the most interesting findings that I've come across recently about unintended negative consequences was research that's been done at the University of Toronto by Mazar and Zhong. And in their research they've done is that they find that there's a rise of unethical behavior following green consumption. So let me tell you about this. So people buy green products. It gives them a license after they've done something good to lie, cheat or steal. Right? And that's amazing. And they found this across a number of studies. It's a very robust finding. And I find it really, really interesting is what gives people that license to do something bad after you've done something good. Professor Tina Dawson has done a lot of research on dark side theories and case studies. And in this talk she's given a lot of research. After watching this video, in the next module we'll recap the main points of Professor Dawson's talk and try to draw conclusions or lessons from it. Thank you.