MRC Research Programme on ‘Developing methods to evidence social enterprise as a public health intervention’
Project 1: An historical perspective on social enterprise as a public health intervention
Research Protocol May 2014
Introduction:
This project provides the opportunity to reflect upon the relationship between the two substantive topics of ‘social enterprise’ and ‘public health’ and how their histories have been developed, applied and remembered within the social history of the twentieth century. From a public health perspective Virginia Berridge has contended that current commentary on health policy is far from ‘history free’, but that it ‘uses history in distinct and limited ways’, as part of the ‘background’ to studies of public health, rather than as a central component to current analysis.[1] Initial archival research suggests that social enterprise stakeholders have a clear view of the history of their practice, citing the co-operative movement as an important precursor to community business and later social enterprise.[2] For example, John Pearce described the Rochdale Pioneers and the Equitable Society (1844) as ‘immediate forerunners’ of social enterprise.[3] However, while these connections may appear self-evident to a prominent member of the social enterprise community, such as the late John Pearce, from the perspective of historical study they remain unexplored and unevidenced. Therefore in beginning to research social enterprise as a public health intervention several questions immediately arise: How have ideas of ‘working together’ and ‘common social purpose’ been sustained through the massive economic, social and political changes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries? How have these ideas been translated within changing concepts of ‘community’ and ‘society’ during this period? What has been the relationship between these ideas and social action, by entrepreneurs, academics and the public? What missions have been stated by social enterprises, and in particular, how do they relate to understandings of health and well-being?
In exploring these questions, the value of the historical perspective within the broader MRC research programme is twofold. Firstly, in researching the intersections between the parallel histories of social enterprise and public health this study can provide new insight into these important aspects of social history that have hitherto largely been analysed by distinct groups of practitioners, revealing their significance within the broader picture of social change in the twentieth century. Secondly, the project also aims to develop a dialogue between the past and the present, intervening in current discussions in the developing field of social enterprise and health and therefore producing a History that is more than a dormant background, but part of an active evidence base in current and future research.
The historical timeframe for this analysis is at present bounded by the available archival material. The core material for this study is the Social Enterprise Collection Scotland held by the Special Collections at GCU and within this the John Pearce papers. The papers are representative of Pearce’s work in the community and social enterprise movement from the late 1970s until his retirement in 2010. The project will initially working within this timeframe with the potential to refine this as the research in this project and Project two: A contemporary analysis of social enterprise as a public health in intervention develops.
Aims:
It is anticipated that this study will identify a range of social actors connected with social enterprise who have, either explicitly or implicitly, intervened on aspects of public health, broadly defined. It will assist in the identification of definitions of both social enterprise and broader health determinants. Perhaps most importantly, the project will evaluate in what contexts social enterprise has successfully and sustainably provided a vital means of restoring community participation and engagement in areas where the resources for maintaining collective health have been diminished by lack of employment, poor quality housing, and lack of access to education and recreation.
The central aims of the project are to:
· Systematically analyse and contribute to the growth of the Social Enterprise Collection (Scotland): the project will be the first to systematically analyse the collection, it will contribute to the ongoing cataloguing work required on the John Pearce papers and extend and complement the existing archival material with oral history recordings.
· Explore the intersections between social enterprise and public health: this study will collate the historical evidence revealing how social enterprise relates to the disciplinary trajectory of public health history; revealing the social actors involved (in academia, public health and policy, and social enterprise), the missions initiated, and the relative success of those missions.
· Open up community-centred perspectives on the history of health and wellbeing: within the process of evaluating social enterprise missions, the perspectives of the communities and groups who have been the intended beneficiaries of social enterprise will be considered, thus enabling the study to consider the substantive topics ‘from below’ as well ‘from above’.
Methods/approaches:
The project will be based upon two well established approaches to contemporary history research: archival study and oral history interviews. The exploratory nature of the research means that the former will be the initial focus of the project, with the parameters for the oral history interviews being developed from the findings of the archival study. However, there is potential to carry out a small sample of ‘directional’ interviews towards the beginning of the project.
Stage 1: Social Enterprise Collection (Scotland) (held by GCU Special collections)
GCU holds substantial and unique collections for the study of social enterprise in Scotland including the Records of the Community Business Scotland Network and the Papers of John Pearce. The latter will be the focus of this project. Upon his retirement in 2010 Pearce donated a range of reports, as well as his personal papers, that will play a valuable role in illuminating how communities and social enterprise practitioners took action to intervene, directly and indirectly, in the health and wellbeing of people in their area. Research has begun on social enterprise reports and social audits, which are already fully catalogued. The remaining papers of John Pearce, will be organised and prepared for cataloguing as part of this project, and analysed during this process. During a systematic evaluation of the contents of the archive, portions of the material will be transcribed and photographed and uploaded to Nvivo, which will be used as the basis for further detailed analysis, journal articles and dissemination events.
What is available and what can it be used to discuss?
An initial audit of the archival material has identified six types of social enterprise report that will prove valuable to this study. Namely:
· Annual reports and accounts from individual social enterprises that reveal their missions, structure and stakeholders.
· Social Audits of individual social enterprises that detail the process of social auditing, at times these reports include the original questionnaires and responses of those surveyed.
· Social Audits of a group of social enterprises, which as well data on individual initiatives also draw broader conclusions from findings (often based on a collection of social enterprises operating within a specific geographical area).
· Newsletters written and circulated within social enterprise networks, detailing contemporary events and the changing ambitions of social enterprise as a movement.
· Research reports covering contemporary debates in academia and the social enterprise sector nationally and internationally.
