The tactical mimicry of social enterprise strategies: Acting ‘as if’ in the everyday life of third sector organizations

Abstract

Using England as a paradigmatic case of the ‘enterprising up’ of the third sector through social enterprise policies and programs, this article sheds light on practitioners’ resistance as enacted through dramaturgical identification with government strategies. Drawing from a longitudinal qualitative research study, which is interpreted via Michel de Certeau’s theory of the prosaic of the everyday, we present the case study of Teak, a charitable regeneration company, to illustrate how its Chief Executive Liam ‘acted as’ a social entrepreneur in order to gain access to important resources. Specifically, we establish ‘tactical mimicry’ as a sensitizing concept to suggest that third sector practitioners’ public identification with the normative premises of ‘social enterprise’ is part of a parasitical engagement with governmental power geared toward appropriating public money. While tactical mimicry conforms to governmental strategies only in order to exploit them, its ultimate aim is to increase potential for collective agency outside the direct influence of power. The contribution we make is threefold: first, we extend the recent debate on ‘productive resistance’ by highlighting how ‘playing the game’ without changing existing relations of power can nevertheless produce largely favorable outcomes. Second, we suggest that recognition of the potentiality of tactical mimicry requires methodologies that pay attention to the spatial and temporal dynamics of resistance. Finally, we argue that explaining the normalizing power of ‘social enterprise’ without consideration of the non-discursive, mainly financial resources made available to those who identify with it, necessarily risks overlooking a crucial element of the dramaturgical dynamic of discourse.

Keywords

Michel de Certeau productive resistance social enterprise space tactical mimicry third sector

To succeed as a country we have to make best use of all our resources. We have great social entrepreneurs and it is time for the public sector and socially responsible investors and businesses to get behind them. Expect the quiet revolution to get noisier.

Nick Hurd, UK minister for civil society, writing in Guardian Professional, 3 April 2013, http://www.theguardian.com/social-enterprise-network/2013/apr/03/social-innovation-nurturing-quiet-revolution

Introduction

The global rise of neoliberalism has largely relied on the embodiment of the individual as entrepreneur of the self (Foucault, 2008). The entrepreneurial homo oeconomicus is, as Foucault suggested, not merely a partner of exchange. As an entrepreneur of himself [sic], the self-optimizing individual is flexible and able to systematically respond to any modification of the environment. It is this flexibility which ultimately renders individuals amenable to external control. That is, individuals become governable insofar as they accept that the best forward is to conduct their lives just as one would manage an enterprise. Foucault’s interest in the entrepreneur as an eminent figure in the contemporary ‘art of governing’ has struck a chord with organization studies’ scholars interested in how discourse works to structure individuals’ freedom and desires in accordance with managerial objectives (for an overview, cf. Mennicken and Miller, 2014). By expanding norms and practices from the realm of entrepreneurship to individuals, groups, and organizations which might not be considered entrepreneurial, ‘enterprise’ works as an antidote to bureaucracy by creating a heightened sense of importance of business virtues such as performance and competition (Du Gay, 2004).

Although treatises of enterprise discourse and the enterprising self have become central components of organization studies, these studies support a rather deterministic understanding of discourse (Fournier and Grey, 1999). Interpretive research has helped resituate agency back into the understanding of the enterprise discourse by demonstrating that individuals do not necessarily identify themselves in the prescribed terms (Jones and Spicer, 2009). People discursively ‘interpellated’ as entrepreneurs may resist this subject position by making choices between competing meanings (Sanders and McClellan, 2014) while negotiating ‘their own understanding within their own particular worlds’ (Cohen and Musson, 2000: 44). Thus, individuals might not behave like docile bodies unreflectively endorsing enterprise discourse, but rather act as agentic subjects antagonistically relating to enterprise discourse through a process of ‘permanent provocation’ (to use Foucault’s (1982: 222) terminology). However, while studies looking at how the enterprising self is discursively resisted have focused mainly on antagonistic practices such as opposition, appropriation, or transgression, relatively little work has explored the dramaturgy of resistance,¹ notably as it pertains to mimicry.

Homing in on this gap, in this article, we offer an account of resistance which works less through overt antagonism than through counterfeit identification, or what we refer to as ‘tactical mimicry’. Rather than equating resistance with ‘pushing back’, we use tactical mimicry to sketch out an understanding which combines a covert refusal to consent with the desideratum of power with an overt and tactical identification with the normative demands of power geared toward gaining access to important resources. Unlike theories which reserve the term ‘resistance’ for rare moments of collective upheaval and insurrection or individual acts of bravery (Couzens Hoy, 2004), tactical mimicry appeals to the dramaturgical creativity at the heart of everyday life. Combining the cunning characteristics of covert, infrapolitical forms of resistance (Scott, 1990) with the change-orientation typified by ‘productive resistance’ (Courpasson et al., 2012), tactical mimicry contributes to existing research by restoring space for the more progressive possibilities of disguised and non-confrontational forms of resistance. Tactical mimicry overlaps with infrapolitical forms of resistance in that both are informal, unorganized, and exercised outside of the direct influence of power. However, its defining feature is the potential to expand possibilities for collective action (in another space) without opposing or even assuming power (Holloway, 2010), thus creating favorable outcomes which exceed the (false) sense of autonomy and agency (Fleming and Spicer, 2003) engendered by defensive, self-protective gestures such as cynicism, lampooning, foot dragging, or humor (Contu, 2008). We use as an illustrative example of tactical mimicry the case of ‘Teak’,² a charitable regeneration company, whose Chief Executive Liam privately opposed but overtly affirmed the government discourse of social enterprise in order to gain access to important monetary and symbolic resources, to demonstrate how ‘acting as’ social entrepreneurs can not only increase spaces of discretion or advance sectional interests but also create spaces for collective agency outside of power’s gaze.

The article proceeds as follows. To make palpable the kind of power to which tactical mimicry responds, we first introduce our wider field of study, the English third sector where government employed social enterprise policies and programs to render the third sector more enterprising. Second, we offer a brief sketch of de Certeau’s theory of everyday creativity and elaborate on the kind of understanding of resistance his notion of ‘tactics’ entails. Third, in our methodology section, we outline our longitudinal research study and approach to analysis. Fourth, we introduce our empirical case, Teak, which forms the empirical basis of our abductive conceptualization of tactical mimicry. Finally, we discuss the political, conceptual, and methodological implications of our main insights.

