5. Social Enterprise
It might be concluded from the case studies and literature reviewed in this research that faith-based businesses are most likely to appear and flourish at the start of a new phase of economic and social organisation. The influence of religious thinking on the Industrial Revolution and its genesis is pronounced, and the origins of the co-operative movement also have a distinctive Christian accent. The energy and fresh thinking of a faith perspective might have more freedom to operate during a period of change, and might even drive certain aspects of that change. It might also be concluded that such innovation invariably gets sucked into the secular mainstream – such is the nature of capitalist business development, to pick up that which works and to discard the unproductive. There are signs that new business models are starting to appear in Britain, and a relatively new sector known as social enterprise has started to emerge as one alternative future model that seeks to distribute wealth more fairly than traditional capitalist models.
As with other emerging trends, the causes and origins are diverse and are not exclusively religious in character. Two high-profile examples of social enterprise are Jamie Oliver’s Fifteen restaurant chain and The Big Issue homeless magazine. However the Church of England has recently explored future growth in this direction with its commitment to developing credit unions as an answer to pay-day lending firms such as Wonga. And the Methodist movement has been involved in its own social enterprise through the Methodist Housing Association. Cafédirect plc was set up by a consortium that includes Oxfam and Traidcraft, which both have Christian origins. Indeed Traidcraft itself could be considered one of the first such social enterprises to emerge, having been established in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1979.
The term social enterprise is a relatively recently coinage, dating from 1978 when Freer Spreckley of Beechwood College, Leeds, used it to describe businesses based on worker and community co-operation[22]. It has therefore been applied retrospectively to longer-standing business models such as co-operatives. The concept received a boost to its profile after David Cameron, subsequently British prime minister, pledged to build a ‘Big Society’ at a speech before the General Election of 2010. Whether social enterprise represents a new type of business sector is debatable, but certainly management techniques are beginning to evolve for such organisations operating in the third sector, as the not-for-profit economy is also known.