Category — adventures in detroit

I sometimes wonder whether academic writing has any purpose other than to 1) exclude and create a class of “experts” that have legitimacy and power (check out this great TED talk on when experts are warranted and when they’re dangerous) and 2) to obscure fuzzy thinking in jargon so that it can’t be exposed as such.

I’ve been reading William Zinsser’s classic On Writing Well and trying to apply it to my own writing (it’s a process…. :/)  I find that I’m sometimes able to translate ideas I come across in academia and bring them to everyday conversations, but more often than I’d like (and especially when I’m still working out an idea, or still unclear) I slip into using big words to say not much of anything.

Why do I (why do we as scholars) write the way I (we) do? How might changing the way I (we) write change the way I (we) think?

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FoodLab Detroit is a network of entrepreneurs supporting one another in developing businesses with a “triple-bottom-line” (social environmental and financial). FoodLab was founded at a small informal gathering of peers in January 2011; by August, the group had grown to nearly 30, adopted a charter, and created a steering committee. As of February 2011, we have 73 entrepreneurs on our online listserve and engage in a broadening portfolio of activities including regular meetings and networking events, business planning workshops, coordination of shared use kitchen space and other resources, and advocacy through speaking events and engagement with community partners. The organization participates in Detroit’s good food movement, a meta-movement comprised of diverse sub-movements united by the recognition that “today’s food and farming economy is ‘unsustainable’ – that it can’t go on in its current form much longer without courting a breakdown of some kind.” (Pollan, 2010). The organization is also a part of a movement to “reimagine” the city of Detroit. FoodLab members grapple with questions about GHGs and energy use, how to support local growers and connect people to their food, but also how to create more living-wage jobs, use vacant space, rebuild neighborhoods, connect an otherwise largely segregated city, and build a more participatory, responsive, and democratic community.

Our vision is to build a “network of thriving, diverse locally-owned food production, processing, and retail businesses that contribute to the well-being of our communities and are collectively committed to increasing healthy, green, fair, and accessible food options in Detroit area.” In service of this vision, we support nascent entrepreneurs in order to help them develop socially and environmentally conscious businesses that can be sustained over time. One of our primary strategies is helping to build relationships between entrepreneurs themselves and entrepreneurs and relevant external stakeholders and service providers. As FoodLab grows, how can research help us design more effective activities within this broad strategy?

This essay describes how Davidsson and Honig’s (2003) study of nascent entrepreneurs legitimizes FoodLab’s focus on relationship-building and offers suggestions on how network analysis (to which the authors allude) could provide even more nuanced and useful guidance. I begin with a summary of the authors’ findings on the effects of social capital on early-stage entrepreneurs; I go on to examine how their approach, despite its focus on the importance of relationships and its informal invocation of networks, differs from network analysis; I conclude with examples of how FoodLab could use network analysis to inform what structures of relationships are most beneficial to the development of early-stage social entrepreneurs, and how different activities might foster particular types of structure.

Social capital as a predictor of entrepreneurial “success”

How do different sorts of non-financial capital affect entrepreneurial success? Specifically, Davidsson and Honig (2003) measure the extent to which an individual’s stock of human and social capital can predict three stages in the entrepreneurial process: 1) whether or not she engages in nascent activities; 2) the frequency of her “gestation” activities (e.g. writing a business plan); and 3) first sale or profitability of the business. We will focus primarily on their findings related to social capital.

Researchers collected data from 380 nascent entrepreneurs and 608 non-entrepreneur control participants via an initial phone interview, then followed up with entrepreneur-participants after 6, 12, and 18 months to gauge the life of the venture over time. The data supported the claim that individual social capital is strongly associated with reaching all three stages in the entrepreneurial process (see Figure 1). While the authors characterized certain measures as “strong” versus “weak” ties (e.g. family bonds versus business network bridges) and acknowledged the theoretical difference between the two, data did not support claims about the effect of one type of tie versus another on the entrepreneurial process. Overall though, social capital did appear to explain a greater percentage of entrepreneurial success human capital (including formal education and attendance at business classes), especially when it came to achieving a first sale or profitability. Specifically, the authors found that

• Having parents in business, being encouraged by friends or family, or having close friends or neighbors in business increased the likelihood that someone would become a nascent entrepreneur.
• Being a member of a business network, contact with an assistance agency, being a member of a startup team, being encouraged by family or friends, having close friends or neighbors in business, and being married increased the rate at which entrepreneurs engaged in gestation activities.
• Finally, only one variable reliably predicted whether or not an entrepreneur would achieve sales or profitability within the 18-month study: whether or not the entrepreneur participated in a business network.

