The Search for Social Entrepreneurship

5. Selecting Cases

144 The field of social entrepreneurship has spent much of the past decade telling success stories designed to celebrate, inspire, and teach. Few can read the stories without wondering how they might change the world too, nor can they miss the hopeful lessons learned: harvest exceptional ideas, embrace surprise, adapt and learn, recruit the right people, and above all persevere. David Bornstein’s How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas is a best-selling example of the genre. “The purpose of this book is not to exalt a few men or women,” he began, “but to call attention to the role of a particular type of actor who propels social change.”1 Bornstein’s website is even more direct in its social value proposition: How to Change the World tells the stories of people who have both changed their lives and found ways to change the world. It tell stories of people who have discovered how to use their talents and energy to advance deeply meaningful changes—defiant people who refuse to accept the status quo, who simply cannot sit still in the face of injustice, suffering or wastefulness. The book shows (and analyzes) how innovators advance new models to solve social and economic problems—how they make headway against the odds. CHAPTER FIVE SELECTING CASES 1. Bornstein (2004, p. 1). 05 5211-0 ch5 7/13/08 6:54 PM Page 144 145 SELECTING CASES Full of hope and energy, pragmatic solutions and compelling characters , this book will be practical and inspiring reading for individuals who seek to understand the fast growing field of “social entrepreneurship” and discover opportunities to enrich their work and their lives.2 There is nothing wrong with celebrating, inspiring, and teaching social entrepreneurs. The world needs all the social change it can get. If even one potential entrepreneur is moved toward change, the stories may be well worth the investment, especially if that one entrepreneur happens to be another Nobel Peace Prize winner. However, there is something wrong with drawing lessons from relatively small, if inspiring, samples of successes without matched samples of near successes and outright failures . Lacking a comparison group against which to compare success, would-be entrepreneurs have to scour each success story for common lessons that might help them succeed. Some will be led to use all six practices of Leslie Crutchfield and Heather Grant’s Forces for Good, for example, while others will wonder which of the best practices actually matter in their ecosystem. Whereas the literature on business entrepreneurship is littered with research on near misses and outright disasters, the social entrepreneurship literature is mostly driven by research on heroic achievement. MAKING LISTS This is not to argue that the business literature is impeccably rigorous. For every best-selling book such as Good to Great, which is based on matched groups of great and merely good businesses, there are dozens of books built solely on success stories. Who wants to read a book about failure? But the weakness in using single samples of successes or even failures remains nonetheless. Consider the frustrations in actually using the list of recommendations described in Tom Peters and Robert Waterman’s 1983 best seller, In Search of Excellence. According to my New York University colleague George Downs and his co-author Patrick Larkey, the absence of a comparison group makes the list virtually unusable: 2. (http://howtochangetheworld.org/). 05 5211-0 ch5 7/13/08 6:54 PM Page 145 Since they do not make strong use of comparison groups, (i.e., they fail to include bad as well as good companies) in identifying the factors contributing to success, it is not clear from their study if there are unsuccessful companies with all or some of the eight “attributes.” They do not describe their interview procedures very satisfactorily, raising the possibility that they elicited just the results for which they were looking. They emphasize intangible, unmeasurable factors; it is hard to imagine how one would go about devising measurable variables for the eight attributes. . . . Finally, the support the authors offer for their findings is largely anecdotal, an approach that increases the psychological impact of the findings on popular audiences but leaves the weight of evidence in scientific terms ambiguous.3 Yet, as the two authors acknowledge, “one cannot read the book without believing that the ‘eight basics’ contain a lot of wisdom about how...