Practicing Ethnography in a Social Enterprise: Developing an Internal Critique

Abstract

It is suggested that social entrepreneurship has the ability to combine social interests with the business practices to bring positive changes in the society. SRREOSHI, a women-led organisation was set up in the year 2005. In this paper, we engage with the idea of whether tools of ethnography can be used as tools to develop an internal critique where everydayness of freedom is recognised as a process of empowerment. The idea of value creation is central to a social enterprise. In SRREOSHI’s work, the focus of research is on generating knowledge aimed towards finding solutions to specific developmental problems. The idea of research is on identifying the problems, identifying the target population and comparing situations to assess the implementation. The research happens within the broader rubric of women’s empowerment. Ethnography as a research method which attempts to discover cultures and experiences of people involved in a programme can offer important tools of research that a social enterprise can use. However, we suggest that social value creation through a social enterprise involves attempts to collectivise and more attention needs to be paid in nurturing the collective. We feel that tools of ethnography can offer us important avenues of a stronger collective aimed at creating values for sustainable women’s empowerment.