The authors highlight that connection with an entrepreneurial assistance agency did not necessarily correlate with whether an entrepreneur made an initial sale or achieved profitability within 18 months. Based on this, they argue,

[Social] relations are more important than maintaining contact with assistance agencies, or even in taking general business classes. […] The facilitation and support of business networks and associations may provide the most consistent and effective support for emerging businesses. […] Furthering our understanding of these specific nascent networks and learning how best to facilitate them represents an important activity for future entrepreneurship research. (P. 324-325)

As a nascent network, FoodLab implicitly recognizes the value of social capital and relationship-building. If Daviddson and Honig’s (2003) findings help to justify our existence and general approach, can they also lend more specific insight into how we should design and structure our activities?

Social capital as an generalized individual attribute versus specific relationship

While this particular study suggests that various relationships, and business networks in particular, can play an important role in entrepreneurial emergence, it does not explain the process by which these networks have an effect. The business network, and the social capital it represents, is a black box. In order to understand how a business network affects an entrepreneur (and not just that it does somehow) we would need first to understand the specific kinds of social capital or ties that are created in the context of a business network, and also to re-imagine social capital as a structure of relationships rather than an endogenous characteristic of an entrepreneur (e.g. membership versus non-membership).

Neal (forthcoming) points out that describing a network as such without engaging in network analysis tells us “very little about what networks are or how they work, frequently because they do not identify exactly who or what is connected or in what ways” (p. 5). In the case of Daviddson and Honig (2003) we see that entrepreneurs who belong to a business network are more likely to achieve a sale or profitability. The authors assume that this is because participation in a business network affords entrepreneurs with more bridging (rather than bonding) capital which Granovetter (1973) and others have suggested is important for the diffusion of new ideas and innovation. This assumption may be true, but there also may be instances in which networks (or dense clusters within networks) provide entrepreneurs with the bonding or “strong” ties that might foster exchange of resources or reinforce norms of behavior (e.g. calculated risk-taking or opportunism) that increase the likelihood of success. Rather than make a priori assumptions, we could define and measure specific ties within a network in order to understand more clearly how the nature and structure of relationships surrounding an entrepreneur contribute to success. Some specific examples of the sorts of ties that might develop within a business network include advice-giving, information or opportunity sharing, business partnership or collaboration, emotional support, inspiration, motivation, or emulation.

This approach would also shift focus from the individual to relationships as the unit of interest, and imagine social capital as a structural pattern of relationships (many or few, dense or thinly spread, reciprocal or not?) rather than an individual characteristic (does someone have it, or not?) Traditional approaches that emphasize personal attributes have a number of drawbacks. For one, they “treat each social system member as an astructural independent unit” which “assume(s) random linkages,” whereas in reality, relationships are not random (Wellman & Berkowitz, 1988, p. 31). Entrepreneurs may exhibit homophilic tendencies along characteristics like race, gender, and  age, as well as industry and level of experience. An emphasis on categorical attributes also creates false groups (for example, people who belong to a business network versus those that don’t) and ties these categories to certain outcomes.

These groupings do not get at the root of the matter. FoodLab entrepreneurs will not succeed because they belong to FoodLab, but because of the specific patterns of relationships they might build as a result of membership. The categorical approach may be expedient, but has less explanatory power and may lead to false conclusions. By actually measuring an entrepreneurial network, we can understand how certain types of social capital as evidenced in particular structures of relationship might facilitate diffusion of information versus actual adoption of new practices (Neal et al., 2011). By comparing more than one network, comparing the structure of an informal social network with an intentional business network, or comparing the effect of different activities in the same network over time, we might understand what types of programs and activities foster what type of social capital to what ends.

Future research: social capital and the individual, social capital and the group

In order to inform FoodLab’s strategic direction, we need to know more about:

1. How different network structures (aka types of social capital) lead to different outcomes. [IND VAR: network structure, DEP VAR: entrepreneurial outcomes]
2. How different activities lead to different network structures (aka types of social capital) [IND VAR: activities, DEP VAR: network structure)

In part one, we might ask questions like, do we prefer a more densely clustered or more loose network? Do reciprocal relationships matter? What effect do bridging versus bonding ties have on outcomes? In part two, we might ask things like: how does operation of a listserve versus in-person meetings affect the structure of relationships that form within FoodLab? How does intentional recruiting of diverse participants affect our network structure?

