Graduates with Social Enterprise Ambitions
By Dr. Gordon K Adomdza, Executive Professor
It’s close to another graduation ceremony and many students who have experienced the power of social impact and social enterprise in doing good are faced with the usual dilemma; should they take that well-paying, less “social”, job? After all, it’s in their field of study. Or should they tough it out and go work for that social enterprise they read about in class or visited last year? The money will not be enough but it will ‘feel right.’ If they don’t take the social enterprise job, they will be kicking themselves for a while because the images of inequality, abuse, deprivation etc. that they saw or experienced are still fresh. How do these sometimes negative thoughts or emotions influence the social enterprise field, opportunity discovery and exploration?
I have an interest in what people are thinking and feeling when they decide to start a social enterprise or work for one in a managerial position. Since social enterprises are more likely to be cause-driven, one can argue that feelings or emotions associated with these causes may play a stronger role in the discovery and exploration processes. These negative reactions and experiences may therefore play a stronger role in the social space than in the nonsocial space.
How do the negative emotional reactions influence social entrepreneurs? How do these emotions influence students who aspire to be social entrepreneurs? Could a deeper understanding of how these emotions work help in devising ways of encouraging young people to keep their socially motivated dreams alive?
Research on human emotional has long since suggested that the positive/negative valence dimension of an emotion is what evokes fight or flight behavioral response. In other words, when people have a positive emotional reaction, they are likely to engage the target of the emotion and if they have a negative emotional reaction, they are likely to disengage from the target.
According to the Appraisal Tendency Framework, however, positive/negative classifications are not the only way to assess emotional reactions,. Apparently, emotions with similar valence (positive or negative) can evoke divergent behavioral reactions. The classic pair of emotions used by psychologists Jennifer Lerner and DacherKeltner to highlight this point is anger and fear. They found that even though anger and fear are both unpleasant (negative valence), they diverge when it came to other dimensions such as control and certainty.
Anger evoked individual control and certainty leading to risky decisions such as travelling halfway across the world to volunteer. Fear evoked a lack of individual control and uncertainty about the situation leading to risk-averse decisions. These effects have been replicated in entrepreneurship by Maw Der Foo who found risk perceptions higher for fear and hope than for anger and happiness when these effects were induced in participants.
The tricky part of all this is although these emotions can occur separately, they can also occur together or one after the other. For example, fear of a deplorable human situation in a developing country can be followed by anger at the perpetrators. Further, these emotional reactions have been found to persist beyond current situations and become “an implicit perceptual lens” for interpreting subsequent situations.
Whichever order in which they occur, the point is that specific evaluations associated with certain emotional states can orient entrepreneurs or prospective entrepreneurs to appraisals of uncertainty and individual control in the micro and macroeconomic environment which will then impact evaluations and risk assessments for socially entrepreneurial opportunities.
The graduating students who took social entrepreneurship courses and went on field study programs undoubtedly had different but specific emotional reactions to the case studies and real-life experiences they encountered. According to the appraisal tendency framework, these emotional reactions will evoke a sense of individual control (that they can do something about it), situational control (that they can’t do much as an individual), a high sense of certainty (that they can envisage social impact), or a high sense of uncertainty (that they cannot be sure of impact). The question is, which?
There is a particularly heartbreaking story we hear at Nonceba on the SEI Dialogue to South Africa. That story sickens you with fear for the little girls in the townships but also fills you with, potentially, righteous anger against the situation. According to our theory, our students need to make that transition from fear to anger (righteous anger, to be careful and if there is such a thing), to realize appraisals of individual control and certainty about the impact they as individuals can make on the situation. Our theory says this is when our students will gravitate towards risk-taking judgments, the types that will make them more readily follow their social entrepreneurial yearnings.
So how do those negative emotions experienced through case studies and real-life experiences motivate consideration of social entrepreneurial opportunities? That only happens if those emotions do not make us feel helpless; rather, they must make us think we can do something about the situation and actually make an impact. Even if our students don’t take action right after graduation, as long as they keep that action-oriented negative emotion aflame, it’s likely to be that ‘implicit perceptual lens’ that will keep nudging them to action.