The English third sector and the social enterprise discourse

Early co-operative pioneers in England in the mid-1990s were attracted to the social enterprise concept partly as it offered freedom from dependency on government money and the associated loss of autonomy (Ridley-Duff and Bull, 2011). From this perspective, social enterprises were collectively orientated organizations which survived through trading and redistributed profits for the benefit of the communities they served (Teasdale, 2012). The first government publication during Tony Blair’s term as prime minister referred to social enterprises as ‘organisations that are independent of the state and provide services, goods and trade for a social purpose and are non-profit distributing’ (HM Treasury, 1999). Ironically, contrary to what co-operative leaders had expected from social enterprise, government interest in the subject matter, and particularly the repositioning of social enterprise as the delivery of public services by third sector organizations, has actually increased third sector organizations’ dependence on the state (Carmel and Harlock, 2008).

The introduction of the social enterprise discourse to the English third sector³ has occurred against the backdrop of a general atmosphere of anti-welfarism (Hogg and Baines, 2011) and associated attempts to render the social a space of competition, individual responsibility, and self-organization (Tomlinson and Schwabenland, 2010). Starting with the election of a New Labour government in 1997, there has been broad political consensus that social welfare was no longer the primary responsibility of government and that communities and individuals should adopt a more proactive approach to solving social problems. Various initiatives and measures were introduced by government to redefine the third sector as a political category designating a territory of human conduct which needs to be both governed and supported (Carmel and Harlock, 2008). Government discourse purports that in return for public resources, third sector organizations, particularly those involved in public service provision (Tomlinson and Schwabenland, 2010), should professionalize by demonstrating a more business-like, entrepreneurial approach to their way of doing things.

It was in this post-welfarist climate in the late 1990s that English government retreated from its traditional role of providing welfare, while positioning itself as a global leader in delivering welfare indirectly through social enterprise. Social enterprise’s essential ideological operation is to encourage traditional third sector organizations to be more ‘market-driven, client-driven, and self-sufficient’ (Tracey et al., 2005: 355). A vast arsenal of discursive re-articulations and material incentives, such as performance-based contracts, policies, grant programs, and education schemas, were used to establish an entrepreneurial culture at the heart of the third sector. A Social Enterprise Unit was established within the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) in 2001, which was later moved to the new Office of the Third Sector in 2007. A new legal form for social enterprises, the Community Interest Company, was introduced which allowed limited distribution of profits, and revealingly, ‘business support’ for social enterprise was delivered by the Government’s Small Business Service (Teasdale, 2012). Interestingly, the transformation of the third sector was continued under the coalition government elected in 2010. Their Big Society program was directly contrasted with the (overbearing) Big State promoted by New Labour and touted as an ‘endorsement of the positive and proactive role that […] social enterprise could play in promoting improved social inclusion and “fixing Britain’s broken society”’ (Alcock, 2010: 380). One of the most important support mechanisms is Big Society Capital, a social investment wholesaler launched in 2012 which lends £600 million to social enterprises, charities, and community groups to enable them to scale up and deliver public services on a larger scale. Alongside this, the Public Services (Social Value) Act (2012) aims to help social enterprises win contracts through encouraging commissioners of public services to take wider social value into account (Teasdale et al., 2012). In summary, government used social enterprise to govern the third sector ‘at a distance’ (Foucault, 1991), with power exercised through a network of heterogeneous techniques such as policies, grants, and various forms of intellectual and material support. Together, these techniques established social enterprise as a normative ideal toward which third sector practitioners are supposed to move (Dey, 2014).

Resisting social enterprise through disidentification

Perhaps unsurprisingly, social enterprise was not wholly welcomed by commentators and practitioners. ‘I spit on it’ was the unapologetic reaction of Andy Benson, director of the National Coalition for Independent Action, at a seminar in Northampton in late 2012.⁴ An overarching critique from academic commentators was that social enterprise offered a neoliberal response to the problems caused by neoliberalism, in the process de-politicizing community engagement by rendering collective identities and processes subservient to ‘what works’ (Pearce, 2003). It would be wrong, though, to assume that social enterprise automatically hegemonizes the third sector through a set of mainstream business ideas. Such an interpretation eschews tout court issues of agency and resistance as they occur on a day-to-day basis.

Spearheaded by Parkinson and Howorth’s (2008) seminal inquiry, scholars became increasingly interested in exploring whether practitioners identify themselves with the terms used by government to unleash the third sector’s entrepreneurial spark. This research suggests that practitioners, rather than being determined by incessant attempts to shape their reality and identity, retain a certain degree of agency and are able to resist the social enterprise discourse by displacing, appropriating, or negotiating their own meanings and identity within the political context in which they work. Baines et al. (2010), studying initiatives intended to advance entrepreneurial and business-like approaches in the realm of public service delivery, demonstrate that public sector commissioners and third sector organizations often face difficulties in relating to the other party’s world view and assumptions. Seanor and Meaton (2007) concluded from a study of a social enterprise network that practitioners reject the prevailing image of the heroic leader and even deny wanting to become social entrepreneurs. Froggett and Chamberlayne (2004) further point out that practitioners sidestep individualistic and consumerist discourses of social enterprise. These studies are united by an adherence to an antagonistic paradigm which conceives of resistance as the ‘constant process of adaptation, subversion and reinscription of dominant discourse’ (Thomas and Davies, 2005: 687).

However, by foregrounding complex struggles over meaning, existing research has overlooked the possibility that discourse might also be resisted in non-antagonistic ways. In the remainder of this article, we explore a particular form of non-antagonistic resistance of the social enterprise discourse through an in-depth analysis of a third sector organization called Teak. Our findings came as a surprise as our research was aimed precisely at understanding how practitioners resist (or not) ‘social enterprise’ antagonistically by variously displacing and appropriating its normative premises. Thus, our understanding of ‘tactical mimicry’ emanated from unexpected observations and an ensuing process of abductive reasoning. Before moving on to this, we first provide a brief overview of Michel de Certeau’s theory of everyday creativity.