Borgatti (1998) gives some suggestions on using network measures to describe an individual’s social capital. He suggests looking at network size, density, heterogeneity, compositional quality, effective size, constraint, closeness, betweenness, and eigenvector values. In this case, we would measure the ego-networks of various entrepreneurs and see how they correlate to various entrepreneurial outcomes. However, Borgatti (1998), in line with Coleman (1988) recognizes that social capital doesn’t only belong to an individual, but can be construed as a public good external to the individual and contained within the broader group.

[My thinking on the exact measures I might look at is still in the very very baby stages... as my prof Zach Neal pointed out, there's no point throwing all these measures around if they aren't getting at something we care about (in his words, they need theoretical grounding.. in my words, they need a grounding in measuring some value we care about)]

Entrepreneurism is seen as a uniquely individual pursuit. Why might we be interested in measuring the overall social capital within a group of entrepreneurs? For one, Coleman (1988) argues that even when social capital doesn’t accrue immediate or apparent benefits to the individual, it can benefit a community as a whole by increasing the stock of overall obligation, expectation, and trust, thus facilitating future interactions. Measuring the effect of relationships on an individual entrepreneur’s success would not account for this.

Also, in the case of FoodLab, we are interested not only in supporting the individual success of businesses in creating social, environmental and financial value, but also in fostering a set of shared norms (e.g. a commitment to social and environmental values). We recognize the advantage of fostering closure within the group to facilitate trust, but also in bridging between otherwise disparate clusters of entrepreneurs (and entrepreneurial allies) to encourage innovation and facilitate more effective collective action. Students of the food movement in the US have commented on this bridging capacity as one of the major strengths of the movement (Hassanein, 2003; Starr, 2010). This shift from considering individual outcomes to outcomes for communities or groups marks a significant difference between traditional entrepreneurship and social enterprise, or enterprise in the service of social change (Thekaekara & Thekaekara, 2006). Systematically measuring FoodLab’s network and linking structural methods to outcomes for individual entrepreneur and for the broader community will be useful in articulating and demonstrating our value to members and supporters, as well as in guiding the mix and design of programs and activities.

Works Cited

Borgatti, S.P., C. Jones, and M.G. Everett. 1998. “Network measures of social capital.” Connections 21(2):27–36.

Coleman, J.S. 1988. “Social capital in the creation of human capital.” American journal of sociology 95–120.

Davidsson, Per, and Benson Honig. 2003. “The role of social and human capital among nascent entrepreneurs.” Journal of Business Venturing 18(3):301-331. Retrieved February 12, 2012.

Granovetter, M.S. 1973. “The strength of weak ties.” American journal of sociology 1360–1380.

Hassanein, N. 2003. “Practicing food democracy: a pragmatic politics of transformation.” Journal of Rural Studies 19(1):77–86.

Neal, J.W., Z.P. Neal, M.S. Atkins, D.B. Henry, and S.L. Frazier. 2011. “Channels of Change: Contrasting Network Mechanisms in the Use of Interventions.” American Journal of Community Psychology 1–10.

Starr, Amory. 2010. “Local Food: A Social Movement?” Cultural Studies, Critical Methodologies, 490.

Thekaekara, M.M., and S. Thekaekara. 2007. Social Justice and Social Entrepreneurship: Contradictory Or Complementary? Skoll Centre for Entrepreneurship, Saïd Business School.

Wellman, B., and S.D. Berkowitz. 1988. Social structures: A network approach. Cambridge Univ Pr.

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[1] Including a control sample allowed researchers to test how human and social capital affected whether or not an individual engaged in entrepreneurship at all. The longitudinal design sidestepped the problem of “success bias.” Rather than only measure sustained or successful activity, the data also captured “efforts that fail or are abandoned at early stages,” and shed light on the effect of education and relationships at various stages of the start-up process (p. 311). These two features of the research design set this analysis apart from other research on the emergence of new enterprise, which generally employ cross-sectional data on early-stage businesses.

Some quick thoughts this morning when I came upon an interesting graphic on strategies for on-farm resilience from a project in the area where I used to farm. I love the idea of resilience versus growth as a measure of sustainable development AND personal development.

