Extract from
Winfried Weber, Die Purpose-Wirtschaft, 2024, eBook (Amazon Kindle, http://tiny.cc/9eznzz ) (Translation by the author)
"All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights."
This is Article 1 of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 10.12.1948
An earlier source, the Declaration of the French National Assembly of August 26, 1789, states that
"Les hommes naissent et demeurent libres et égaux en droits."
("Men are and remain free and equal in rights from birth").
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, this milestone in human history, was followed in the 19th century by a whole series of social innovations with which founders contributed to the fight for a fairer society and to overcoming poverty and other processes of exclusion. Social entrepreneurs developed new visions for social justice and implemented them as pioneers.
To give a few western examples, Amalie Sieveking (born 1794) founded an association for the care of the poor in Hamburg and set herself the goal of creating better conditions for impoverished citizens. Maria Cederschiöld (born 1856) fought as a pioneer for women's rights in Sweden. Robert Baden-Powell (born 1857) created a snowball system of self-organization for young people with the Boy Scouts, who learned to orient themselves towards the common good and take on responsibility at an early age. Mary Parker Follett (born 1868) transferred her social work experience from Boston's socially deprived areas to the process of organizing, later advised politicians and managers and is now regarded in the USA as the mastermind of modern management ("Mother of Modern Management", see chapter "The source code").
For Immanuel Kant, human beings had an "incomparable value". For Kant, people should never be used like things for purposes, instrumentalized and completely exploited. This violates their dignity and is ethically impermissible. “Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means, but always at the same time as an end” (Kant 2004).
In this sense, social entrepreneurship is a human rights profession that monitors social justice, seeks effective solutions to social injustice and social problems and closes gaps. Social entrepreneurs are less oriented towards the solutions of established welfare institutions, which in some countries are equipped with quite lavish resources, often have high administrative and management costs and do not practice "lean management".
Established charities are increasingly adopting strategies that are more in line with the concepts of business administration: Increasing turnover and profits, scaling effects, profit centers, KPIs, outsourcing, standardization of work content or clocking of services. However, business management concepts in social work, care, healthcare or spirituality often lead in an ineffective direction for the common good. Help for offenders sometimes produces more crime, outpatient care sometimes causes avoidable inpatient care, profit concepts in healthcare sometimes produce more patients and knowingly harm them.
In one of his last reports in 1993, the journalist Gordian Troeller reported on the situation of children in the refugee camps in Angola and put it bluntly: "In the Third World, caring for the poor has degenerated into a huge business. There are 70 aid organizations in Angola alone. For many of them, salaries, cars, apartments and offices consume up to 80 percent of the available funds. Emergency aid as a job creation program for unemployed academics." (Troeller quoted from Deutschlandfunk 2017)
Social entrepreneurs, however, rely on entrepreneurial means for social innovations. Their solutions are not developed through bureaucratic procedures. They measure their success less in terms of financial profit. Social entrepreneurs evaluate their success in the environment, outside of their own social start-up. Their performance is measured by how the innovations have a positive impact on society, how their company "improves the world" and whether it contributes to the common good. In other words, they align their raison d'être with achieving social inclusion. The focus is on rethinking the social and bringing groundbreaking social innovations into the world.
Although incremental innovations, i.e. improvements in small steps, are also important, they are usually the consequences and subsequent process innovations of an originally groundbreaking innovation. The crux of the social entrepreneurial approach is that, as a company oriented towards the common good, they "have no bottom line", according to Peter Drucker in his remarkable book, Managing the Nonprofit Organization (1990).
For many founders of successful social start-ups, it can be observed in the early stages that profit is of secondary importance and even irrelevant for some social organizations. The founding motives of entrepreneurs are diverse. First of all, they are affected by, or even angry at, existing inefficient or even harmful structures and offers of help and resistance to change. A similar motive is anger at the fact that there are no services for certain social problems and those affected are left to fend for themselves. This also includes the fact that there are examples of social best practice elsewhere, but these are ignored or not considered practicable locally.
In Portugal, for example, drug help is seen as part of the healthcare system. Addicts are allowed to possess small amounts, vulnerable users are referred to addiction experts rather than the courts, and these social innovations achieve one of the lowest death rates in the world. Finland consistently offers housing to homeless people without preconditions and then helps them to solve their other problems. Austria has privatized the help for offenders. There, independent organizations are developing innovations by focusing on prevention and tackling the social roots of crime.
The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (with the Social Development Goals, SDGs), which was adopted by all member states of the United Nations in 2015, points to a broad perspective for social innovation and global people-centered development. Social workers, as well as academics from other future-oriented fields of work, are well prepared to respond to the emerging complex social and environmental issues in each country and could contribute to solving all seventeen SDG goals. Social entrepreneurs balance business and social goals and find entrepreneurial and innovative solutions that work on their own in the long term - without subsidies after the start-up phase, because they are able to generate entrepreneurial opportunities and business models from societal and social problems, even if they achieve a constant influx of volunteers.
With social entrepreneurship, nurse entrepreneurship, civic entrepreneurship or entrepreneurial action in the education sector, human rights professions have emerged that are often just as important, sometimes more important, for the further development of the next society than technical innovations. Innovations in social and societal areas form the foundation of knowledge, of successful communication, of social cohesion and often enable a society's ability to perform in the first place.
The next generation in particular is increasingly willing to integrate public welfare issues into their own professional lives. 40% of young people prioritize social impact when choosing a career (World Economic Forum 2017). The appeal of entrepreneurship is growing in general, for technical, social and other start-ups. However, there is a gap between ambition and action in the next generation. Almost half of students in OECD countries want to start a business within five years of graduating, but only 5% of young people between the ages of 18 and 30 are actively working on or in a start-up. According to a study by the OECD (OECD/European Commission 2021), the lack of funding, skills and tailored support is thus holding back economies from innovation, growth and employment (see also the chapter "Education and Entrepreneurship" with the entrepreneurship approach of Danish education policy). Let's see how future generations define entrepreneurship and the purpose of start-ups.
Comments