De Certeau and the prosaic of the everyday

In short, Michel de Certeau grappled with everyday life as a hallmark of immanent creativity (de Certeau, 1984; de Certeau et al., 1998). A key concern in his work was resistance. Partly as a response to Foucault’s (1979) ‘Discipline and Punish’, which he admired but also perceived as omitting the possibility for agency,⁵ de Certeau developed an understanding of resistance as the creative potentiality inherent in everyday practices. Particularly relevant in this regard is de Certeau’s distinction between strategies and tactics, arguably the most famous of his conceptual binaries but also one of the most misunderstood (Buchanan, 2000). De Certeau (1994) conceives of strategies as ‘calculus of force-relationships’ (p. 380) which can be found in all powerful projects of ‘political, economic, and scientific rationality’ (de Certeau, 1984: xix). Strategies represent the perspective of the dominant order which prescribes what is adequate or desirable and so forms the ‘institutionalized frameworks, scripts, or patterns of action that serve as general guides to behaviour’ (Carlson, 1996: 49). Social enterprise policies and programs can thus be regarded as strategies since they seek to dictate the conditions of proper subjectivity and social production (Dey and Steyaert, 2014). Tactics on the other hand relate to the devious but dispersed everyday creativity at the hands of the people. Tactics, according to de Certeau (1984), represent the inventive possibilities that exist within strategic circumstances. Importantly, tactics do not stand in opposition to strategies but ‘make do’ with the opportunities that strategies offer.

De Certeau developed a prosaic understanding of resistance which, in line with Scott’s (1985) notion of ‘everyday resistance’, emphasized the parasitical and creative aspects of the everyday over the antagonistic and confrontational. ‘Prosaics’ in de Certeau’s (1984) account has a very particular meaning since derived from the etymological meaning ‘to create, invent, generate’ (p. 205). The role of invention and creativity as an inherent part of everyday tactics is evinced more strongly in the original title ‘L’invention du quotidien’ of de Certeau’s theory of the everyday than its English translation as ‘The Practice of Everyday Life’. The prosaic of the everyday in de Certeau (1984) designates the mundane ways of ‘doing things’ as the locus of attention, delineating how ordinary individuals resist strategic claims and imperatives by acting as ‘poets of their own acts, silent discovers of their own paths in the jungle of functionalist rationality’ (p. xviii). The prosaic interpretation of the everyday as the space of resistance underscores that tactics, rather than opposing or displacing strategies, ‘take place in its blindspots’ (Highmore, 2002: 160). Conceiving tactics quite generally as the clever tricks and spatio-temporal practices which people enact to develop their individual trajectories, de Certeau’s (1984) primary purpose was to invite ‘continuing investigation of the ways in which users—commonly assumed to be passive and guided by established rules—operate’ (p. xi). Indicating that tactical resistance can take various forms, de Certeau made it clear that his concepts lend themselves to adaption and novel uses. Before doing just that, we offer some details on the empirical inquiry upon which our conceptualization depended.

The Real Times study

Real Times was a 5-year Economic and Social Research Council–funded qualitative longitudinal study of 15 ‘core’ third sector organizations. It broadly aimed to understand third sector organizations’ everyday reality: how they work in practice, change over time, respond to challenges, and under which conditions they flourish.⁶

The theoretical framing of Real Times is that third sector organizations are situated within and influenced by a complex web of overlapping fields, including those which may be geographic, industry based, or political. The organizations and individuals are shaped by the fields they are part of, but—dependent on their relative power—are also able to recursively influence those same fields. Existing research on third sector organizations has tended to study third sector organizations in isolation from the wider environment in which they are situated or to examine them through the lens of a single field-based relationship (Scott et al., 2000). Real Times aimed to avoid the problems inherent in synchronic research which studies third sector activity at a particular point in time (and space) and often draws conclusions which may not be representative of the snapshots which could be taken from other angles (Scott et al., 2000). Longitudinal in nature, the aim of Real Times was to study how third sector organizations react to and thereby change or perpetuate, respectively, their environments over time.

Real Times involved the selection of a diverse range of third sector organizations, broadly sampled to reflect the diversity of the sector. Teak, which we use to illustrate the concept of tactical mimicry, was selected as an example of an organization which approximated as closely as possible to the then dominant policy discourse of social enterprise as outlined by the United Kingdom’s DTI (2002):

a business with primarily social objectives, whose surpluses are principally reinvested for that purpose in the business or in the community, rather than being driven by the need to maximise profit for shareholders and owners. (p. 8)

Teak derived trading income through construction, the provision of environmental landscaping services, and a hotel and conference center. Its social mission was to provide employment for disadvantaged groups by integrating them in Teak’s core businesses. All profits were reinvested in the social mission. Customers came from a range of businesses, housing associations, schools, and private individuals. While generalization was not an aim of the Real Times study, we felt that Teak was emblematic of an ideal type of social enterprise promoted by government as

using business success to address social or environmental challenges such as regeneration and social inclusion. (Cabinet Office, 2006: 13)

At the time, government distinguished between two broad types of social enterprise: those operating as delivery agents for the public sector and those operating in commercial markets,

but nevertheless generating substantial public benefits through the people they employ or the services they offer. (Cabinet Office, 2006: 5)

Teak was firmly in the latter camp and was used in various government publications as a successful example of a commercial social enterprise.

To contextualize the organizations as part of our sample, each of the 15 core cases was matched with up to three supplementary cases involved in similar activities. In the case of Teak, this meant that we selected as supplementary cases a for-profit supplier from the construction industry, a housing association that had initially created Teak, and a social enterprise support agency. We were able to further contextualize Teak by connecting it to two of the other core cases—a deprived former mining village and a social enterprise which Teak supported through a government-funded program (which we return to later).

In terms of method, the project was based on interviews conducted with third sector practitioners at their place of work, observational visits, and documentary material relating to the cases. All interviews were recorded, transcribed, and then stored in NVivo. Empirical material pertaining to this article was collected between January 2010 and March 2013. At the time of writing, we had collected over 500 interview transcripts, 33 of which related directly to Teak. While one of the authors was responsible for researching Teak as part of the Real Times project, other members of the Real Times team were involved in the initial thematic coding as well as in the iterative interpretation of the interview material.