The Farm Resilience project describes resilience as “a community’s ability to anticipate, adapt to, and successfully overcome what usually amounts to unanticipated, harmful events. Every community faces threats. These threats may come from nature, rather the natural environment, from economic forces within the community, or from external social policies and programs. The most challenging threats are often a combination of all of these. Resilience is the ability to provide the necessary physical, social, cultural, and economic structure for members to live, work, and thrive in the face of chronic and emerging threats.”

I’ve been interested lately in the way that positive action emerges from crisis, but if we remain in a crisis frame, I think we tend to limit our realm of action to building systems capable of adapting to that particular crisis rather than considering that we might also think about this in the reverse… how can we build a system that’s better positioned to take advantage of natural energy (whether you think of low-entropy natural capital, or life-force/Qi, or some other kind of energy that I don’t yet know about).

I don’t know much about music. I enjoy listening to it and often wish I knew more so I could create soundtracks to befit the situation at hand, but I never remember song or band names, rarely “just browse” new artists, and usually end up going back to the same 300 or so songs that tell a general story about my life.

Many of these are favorites not because they’re “good” but because they conjure memories: Ray Lynch from late nights falling asleep tangled with my little sis on leather seats in the back of our family car on the way home from some event, a Mariah Carey ballad from the fifth grade talent show, angry Alanis from junior high, the Sublime song we blasted in my Jeep as we drove down Beach Blvd in our bikinis… a song for all times in life.

But every-so-often I worry that my music collection is stagnating, that it can’t keep up to the vibrant, fluid, varied nature of life. In these cases, I have four or five go-to friends who I can count on to send me a mixtape and brighten up my auditory world.

Now my friend Pete’s helping to introduce me to his slice of the local music scene here in Detroit. He sent me a nice long list of bands to try, so I’m starting at the top and working my way down.

First up:

Illy Mack  http://www.myspace.com/illymack sort of neo-soul pop. the bassist plays the drums with his feet!

It’s so nice to be cooking again and to have a friend to cook for. Salmon cakes, steamed broccoli, and plain quick quinoa. Quick, easy, yummy.

Salmon cakes: one can wild pink salmon, one egg, little bit flour, little bit parsley, one stalk celery, leftover half onion, spring onion we were trying to finish, splash of sesame oil, sprinkle salt. Makes six.

I don’t know a ton about sustainable seafood, but I have it on good authority (clever fish scientist friends + monterey bay aquarium) that pink salmon’s an especially good choice. Not pricey either. 

A brief section from a long paper I wrote for a course I took in Field Research this semester in the Management and Organization department at the business school at UM. The class was wonderful, thanks to great group of classmates, and also in large part due to our really wonderful instructor Wayne Baker.

Each of us chose a field site for study and took detailed field notes over the course of the semester. Wayne read all our notes and gave us weekly feedback. It was so valuable to my development as an ethnographer to have someone else looking over my shoulder, especially someone who was completely “fresh” to my field.

I chose to focus on FoodLab Detroit (formerly the Metro Detroit Good Food Entrepreneurs) — the group of triple-bottom-line food entrepreneurs that I’ve been working with in Detroit. In a lot of ways, it become something of an auto-ethnography… so much so that I titled the second section “Origins of this Me-search Project.”

Table of contents is below for context, then just a very very short section. Interested to hear what folks think.

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The Good Food Movements: Peeking Inside the Lumpy Tent……….. 3

Origins of this “Me”-search Project……….. 5

Journey into Detroit’s Good Food Movement……….. 5

Research and Activism……….. 7

Background on FoodLab Detroit ……….. 9

History and Founding……….. 9

Network boundaries and characteristics……….. 14

FoodLab and Race……….. 15

FoodLab as a social network……….. 18

Networking a Network……….. 18

Mapping the FoodLab network……….. 20

Understanding the periphery……….. 20

Bridging two cliques……….. 22

What’s in a Tie?……….. 26

Information & Advice…………….. 26

Shared Resources…………….. 28

Emotional Support…………….. 30

Social Pressure…………….. 30

All networks not made equal……….. 31

FoodLab as a Social Movement Guild……….. 34

More than the sum of parts……….. 34

Social Movement Organization versus Social Movement Guild……….. 36

Framing within a social movement guild……….. 39

Frame disputes and network structure…………….. 41

A Dispute about Ethics…………….. 43

FoodLab as a movement broker……….. 48

From the parts, to the whole, to the whole in context……….. 48

FoodLab bridges a divided good food field……….. 49

FoodLab and Tertius Iungens…………….. 53

Further Questions……….. 55

Implications……….. 57

For FoodLab……….. 57

For entrepreneurship in Good Food Movements……….. 58

Social Movement Organization versus Social Movement Guild

FoodLab Detroit has some of the markings of an emerging social movement organization (SMO). Snow, Soule and Kriesi (2003) define a social movements as:

