Rory Tews
What is Happening in the Field of social Business?
The implicit idea of using economic activity to address social issues has been around for a while, at least since the co-operative movement during the nineteenth century. The idea of social business is now beginning to take a new shape, with businesses being explicitly designed to address social issues through their revenue-generating activity. In my research I am looking at the various ways in which this idea is manifesting itself in various institutional settings. Currently the areas under investigation are the UK, the US and Germany. I take an action research approach, which means that I actively engage in the field in order to generate data (which is sorely lacking in this nascent area of research). One major question is whether this phenomenon is a social movement and should be studied as such, or if this is the relatively autonomous emergence of a new field of activity. In particular I am trying to access and analyse investor-investee relationships and the negotiations between them.