Practitioners’ stories became more nuanced, multifaceted, and reflective as our working relationship matured. As Taylor et al. (2014: 54) mention in this regard, the longitudinal design of the Real Times study allowed us to excavate ‘some of the more formalized organizational narratives that were presented initially and uncover the practices and tensions beneath’. Over subsequent waves of fieldwork, participants increasingly gained trust in us, sharing thoughts and beliefs which had initially been kept private. As a result, it became obvious that part of what we had learned, or thought we did, during the initial stages of the research about third sector practitioners’ relationship with ‘social enterprise’ was in fact a dramaturgical performance more or less explicitly aimed at portraying a desirable image toward us as researchers. Studying organizations longitudinally afforded us the advantage of revisiting our initial interpretations of why they acted in particular ways. In the case of Teak, to which we turn below, a critical moment occurred when the Chief Executive left the organization in late 2012. This offered him more freedom to reveal the actual tactics he had been involved in, which were initially veiled behind the formal organizational narratives presented to the researcher. It also allowed us to report on aspects of the case which might otherwise have proved detrimental to Liam’s career and status. Through more informal discussions with Liam, we were able to better situate and make sense of the data collected over the previous 3 years. While we use Liam (and Teak) to illustrate our conceptualization, it is important to emphasize that tactical mimicry was also manifest in other cases in the Real Times study. The results of our inquiry are presented as they unfolded to us. This necessitates moving backward and forward through time in order to emphasize how our uncovering of tactical mimicry was conditional on the longitudinal setup of our research design and the establishment of trustful relationships with our informants, more specifically.

Findings

Embracing social enterprise?

The first wave of interviews conducted in 2010 appeared to confirm our initial assumption that practitioners either reinforce and support or challenge and appropriate the normative demands and subject position of social enterprise inscribed in government policies and programs. As we have discussed elsewhere (Dey and Teasdale, 2013), some third sector organizations did in fact reject the social enterprise label. However, our empirical material also seemed to indicate, in contrast to Parkinson and Howorth’s (2008) study, that many practitioners were willingly embracing the discourse of social enterprise. This might imply that social enterprise has gained legitimacy at the level of practice. However, some of the organizations in our sample, notably Teak, offer an alternative interpretation.

Teak’s website proclaimed the organization to be ‘one of the largest social enterprise groups based in the [region]’. Their stated mission was ‘delivering social justice though enterprise’. Teak had been created to provide in-house maintenance to a parent charity in the mid-1990s and had gradually expanded to incorporate a wide range of subsidiary businesses including construction and hospitality companies. Our primary contact, Liam, had initially been recruited to manage the construction company and later became chief executive in the mid-2000s. Liam had grown up in a Northern industrial city, did an engineering degree after which he began to think about ‘who shall I work for?’ It wasn’t ‘can I get a job’ in ‘those days’. After 2 years working in London, Liam decided London could never be ‘home’ and moved back to the North. After a few more years working for construction companies, Liam ‘saved up enough money for the deposit on the house, but went and blew it on a round the world ticket and took six months travelling around the world on my own, in relative style’. When he returned, he went back to work for his old employers. After the company was taken over in 1995, Liam began to feel increasingly at odds with big business and particularly the sub-contracting methods they employed which led to a casualization and, thus, precarization of labor:

It smelt to me—when I’d started in construction we used to employ lots of people—I started as a site engineer being beaten up and driven by the concrete gang and the carpentry gang because they wouldn’t earn their bonuses if I didn’t set it out correctly and they were all employed and 22 years on they didn’t employ anyone … just all contract labor. (March 2010)

Liam recognized that the increasing tendency of construction companies to employ temporary employees instead of permanent ones signified the moment when he first became ‘politicized’, referring to it as the period of his ‘finding my New Labour soap box’. He ‘bumped into’ a current member of the Teak board who was then working for a Local Housing Association. Liam was critical of the housing association for not employing local people. However, after ‘a few drinks’ Liam ‘ended up saying “go on then, I’ll jack my job and we’ll set up a construction company, you give us the first contract” and that’s where it (Teak) came from’. Evidently, much of the language Liam used in our first interview in 2010 could have derived straight from the policy rhetoric surrounding social enterprise at the time. In accordance with New Labour’s portrayal of social enterprise as being ‘first and foremost’ about business, Liam emphasized Teak’s business-like nature:

We just want to trade as a company. … we’re not particularly selling ourselves as a social enterprise, we’re selling ourselves because we’ll deliver a product on time, to a quality, at a cost … It’s about business—trading for more than pounds shillings and pence … We’re trading because we want to help people. (March 2010)

During the same interview, Liam set Teak apart from charities and other social enterprises which were merely relying on ‘government hand-outs’. Liam emphasized Teak’s aversion to taking government money (whether through grants or service-level agreements) was about maintaining independence:

It was always the vision to have revenue-defined income, more than anything. I think, so that we had control of our destiny … once you start, and yes we’ve done a few, inverted commas, government contracts in one of the companies … is the minute you become grant-dependent or you’re answerable to somebody else. Whether it’s belligerence or belief, we’d rather not be answerable to someone else, you know, we want to be answerable to our own vision and mission. (March 2010)

In the above extract, Liam was conveying the impression of a tough businessman and, in accordance with policy rhetoric of the period, setting Teak apart from both ‘patronizing’ charities which inadvertently perpetuated poverty and from those social enterprises that had become through accepting contracts and service-level agreements. However, the economic downturn in 2008 hit Teak hard. As Liam explains, the industries in which they operated were particularly vulnerable:

Construction, landscape, maintenance, conference and hospitality … it is one of the worst mixes in the present economic position. I mean we have got murdered this year. You know you couldn’t think of anything [worse]—what do people cut first? Construction spend and training spend. (March 2010)

Liam stressed that protecting the jobs of his staff was of paramount concern and that Teak had drawn upon reserves to do so. He was particularly proud that

We’ve been here 11 years, no staff member’s ever left, it’s a family and they’re reliant on me for their wages, and it’s very close in here. (January 2011)

Despite Liam’s critique of other charities’ and social enterprises’ dependence on government money, it appeared that one consequence of the economic downturn was that Teak had for the first time engaged in contracting to deliver services for government, initially through the Future Jobs Fund—a New Labour government program designed to provide short term employment opportunities:

So if I was very frank this is about survival in this market because we are totally and utterly reliant on contracts. There isn’t any construction work out there, we’re going to do it differently and now we’ve also just taken on as a delivery [agent] for the future jobs fund. We’ve [previously] avoided it like the plague, yeah? (March 2010)

Liam had also become the manager of a government-sponsored program designed to encourage third sector organizations to earn money through trading rather than rely on grants. In light of this, it seemed somewhat paradoxical that an organization placing a high emphasis on trading in the private market place (i.e. competing on cost and quality) and avoiding government contracts appeared to suddenly reposition itself as part of the government supply of public services.