Collectivities acting with some degree of organization and continuity outside of institutional or organizational channels for the purpose of challenging or defending extant authority, whether it is institutionally or culturally based, in the group, organization, society, culture, or world order of which they are a part. (P. 7)

Social movement organizations are generally conceived as formal organizations that work to implement the goals of a movement (Caniglia and Carmin 2005). Emerging social movement groups (ESMG) are SMOs who are “in the process of becoming and defining themselves. They are works in progress” (Blee and Currier 2005: 129) Yet FoodLab differs from typical conceptions of social movement organizations (even those in the process of forming) because it does not exist to implement the goals of a particular movement, but rather to propagate the use of a skill or process (good food entrepreneurship – or social entrepreneurship with some food component) in service of multiple goals defined and chosen by individual entrepreneurs. This structure seems to make sense given the fragmented landscape of movements related to good food (see Figure 8 below).

Figure 8: Social Movements Related to Good Food (in Flora 2009)

The  relationship between social movements, social entrepreneurship, and social change is contested. Mair & Marti (2006) suggest that social movement literature may be a useful lens through which to examine the process of social entrepreneurship because “both social movements and social entrepreneurship are concerned with social transformation.” Yet as Starr (2010) and others have pointed out, social entrepreneurship  and social movements are ultimately different models of social change (Martin and Osberg 2007; Thekaekara and Thekaekara 2006).

Critiques of entrepreneurial approaches to transformation within good food movements abound. Food systems academics have noted that purely market-based or entrepreneurial approaches to food systems change may fail to address or may even exacerbate issues such as food security for the most vulnerable and racial and cultural injustice (Allen et. al. 2003). Critics of entrepreneurship as a food movement strategy also suggest that a reliance on market and consumer-driven approaches to change may encourage “individualized, depoliticized behavior” at the expense of attempts at structural change (Donald 2008). Starr (2010) responds to this argument with a catalogue of the strength of the social entrepreneurship approach:

Responding to a political landscape that seems to offer only dead ends, energetic social entrepreneurs are making things happen with resolute utopianism. They are creating space, enabling new experiences, innovating, and providing meaningful jobs for other people who want to work their values. Social entrepreneurship as an approach to social change is personalistic, isolated, and unaccountable, but also experimental, decentralized, agile, and multi-issue. And entrepreneurs know that cultural relevance is necessary to their success, a lesson many social movements refuse to learn. (P. 486)

Notably, FoodLab members have described the network as a way to hold one another accountable to individual missions and shared values through public standards and audits, social pressure, and a shared value of “transparency.”

Rather than a social movement organization, FoodLab could be considered an emerging social movement guild (SMG). The term “guild” implies an association of craftsman organized around a common skill or craft. Guilds incorporate systems of apprenticeships to build skills and competence among members, they often enforce mutually agreed-upon standards of accountability, they may share resources and share a collective identity, yet guild members themselves are independent and may apply have different motivations and ways of applying their shared trade. An SMG, as opposed to a traditional guild, prepares members to use their craft in the service of social change rather than maintaining the status quo: specifically “challenging or defending extant authority, whether it is institutionally or culturally based, in the group, organization, society, culture, or world order of which they are a part” (Snow, Soule, Kriesi 2003: 7).

Some quick thoughts jotted down this afternoon

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Social movements can be difficult to observe and describe because they tend to be “fuzzy and fluid phenomena often without clear boundaries” (Van De Donk et. al. 2004). Different approaches to describing social movements may focus on the way movements mobilize resources, formal social movement organizations (SMOs), the interaction of movements with external agents, or the way that movement actors construct their identities.

Regardless of the specific approach, movements can be said to be organized to some degree and can perhaps be understood best as networks or networks of networks (Diani, 2003). One of the ways of understanding these networks is through the movement’s online identity, which is becoming an increasingly important part of new social movements (Van De Donk et. al. 2004). Online identity can be understood by analyzing a variety of online media created by popular media, SMOs themselves, or individual movement actors, including websites, blog posts and articles, email archives, and online listservs.