· Copies of official government reports that can be used to trace the relationship between social enterprise and social policy.
Using the material described above it will be possible to begin to build a history of social enterprise that triangulates perspectives from the initiatives themselves, the networks that supported them and the policy networks around them. Only a minority of the social enterprise initiatives that appear in the collection explicitly addressed health issues as part of their stated mission, thus in the majority of the available archival material the relationship between initiatives and health is an implicit one. From the perspective of this study, this is an advantage, since it will provide the ability to look across health indicators, such and housing and environment, education and employment, leisure and culture, and transport allowing for a broad understanding of health and wellbeing to be considered, while maintaining a focus on lay understandings of health. By exploring how these initiatives operated it is hoped that social enterprise can provide a lens to examine what communities understood as important to their health.
Gaps in the archive
As with all archival research, what remains unrecorded must be considered alongside what it present. Potentially, the John Pearce collection captures only the most successful initiatives that were well organised, engaged with social enterprise networks and were willing to share their records. There may have been comparable organisations that worked independently of these networks that had just as great an impact on their communities, how far this project can elucidate the broader economy of social enterprise remains to be seen. Nevertheless the John Pearce collection provides a solid foundation from which to raise these questions. Furthermore, the archival work on this project will be complemented by oral history interviews, which will allow the project to probe the boundaries of the archival material and define the parameters of this research.
In addition, the opportunity to examine John Pearce’s papers will add another dimension to the archival research, but at this point it is not possible to assess what they will contribute. The sorting of the John Pearce papers is scheduled to begin in October 2014.
Data Extraction Tool
How best to organise and analyse the large amount of data collected during this study will be an ongoing point of consideration for the project. As well as keeping an archive diary that records thoughts and questions that arise from the archival work on a daily basis, archival notes recording the library catalogue details, descriptions, notes and the date viewed have also been made on every visit to the archive. These archival notes are now being uploaded to Nvivo to allow for systematic collecting and coding. Scanned documents from the archive can also be uploaded directly to Nvivo; saving them to this database will allow the archival research to be easily shared among colleagues.
Based on the initial archival work, I have started to develop a data extraction tool, which will be used to code the material as it is uploaded to Nvivo:
Language: The repetition of key terms, such as ‘community business’, ‘community enterprise’ and ‘social enterprise’, will be highlighted. This will be used to trace how the definition of social enterprise has changed over time and to what extent the adoption of new terms came from initiatives, their supporting network or policy makers.
People and Structure: Coding elements of the archival material within this category will used to trace who was influential in establishing individual initiatives, key stakeholders, the types of structure used and how they evolved. In doing so the study can examine to what extent social enterprises were ‘grass roots’ organisations.
Mission and Action: A clear mission statement was a standard part of the social audit process, by tracing the stated missions of initiatives and how they compare to their actions the study can begin to examine the impact of the initiatives on their communities. Analysing how these changed over time will also allow the project to consider the impact of economic, social and policy change on social enterprise: Did initiatives have to alter their stated missions in order to gain funding? Did policy changes affect the character of social enterprise in Scotland, or did their actions reflect a continuity of vision?
Impact and Evaluation: This category will be used to trace the methods adopted for auditing social enterprises and how they changed over time: Do they reflect changes in an understanding of the potential of social enterprise? Can a historical insight into these issues provide clarity on current definitional issues in social enterprise?
Obviously these are likely to change as the research develops, but at this stage they reflect the thoughts and questions raised by the initial archival audit.
Stage 2: Oral History Interviews
Collecting oral histories has been a vital tool in realising social histories ‘from below’, because they can be used to capture the voices of those absent in written records. Looking at Scottish History specifically, in the social history of medicine oral history has been valuable in the fields of mental health, occupational health and the influence of the media in the understanding of health. However, a broader analysis of changing health cultures, such as discussed in Beier’s For Their Own Good: The Transformation of English Working Class Health Culture (2008) remains to be written. The success of these projects in beginning to extend historical understandings of health beyond the patient doctor dichotomy is encouraging for research in the emergent field of social enterprise and health. For example, Ronald Johnston and Arthur McIvor have used oral testimonies of asbestos-related disease on Clydeside to argue that ‘industrial disability is a neglected cause of relative poverty and social exclusion’,[4] which resonates with social enterprises whose mission was to ameliorate the effects of industrial decline on local communities. However the current project will depart from these previous studies in significant ways. A significant proportion of social enterprise initiatives were dedicated to securing employment for people in economically depressed communities and being good employers themselves, but also sought to intervene in housing, education, recreation, transport, or a combination of these economic and social issues. Thus the interviews conducted for this project will go beyond occupational health, looking at community-centred understandings of health in the round. This shapes the ethical framework of the interviews, for example, in Johnston and McIvor’s study of occupational disease in Clydeside, a focus on ‘victims’ of asbestos disease was an explicit part of the research strategy.[5] However this study aims to interview as broad a range of stakeholders as possible, thus some potential interviewees may be more vulnerable than others. Moreover the impact of their experiences with social enterprise on stakeholders health, whether it was a positive experience or otherwise, will not be clear at the outset of the interview. Interviewees will most likely have varying levels of ‘subjective composure’, to use Penny Summerfield’s term, in narrating memories of this time. Therefore the questions developed and themes explored will have to take into account the potential effect that revisiting these memories may have on interviewees, which may have coincided with a particularly difficult period in their lives. The successful completion of these interviews will valuable to the project allowing the multi-disciplinary team to connect ideas of ‘subjective composure’ developed in oral history with ‘sense of coherency’ developed in health studies.