At the time, our initial impressions of Teak were of a social enterprise on the boundaries of civil society and the market positioning itself as distinct from traditional charities and the public sector by virtue of their business-like nature. In entering new (quasi) markets (read the public contracting arena), Teak had effectively identified with the changing governmental stipulation of social enterprise which, by 2010, was shifting toward third sector organizations delivering public services (Teasdale, 2012). If the story were to end here, we would be left with the impression that government resources and discourses, in combination with the slumbering economy, had effectively recreated Liam as a social entrepreneur acting on behalf of the New Labour government’s marketization strategy to address public service failure.

Tactical mimicry of social enterprise by third sector practitioners

By the time of the second wave of fieldwork in January 2011, a Conservative-led coalition government had taken power and the government funding environment for social enterprises had become increasingly uncertain. Infrastructure support for social enterprise trading in commercial markets had been severely reduced at a time when the economic environment had been severely impacted by the financial crisis. However, there was an increased emphasis on helping social enterprises to win public sector contracts. The government set out its policy emphasis in a document ‘Building the Big Society’:

We will support the creation and expansion of mutuals, co-operatives, charities and social enterprises, and support these groups to have much greater involvement in the running of public services. (Cabinet Office, 2010: 2)

Meanwhile, the government was supporting what was then the Public Services (Social Value and Social Enterprise) Bill which aimed to make it easier for social enterprise to win contracts to deliver public services (Teasdale et al., 2012). It was increasingly clear that the survival of social enterprises trading in commercial markets would be left to market forces and that the new policy emphasis favored those operating as delivery agents for the public sector.

By this time, the relationship with Liam had developed and we were regularly in contact regarding issues not directly relevant to the case study. We felt that he was being more open about his private thoughts about social enterprise and public policy:

I think I’m a cynic because I think there’s much more of a boys’ club in this government, and there is much heavier linkage to large private sector … Yes, I am a cynic; I’m a very cynical person at the moment, but, as long as you understand the game … I don’t think there’s any point fighting it. You’ve got to play it … I had a conversation with someone the other days who’s getting all uppity, I said, ‘Look, at the end of the day, I have a vision mission, which is to help people in need. Now if I have to wear a yellow shirt to achieve the ability to do that, or a blue shirt, or a pink shirt, I don’t really give a shit’, so long as my morals don’t go, and I’m still achieving it, yes, I don’t care. You know, it’s a bit like, you know, we shouldn’t use dirty money … Okay, yes, we don’t like where it came from, but look at the good we can do with the ten quid, you know, so … I don’t think it’s a time at the moment to stand on your moral high ground. (January 2011)

Over the next 2 years, Liam increasingly opened up to one of us about the tactical ‘game’ he was playing. The game, in Liam’s account, involved publicly affirming the new government policy toward social enterprise and the Big Society to obtain what he saw as ‘dirty money’—that is, money from a government which he found morally repugnant because of its ‘boys’ club’ and links to the large private sector. On the other hand, this dirty money, which he gained access to as a result of his public consent with government’s new social enterprise policy, became an important resource stream for his organization as it was used to support the salaries of his workforce, most of whom had originally come from disadvantaged backgrounds and many of whom had been with Teak for 11 years.

Returning to our transcripts, an initial hint of the rules of Liam’s tactical mimicry, which we had missed at the time, came in our first interview back in March 2010. Referring to Teak’s seemingly accidental move into delivering a previous governmental program to teach third sector organizations to be more entrepreneurial, Liam outlined how he had ‘been asked by [a government department] to do a presentation on social business to a number of homeless organizations’. Liam had observed that the charities which attended ‘didn’t give a shit, just keep giving us the money, we’ll carry on doing the hand out and let someone else do the hand up’ (March 2010). In a ‘loud and argumentative conversation’ which took place in the bar afterward, Liam had been asked for his thoughts as to how to change the situation by government. He proposed that the government department should fund a program which Teak would manage to encourage charities to become more business-like.

Over subsequent interviews, it became clearer that Liam had dramaturgically played upon both the business-like nature of Teak and the need for third sector organizations to become more market-driven to encourage a situation whereby the government would give Teak money to enable other organizations to copy Teak. For example, in September 2012, referring to an event ‘What can the third sector learn from the private sector?’ Liam reflected angrily upon the difference between big business and social enterprises and charities:

(A major firm of accountants) were giving all the bullshit about their ability to measure social value, the work they’d done for Puma and this that and the other … I think this is bollocks … The whole point for social enterprise and charities is they have a vision and then measure effectiveness. That is a massive difference of you doing something with Puma where they haven’t changed their ways, they have no vision, they have no objective. (September 2012)

Thus, Liam was not the die-hard market dogmatist he initially appeared to be. Wedded to the idea that market mechanisms could be used to create not just economic but social and societal value, Liam was pragmatically embracing social enterprise mainly to enable alternative capitalist possibilities (Gibson-Graham, 2006) for people who were facing difficulties in making a living in the formal economy:

We’re not a training organisation. We’re an employer … we felt that we could really move people’s lives around by introducing work (for) 20 year olds to 50, you know, who are a bit screwed up. But they spent a lot of time in the army, have no family life, come back and there’s nothing, because they’ve got no structure and everything goes a bit … and then, you were finding the same in prison, they were finding them in hostels, and we thought, well … the endgame and success is someone employed, yeah, and someone with a secure home. Everything else in the middle is just a route to it. (October 2011)

Social enterprise in Liam’s account formed a pertinent way of creating liberatory experiences and opportunities for those who had been marginalized in the current economic order. And although he privately disliked the idea of collaborating with government, due not least to how government tried to shape the third sector according to the demands of the economy, this did not prevent Liam from publicly mimicking government’s social enterprise policy. Evidently, Liam’s mimicking of the novel government strategy was tactical and calculated in that it allowed Teak to move toward a different financial model which relied more upon government money and which eventually helped Teak replace dwindling commercial revenues. As Liam later noted,

I think Teak was moving from a social enterprise that did something and moving towards a social enterprise that doesn’t do anything. (September 2012)

Understandably, this tactical engagement required considerable flexibility since the social enterprise policy landscape constantly shifted, particularly after the establishment of the coalition government.