The Good Food Movement is no exception to the slippery nature of new social movements. Despite attempts by practitioners and academics to characterize, “pin-down,” and evaluate the success of the movement with comprehensive goals and indicators (see, for example the Vivid Picture Project, Soule 2008),  the movement remains a moving target; some argue that coming to a consensus on movement goals is neither a necessary nor particularly useful exercise (Hamm 2009). As Starr (2010) writes:

Movement critics (academic and activist) tend to write like restaurant reviewers, assessing the worth of a movement’s “product” (always expected already to be running at peak performance). I have recently come to see social movements are long, stuttering conversations in which conversants do not begin with the same mother tongue but over time develop both linguistic and cultural literacy. I see social movement culture functioning as a process of recognition, query, and expansion, repetitious, slow, but growing bigger in each conversation.

Online listservs offer one glimpse into this “stuttering conversation.” Despite their obvious limitations (e.g. various “digital divides” means that low-income and rural contingents might be less represented in online conversations), listservs offer one view into the way the good food movement constructs its identity through movement “frames.”

The COMFOOD listserv was founded in 1997 by Hugh Joseph, a significant leader in the good food movement. Joseph cofounded the Community Food Security Coalition (CFSC), the New England Sustainable Ag Working Group (NESAWG), Boston Food and Fitness Initiative, and the New Entry Sustainable Farming Project at Tufts. Joseph was also instrumental in starting the Community Food Projects and Farmers Market Promotion Program, two USDA grant programs.

According to Joseph, “When Comfood started in 1997, it was envisioned as a straightforward national networking vehicle on community food security topics. Now it’s become a repository for most food-related issues” (Qtd in Starkman 2008).

As of November 6, 2011, the listserv had 5333 members, which may make it the largest online network of food activists and food movement organizations. In contrast, two of the most popular movement-related listservs after COMFOOD are ASFS (created in 2001 by the Association for the Study of Food and Society) with 1829 members and SANE-T (created in 1991 as a discussion group about sustainable agriculture) with 822 members.

Generally, the list is made up of practitioners, activists, academics, students, policy-makers and other individuals. A description of the listserv on the Community Food Security Coalition website explains that “Postings by any subscriber may include, but are not limited to:

• Broad or specific discussions on the issues and strategies relating to community food security; similarly, articles of general interest;
• Requests for information, contacts, or assistance on topics related to CFS research or programs;
• Requests for information about organizations working in specific areas (for example, which groups in a region are doing entrepreneurial gardening programs);
• Requests for technical assistance or related help in designing or implementing projects;
• Descriptions of new activities your organization is initiating;
• Announcements of CFS-related activities – workshops, training sessions, conferences;
• Job notices or internship opportunities”

The listserv is open for anyone to join and to post; it is unmoderated (anyone can post to the list and posts are not screened), and governed by a peer-policing system along a set guidelines.

I was particularly interested in using COMFOOD to begin to understand the role of entrepreneurship within the movement. I’m aware that there are limitations to using the COMFOOD list as a proxy for the “good food movement” as a whole, but I see this as a place to start.

The chart below shows the number of total posts and the number of posts that include the word “entrepreneur” on the COMFOOD listserve from January 2008 to June 2011. I tabulated posts at six month intervals from the COMFOOD archives. Over this time period, there were an average of 374 posts each month and 12.5 posts (or 3.3%) of posts included the word “entrepreneurship.” Overall posting volume has increased over the 42 month period, and the use of the word “entrepreneur” has followed this general upward trend.

The next step in analysis will be to read and code instances of the use of the term “entrepreneur” and “entrepreneurship” in a randomly selected sample of 50 emails over a 12-month period from Nov 1, 2011 to Oct 31, 2011.

A draft of a paper thinking through how we might apply some of the growing body of lit on social entrepreneurship to the Good Food Movement. I wrote this back in April and my thinking’s evolved quite a bit since then. I’m not sure “social entrepreneurship” is a useful category given what I’m actually trying to get at: the role of entrepreneurship (of all types) in the good food movement (and potentially in other movements).

