Social Enterprise as a Broker of Identity Resources

Abstract

Social enterprises often transmit pro-social values to their staff, volunteers, stakeholders, and communities. Research also shows that social enterprises can improve aspects of beneficiaries’ identity and self-worth. However, knowledge about identity-construction dynamics among social enterprises, their founders and other stakeholders, and the communities and cultures in which they are situated is undertheorized and fragmented across fields. This is attributable, at least in part, to the lack of a theory that can explain identity construction across micro-individual, meso-organizational, and macro-cultural levels. This study makes two major contributions. First, we advance a novel, multi-level theoretical framework for understanding identity construction based on assemblage theory. Second, we use that framework to interpret data from our ethnographic study of a social enterprise based in a Canadian fishing village. Our study reveals that the social enterprise actively curates identity resources from local culture and heritage and brokers those resources to stakeholders for their personal identity projects. It suggests that the impacts are greater for people with transitional or problematic identities. It also shows that identity-resource brokerage can result in generativity whereby staff and volunteers “pay it forward” with the effect of scaling the social impact of the enterprise. The findings support the usefulness of the identity-as-assemblage construct for understanding complex identity dynamics across multiple levels of analysis. They also open the door to a number of provocative research questions, including the role of narrative transmission in the flow of identity resources and a potential identity-mirroring role for social enterprise in shaping or reinforcing elements of place identity.