Changing government, changing the act

As Liam noted in January 2011, the rules of the game had changed again under the new coalition government. Despite the Big Society rhetoric, Liam saw the rules as tilted in favor of ‘larger private sector’ companies. It seemed unlikely that Teak would get any more money supporting charities to become more business-like because that program was seen as an initiative of the previous government. Thus, Liam was trying to disassociate the program (and Teak) from the previous government and connect it to the Big Society with a particular emphasis on the role that private business could play. Teak had developed links with corporate partners, one of whom had agreed to host a big event in the City of London called ‘When will you get involved?’ (a play on the Big Society message of community involvement by business). Liam had invited various speakers and representatives from the corporate world, particularly companies keen to win large government:

… and the strategy is actually saying this isn’t a third sector organization saying, ‘We’re Big Society’. This is some of your biggest fucking suppliers. This is British Telecom Global Services, this is Price Waterhouse Cooper, this is Serco … (January 2011)

His feeling was that if he could present Teak as closely involved with government to the corporate world, and simultaneously as closely linked to the corporate world to government, he might then be able to gain more government interest and funding for the program. The final piece in the jigsaw was positioning Teak as an exemplar of the Big Society:

I don’t want to be saying to the new politicians who have this grand new idea, ‘By the way, we’ve been doing it for ages’ … What I would say is, ‘We’re doing this which is good, actually, given a twist with yourselves, this could be a real good Big Society’. (January 2011)

This approach seemed to work. Liam had received a letter from Prime Minister David Cameron which he used to publicize the event:

… the information you sent us sets out very well what a valuable institute [this program] is, particularly because its emphasis is based on sustainability in partnership with the private sector to enable [disadvantaged] people to become economically independent. [The program] supports the coalition government’s vision of the Big Society. (Letter from December 2010)

As far as Liam was concerned, it didn’t matter how government wanted to label Teak as long as he could get some money. He was just mimicking what he felt the government expected from a successful social enterprise in the era of the Big Society:

And, if [the coalition government] want to say ‘This is it’, and I get a million quid out of it to deliver something, I don’t give a shit. They want innovation, they want something different, they want something new, they want something they can put their own label on. … What we’re trying to do is work on the tactic, let’s put that lovely apple that’s shining up there, saying, ‘And let them come to us’. (January 2011)

When asked whether he had used these mimicry tactics before, Liam laughed and said,

We did it the first time we got this [with New Labour in 2008/09]. We said, ‘We’ve got an idea, you need to bring some money. You go off, do a deal, get the money’ … I think, some of it, you’ve just got to be a bit … because it’s bullshit … Confident bullshit, and we’ve got, you know, let’s get it straight, TEAK punches way above its weight in presence and stuff, but you need to do it. (January 2011)

The tactics seemed to pay off—Teak was awarded a contract for over a million pounds to run a revised version of the government program later in 2011. This constituted over a quarter of their annual turnover. This was particularly important as Teak’s revenue from their other businesses was steadily declining. The money from the government program was being used to pay staff in the other businesses and protect their jobs. Despite all the ‘confident bullshit’, Teak was an organization dependent on government contracts to ensure survival. When Liam was asked about his commitment to social enterprise, he laughed and responded,

What the masturbating in public? … I think it’s just a badge … I don’t think it’s real in a lot of instances … And I think the bit that gets me is people aren’t telling the truth, they’re telling the flowery bit … And I think people believe their own story whereas I don’t. (November 2012)

Concluding discussion

The starting point of this inquiry was that social enterprise had become a crucial strategy employed by government for bringing the English third sector more in line with the rationality of the market. While social enterprise policies and programs chiefly call on practitioners to think and act more like entrepreneurs, this raises questions as to whether, and to what extent, practitioners, respectively, identify or disidentify with the normative demands of government. Despite early resistance to identifying with the concept (Parkinson and Howorth, 2008) by 2009, almost half of formally constituted third sector organizations claimed to closely fit the government’s social enterprise definition despite many of these organizations not even engaging in trading (Teasdale et al., 2013)—which is arguably the defining feature of social enterprise in prevailing policies. Thus, practitioners’ apparent consent with ‘social enterprise’ might not be acts of genuine or authentic identification.

Drawing on de Certeau helps qualify this apparent ‘shift’ of the third sector toward a more pro-enterprise attitude by offering a fresh look at how practitioners creatively ‘make do’ with the normative demands of social enterprise. On the most elementary level, a Certeauian perspective implies that practitioners are not bona fide social entrepreneurs but cunning actors who dramaturgically enact the subject position of the social entrepreneur. Their identification with social enterprise, as the case of Liam testifies, should not be seen as signs of truthfulness or ‘seriousness’ but as ‘willing activations of pretense’ (Saler, 2012: 28). The success of such pretense hinges on conveying the impression that one really believes in social enterprise. Tactical mimicry thus demands the capacity to see resemblances as well as the expressive capacity of imitation (Benjamin, 1977). Demonstrating the difficulty of distinguishing resistance from consent (Couzens Hoy, 2004), tactical mimicry involves theater-like acts whereby individuals conform to government stipulations of social enterprise in order to exploit them. Liam’s overt consent with social enterprise is opportunistic in that he acts ‘as if’ he were a social entrepreneur in order to gain access to valuable resources. This shows that practitioners conform to strategic designations of social enterprise ‘only in order to evade them’ (de Certeau, 1984: xiv). De Certeau, whose work on tactics calls attention to the clever tricks people use to divert energy, time, and resources away from ‘how things should be done’, helps us make sense of why Liam and other practitioners in our study were acting as social entrepreneurs while privately disagreeing with the concept. Tactical mimicry forms an instrument of the ‘weak’ (Scott, 1985) which allows the exploitation of (economic) opportunities inherent in government social enterprise policies and programs, while camouflaging the instrumentality at the heart of the dramaturgical ‘as if’.