Rather, I’m starting to rephrase  to ask: What role does entrepreneurship (whether defined as a series of processes — e.g. innovation, a stage in business development — e.g. startup, particular characteristics, etc.) have to play in food systems change? How is it conceived in the good food movement by entrepreneurs themselves? How and when is entrepreneurship discourse invoked? What are its “real” and perceived opportunities & limitations?  What does this say about the movement itself?

Check out the MindMap for some of my questions from back in September.

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Social Entrepreneurship in the Sustainable Food Movement

“The food movement […] may be able to create just the sort of political and social transformation that environmentalists have failed to achieve in recent years. That would mean not only changing the way Americans eat and the way they farm — away from industrialized, cheap calories and toward more organic, small-scale production, with plenty of fruits and vegetables — but also altering the way we work and relate to one another. To its most ardent adherents, the food movement isn’t just about reform — it’s about revolution.” (Walsh, 2011).

1. The Rise of Entrepreneurship as a tactic in the Sustainable Food Movement

The sustainable food movement has been characterized in the popular media as a “big, lumpy tent” that coalesces around “the recognition that today’s food and farming economy is ‘unsustainable’ – that it can’t go on in its current form much longer without courting a breakdown of some kind, whether environmental, economic, or both” (Pollan, 2010). Policies and organizations that make up the movement have increasingly promoted socially and environmentally-motivated entrepreneurship as a strategy for change.

The 2008 Farm Bill created the Healthy Urban Food Enterprise Development Center to support food enterprises that aim to increase access to healthy, affordable, locally sourced foods to underserved communities (CSREES 2009). The USDA’s Community Food Projects Program which aims to “meet the food needs of low-income individuals [and] increase the self-reliance of communities in providing for the food needs of communities,” gives preference to proposals that “support the development of entrepreneurial projects” (NIFA 2010). A study that interviewed 37 urban and rural alternative food initiatives in California found that entrepreneurial programs dominated their activities (Allen, FitzSimmons, Goodman & Warner 2003). In the past five to ten years, a growing number of consultants have emerged who specifically support sustainable food and agriculture business development[1]. At the same time, academics like Hamm and Baron (1999) have described small-scale microenterprises as “prerequisites for sustainable food systems” (p. 57). Donald & Blay-Palmer (2006) come to a similar conclusion in their analysis of a 5-year study on food enterprises in Toronto. Based on extensive content analysis and key informant interviews, they find evidence that alternative food capitalism in Toronto offers an opportunity for change towards a more “socially inclusive and sustainable urban development model” (Donald & Blay-Palmer 2006, p.1902).

Despite growing momentum on the ground, and a general golden glow around entrepreneurship and entrepreneurs, researchers have yet to critically examine entrepreneurship in the sustainable food systems movement. Herein lies an untapped opportunity to develop more effective theories on how and to what extent and in what forms entrepreneurship is a useful strategy to move us toward a more healthy, more sustainable food system. As Donald & Blay-Palmer point out,

The strength of the firm-centred approach is in its ability to understand better the complex multidimensional and multi-scalar interdependencies between, on the one hand, the internal innovative dynamics of firms and, on the other hand, the broader institutional – as well as social, environmental and cultural – setting within which we all operate. (Donald 2008)

Specifically, emerging theory about social entrepreneurship may provide a framework for developing useful hypotheses about the process by which individuals and organizations can produce social, environmental, cultural and economic transformation within the context of the goals of the sustainable food movement. As Peredo & McLean point out, if social entrepreneurship is a “promising instrument,” academic inquiry into its processes can produce knowledge for policy-makers and practitioners to inform effective legislative support, social policy, and best practices in development and management (2006, p. 57).

For the rest of the paper, click here to download the PDF.

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[1] Some examples of consulting firms include: http://www.cornerstone-ventures.com/, http://ediblesadvocatealliance.org, http://financeforfood.com/, http://www. karpresources.com, http://livecultureco.com/, http://www.newventadvisors.com; http://www.newseedadvisors.com/; http://nuttyfig.com/food-companies/; http://sustainablework.com/.

I’m sitting in Chapelure, an adorable coffee and Asian-inspired pastry shop in East Lansing not far from MSU’s campus. It’s one of the places I often camp out on Tuesdays to do work. The coffee’s good, the staff is friendly, the music is not too distracting, the background chatter is soothing since it’s usually in Korean or Chinese, and the green tea madeleines, quiche, and egg sandwiches are scrumptious.  It’s always too hot in here, and I have a sort of irrational dislike of their grey cafe hard-cornered tables,  but I’m willing to endure those very minor points for the overall effect.

Today though, I was sitting next to a pretty blond girl dressed in professional clothes, hair tied back in a sleek ponytail. She looked like an upperclassman — too fresh-faced to be an overworked grad student, but with a certain measure of confidence. After a bit, her beau came in and sat down at the table with her. They started talking about the places where she was planning to apply for jobs.

After talking through a few other options, Beau suggested that she look into the Detroit Athletic Club — he’d heard they were hiring for a food and beverage service manager and said it was one of the top-rated clubs in the States. Her response: “Oh really, interesting… But I hate Detroit.”

His response to this: “Well you don’t have to live there. You could live outside the city.”

I know this is how many people think. I know many many people downtown and live in the suburbs — it’s impossible to ignore the very clear traffic patterns — folks coming in to the city in the morning and rushing out in the evenings – but I guess I tend to hang out with so many Detroit-die-hards and am constantly contacted by folks who are dreaming about moving into the city that I forget what this attitude looks and sounds like — the texture and color and reality of people like this…

I wanted to keep my mouth shut. I was busy and I didn’t really want to get into it with this girl who I didn’t know from Methusalah, and I wasn’t sure if I even cared to engage with someone who would say something so … silly? careless? uninformed? But I couldn’t keep quiet. I told her what I loved about living in Detroit. I told her how it was hard sometimes, but that it was a place unlike anywhere else, where creative people are engaged and participating in building the kind of city they want to see, where young adults can step up and make an impact in a way they can’t necessarily in other places…

She was open. She listened. I don’t know what she took away from the very very short interaction, but I know it made me wonder if there are parts of my life where I’m similarly blinded by perception and make statements or decisions based on flawed and incomplete assumptions. Is it possible to avoid this? Perhaps it’s all a matter of degree.

In response to a post by an inspiring friend:

I’ve been thinking about this a whole lot lately in the context of my own work and life here in Detroit. I moved here in part for a sense of *community* and connectedness and I find that many of the people close to me are drawn & remain in the city for that reason — and yet that interdependence, that rich social web, that “deep participation” is so complicated, and often a source of discomfort.

I wonder how to motivate and manage participation, collaboration, decision-making in “flatter” systems and networks…. how greater interdependence & “richness and diversity of one’s experiences and the strength of one’s social bonds,” while magical on the surface, can be exhausting in practice… the constant give/take/brokering of our values/needs/actions within our networks is a lot in itself. Given our technology as a species, we are no longer operating at the scale of tribes, so we’re negotiating an ever increasing number of connections at varying scales… not to mention the fact that different people are able/willing to “enroll” to different degrees and those who have stronger ties end up being asked to give more than they can sustain as individuals or businesses or organizations (e.g. studies on entrepreneurs with stronger family ties being alternately a blessing and a burden on the business)…

So I guess I just wonder how we deal with this complexity?

When we move out of more bureaucratic, hierarchical command-based approaches to leadership to more participatory, emancipatory, democratic, distributed/chaordic models … and when we move from linear, cumulative models of progress or development to a systems approach focusing on sustainability and resiliency, what are the new kinds of tools (technological, cognitive, emotional, social, political) that we need to manage these changes?

Network modeling? Systems analysis? Ethnography? Facilitative leadership skills?

Spirituality and religion!?

Amory Starr’s “17-point guide to graduate school” or “phds for radicals in the humanities and social sciences.”

Some incredibly sage and practical advice. I need to make my schedule less busy so I can put more of it into practice. (e.g. learn to be a plumber and find a non-academic partner… though maybe that’s less of an issue since I’m not convinced I’m going to be an academic at all )

I feel like a poor excuse for a “Radical” or “Activist”… I don’t know if I fit that role necessarily, but I’m pretty clear that I want my life to be about figuring out how to contribute to/participate in creating a more just and equitable world and specifically supporting people to feel useful and fulfilled … and I want to be able to do this without driving myself insane… in fact do it in a way that’s generative and full of joy…

Click here to read the rest.

“Activists experience the intellectual-political work of scholarship as part of the struggle. It’s a war. We have to fight. I’ve come to understand the academy as a place where I do some outreach and networking, and sometimes try to transform the institutions to be more liberatory, but for the most part my job is not part of THE struggle. This job is a way to support me and the work I want to do.”