While the broader implications of the conceptualization of tactical mimicry for our understanding of the complex interplay between the discourse of ‘social enterprise’, governmental power, and resistance are numerous, we consider the following three most noteworthy.

Qualifying the power of social enterprise

Central to the concept of tactical mimicry is that the ‘socially constitutive power’ (Trowler, 2001) of strategic stipulations of social enterprise is more limited than would initially appear as people might not believe in its normative premises. How third sector practitioners act and speak does not necessarily reflect their beliefs or convictions. This might foster the conclusion that government-led social enterprise initiatives are a congenially failing operation. However, such reasoning could be misleading for it ignores that tactical mimicry constantly re-enacts social enterprise, despite practitioners not agreeing with what it ideologically stands for. This prompts us to question why such voluntary servitude is happening. One possible explanation would be that government reproduces its rationality not through ideological consent but by relying through blunt ‘economic coercion’. By implication, although social enterprise might not affect what practitioners believe, the resources offered by government might nevertheless compel them to submit to the official doctrine (Mason, 2012), while in turn rendering the third sector governable terrain (Carmel and Harlock, 2008).

Analyzed through the perspective of ‘tactical mimicry’, we reach a different conclusion. Although Liam referred to himself as a cynic, practitioners involved in tactical mimicry are not cynics (in Sloterdijk’s (1983) sense of the term) who bend to official strategies having lost faith that resistance is possible. To the contrary, tactical mimicry implies that practitioners are still hopeful of a better world as they remain able to articulate what they dislike about social enterprises programs and policies, while engaging in practices geared toward emancipatory ends (Couzens Hoy, 2004). Their subordination to an economic rationality is a consequence of their ability to cunningly exploit whatever opportunities government-led social enterprise policies and programs offer them. Although tactical mimicry entails that practitioners are influenced by monetary considerations, government money does not necessarily possess coercive power because practitioners possess considerable agency to ‘manipulate events in order to turn them into opportunities’ (de Certeau, 1994: 480). The perpetuation of social enterprise on the level of practice is thus less the result of governmental manipulation of economic resources than of practitioners’ tactical opportunism through which they appropriate public money (as well as status).

Our conversations with other practitioners suggest we cannot claim originality for these observations as ‘playing the game’ through tactical mimicry is an inherent part of the everyday reality of many practitioners working in the English third sector. As Trexler (2008) remarks, ‘social enterprise reflects the recurring tendency of the charitable community to engage in strategic symbiotic mimesis, adapting by adopting what it believes to be the traits desired by potential supporters’ (pp. 66–67). What is needed, though, are inquiries, premised on a tactical perspective, which explore the complex interplay of the discursive and non-discursive (e.g. financial) aspects of social enterprise policies and programs, and how practitioners parasitically engage with these strategies in ways largely unforeseen by government. Purporting that the discursive dimension of social enterprise is ‘too important to leave out of the equation, but not so important that it can bear the burden of explanation on its own’ (Thompson and Harley, 2012: 1378), it appears necessary to treat government discourse of social enterprise as enforced by the distribution of material flows. Only then will it become possible to reach a more elaborate understanding of how social enterprise programs and policies work strategically and how they lend themselves to alternative, tactical usages.

Tactical mimicry as productive resistance

Unlike the organizational literature on everyday, micro- or infrapolitical resistance whose level of analysis has mainly been the workplace, our study has explored resistance as enacted between civil society and governmental power (Spicer and Böhm, 2007). Nonetheless, tactical mimicry is able to speak to and thereby expand existing theorizing in the domain of organization studies. The argument we seek to advance is that tactical mimicry, simply by representing a non-antagonistic and informal form of resistance, is not automatically ineffective and, thus, of lower importance. Instead, we suggest rethinking the negative connotation of tactical mimicry by framing it as a particular form of what Courpasson et al. (2012) termed productive resistance.

To this end, let us first recall that recent media coverage in England has taken an interest in cases of ‘bogus social enterprises’ (Floyd, 2012), alleging that such fakes pretend to be interested in the social good while in actual fact just being ‘in for the money’ (Secret Social Entrepreneur, 2013). While these views tend to focus on individuals and organizations mimicking social enterprise for personal gain, our own conceptualization conceives of mimicry as a prosaic response to the strategic situation which, importantly, creates value in excess of that which accrues directly to Liam or Teak. That is, publicly affirming social enterprise policies and programs has allowed Teak to survive as an organization and hence to continue to provide employment to people who would have difficulties finding employment elsewhere.

Despite this positive connotation, tactical mimicry does not amount to epochal shifts within existing constellations of power. As de Certeau (1984) reminds us, tactics are defined by their inability to conquer strategies once and for all. Tactical mimicry resembles infrapolitical forms of resistance which are defined by their unobtrusiveness (Scott, 1990). These forms of resistance have increasingly fallen out of favor in organization studies due to their purported failure to challenge the status quo. As Contu (2008) famously argued, the criteria of resistance have been broadened to the point of encompassing all sorts of unobtrusive and hidden forms of ‘decaf’ behavior which do little to change extant power relations. However, we contend that tactical mimicry is amenable to a more affirmative reading for it does comprise an inherently productive potential.

Simply because tactical mimicry contains elements of informality and secretiveness does not mean that it cannot mutate into more collective and organized forms of resistance which confront power head-on in another time or space (Spicer and Böhm, 2007). Following Scott (2005), tactical mimicry can be regarded as ‘the stubborn bedrock upon which other forms of resistance may grow’ (p. 404). To be sure, the operation of governmental power requires resistance (Couzens Hoy, 2004). However, if power depends on resistance, this implies that resistance can make productive use of power, not so much by escaping or opposing it, but by giving it a new direction and meaning. What is critically at stake in tactical mimicry is how the mimicry dimension works to expand possibilities for collective action in an alternative time or space.

This brings into focus the productive dimension of tactical mimicry which takes place outside of the gaze of governmental power. Crucially, the recent debate on productive resistance has focused on forms of resistance that change extant power relations, for example, by voicing ‘claims and interests that are usually not taken into account’ (Courpasson et al., 2012: 801). Our conceptualization thus puts an opportunity in front of us to rethink the attribute productive in conjunction with deviational tactics which parasitically engaged with strategic situations without necessarily changing power relations. The work of Holloway (2010) is instructive here. Holloway’s general thesis is that social change is not necessarily the product of anti-capitalist revolutionaries or activists, but nested in the everyday lives of ordinary people who, by creating cracks in the smooth operation of the gatekeepers of capital, prefigure a world which is different from the one they currently live in. The ‘guileful ruse’ (de Certeau, 1984: 37) invoked by Liam’s dramaturgical and ‘calculated conformity’ (Scott, 2005) can be productive in that it creates transient spaces of potentiality and difference within the coordinates of the existing order, if outside the direct visibility of power. Thus, whether resistance can be deemed productive depends less on whether existing power relations are opposed, but on how the opportunities being created through ‘clever tricks’ (de Certeau, 1984: xix) are eventually captured and used.

As the case of Teak shows, the resources gained from acting ‘as if’ can be channeled into the advancement of the organization’s ‘true’ social objectives. This testifies to the relational and productive dimension of tactical mimicry. Mimicry per se is not ipso facto a productive or unproductive form of resistance. Such normative judgment presupposes shedding light on the broader conditions of possibility engendered by mimicry. Being able to distinguish productive from less productive forms of mimicry requires establishing in situ how practitioners use the advantages they produce: for example, to pursue their own advantages, to create a temporary respite from the influence of power, or to create space to advance collective ends. While there are some inquiries dealing with the dramaturgical aspects of identification, identity work, and resistance (notably Stormer and Devine, 2008), there is a paucity of research probing the moral line separating egoistically inclined and more politically and ethically motivated forms of mimicry. Although we do not denigrate the value of the former kind of mimicry, which often happens ‘out of prudence, fear, and the desire to curry favor’ (Scott, 1990: 2), it is important not to conflate it with tactical mimicry. There is hence a need for prospective research to develop a deeper understanding of tactical forms of mimicry where individuals or groups act ‘as if’ they were in line with strategic expectations in order to ultimately contribute to the common good.

The theoretical and methodological role of space and time

Our conceptualization reminds us that to grasp the dramaturgical aspect of resistance requires remaining ‘critically analytic of the link between appearances and what is really happening’ (Anderson, 2005: 588). This makes it clear that time is an important factor in the epistemological process. The insights reported in this article would not have been possible through a synchronic research design based on one-off interviews. Only over time were we able to comprehend that participants’ initial consent with social enterprise often formed a theatrical performance in line with how they might act vis-à-vis government authorities. Delving beyond practitioners’ dramaturgical consent became possible only after trust was developed.

Equally significant, if more unexpected, was the realization that the productive role of mimicry could not have been detected without attending to its spatial whereabouts. Concurring with Thanem (2012) that space forms a neglected aspect in conceptualizations of resistance, we believe that research on resistance needs to develop a better sensitivity for how ostensible conformity with power in a particular space might be a tactical maneuver designed to create space for alternative modes of (co)existence elsewhere, in other spaces. Spatializing resistance thus permits us to see that movement between, and the creation of (alternative), spaces is a crucial factor in how actors enact realities that cunningly deviate from the ‘dream of the strategist’. In the case of Teak, Liam cunningly submitted to strategic stipulations of social enterprise in one space (i.e. vis-à-vis government representatives) in order to create liberties for realizing his true convictions (providing employment for disadvantaged individuals) elsewhere and beneath the immediate influence of power. These liberties reflect that there are often loopholes for creating other spaces or what Foucault (1986) termed heterotopias in which possibilities for collective action can be increased. Such a spatial perspective helps us further stress the positive connotation of mimicry by showing how resistance works to produce favorable effects. In deviating from the mandate given to them by government, resisters such as Liam are not the sorts of social entrepreneur government wanted them to be. However, they might still be an entrepreneur in the sense described by Hjorth (2005): ‘It is the entre and prendre of entrepreneurship. Entre for creating space, spacing, and stepping into the in-between, and prendre for the grasping of opportunities’ (p. 395; emphasis in original). Placing more emphasis on the importance of space in tactical mimicry specifically, and resistance more generally, requires methodological procedures that are able to capture the possibility that compliance in one space might be a precondition for more radical action in another. While we were only alerted to the spatial dimension of tactical mimicry when practitioners started to openly admit that there was another side (or space) to what they had initially told us, future research should adopt methodological procedures that give explicit emphasis to the spatiality of reality. It is in this connection that mobile methods (Urry, 2007) appear most helpful. Mobile methods suggest that researchers need to move to become part of the powerful performativity of their research subject, while applying a range of interviewing, observing, and recording technologies ‘on the move’ (Büscher et al., 2010).

A final issue concerns the extent to which tactical mimicry is indicative of how social organizations currently operate. Judging from informal conversations with English third sector practitioners and researchers, there are reasons to believe that tactical mimicry forms the courant normal of many organizations working in the social realm. However, since offering a conclusive answer is beyond the limits of this article, it will be the task of future research to clarify the precise role and prevalence of mimicry, feigned performances, and calculated consent in the context of organizations operating in the social sphere. The focal purpose of prospective research should not be to dismantle these organizations as mere impostures, but to develop a subtly nuanced sensibility for the inherently dramaturgical aspect of social organizing and to establish understanding that such dramaturgical acts are often a sine qua non for engendering social value under conditions where powerful actors control access to important resources.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the reviewers at Organization as well as Robyn Thomas for their valuable comments. We are also grateful to participants of various conferences who have commented on previous iterations of this paper, and thus helped us to develop our argument. Our special ‘thank you’ goes to Nina Teasdale for her assistance in editing the manuscript.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This paper derives in part from research carried out at Birmingham University as part of the Third Sector Research Centre. The support of the Economic and Social Research Council, the Office for Civil Society, and the Barrow Cadbury UK Trust is gratefully acknowledged.

Notes

Author biographies

Pascal Dey is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Business Ethics, University of St. Gallen. His research is informed by poststructuralist philosophy and critical sociology, and covers alternative forms of organizing, the agonistic relation between power and resistance, and the co-implication of ethics and politics (hence ethico-politics) in and of organizations.

Simon Teasdale is a Professor of Public Policy and Organisations at Glasgow Caledonian University, and associate editor of Social Enterprise Journal. His research interests span social and public policies pertaining to the third sector, democratic theory, the marketization of the third sector, and associated tensions between social and economic objectives faced by third sector organizations.

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