Social Entrepreneurs as Change-Makers - Research Paper Example

Social Entrepreneurs as Change-makers Who are Social Entrepreneurs? According to Kickul and Lyons , social entrepreneurs are social innovators that strive to try and add value to other people’s lives through the pursuit of a social mission that is designed to use the tools, processes and techniques of business entrepreneurship. By using the profits that are generated from the enterprise for use in the expansion and promotion of the mission to add value to the lives of other people throughout the society, social entrepreneurs are seen to generally tend to put the benefits that the society stands to gain ahead of their own personal gains. This definition of social entrepreneurship is seen to model it along the lines of the functionalist perspective or theory. Social entrepreneurs are able to act as change makers in today’s society through their seizing of the opportunities that might have been missed by others, improving the existing systems in use, creating more sustainable solutions and inventing new approaches designed to encourage the society to change for the better (Roger and Osberg, 2007). Historical Overview of Social Change in the United States The United States’ history is rife with numerous examples of social change movements. These movements included the Civil rights movement, the women’s movement, the students movement, the Lesbians, Gays, Bisexual and Transgender rights movement as well as the currently ongoing occupy Wall Street movement for social change. The civil rights movement has had a colorful history in the United States. Some of the highlights of this history include the 1775 publishing of African Slavery in America by Thomas Paine who was an abolitionist, the removal of Indians from their lands and their subsequent revolts, the fight for the rights of African Americans by Martin Luther and the recent fight for gay rights. And the women’s sufferance movement that sought to establish the right for women to be allowed to vote (Banmaszak, 2001). Theories of Social Change and Social Entrepreneurship Functionalist Perspective The functionalist perspective generally attempts to try and explain social institutions as being collective means which can be used in meeting both social and individual needs. In formulating the theory, Durkheim was primarily concerned with answering the question of just how societies are able to effectively maintain their internal stability and survive over time. The functionalist perspectives society as functioning in a similar manner to organisms and it is the responsibility of social institutions such as social entrepreneurship to work together so as to effective reproduce and maintain these organisms (Boundless, 2013). As a result of the various parts of social institutions generally tending to work together, a progressive change that is brought about by one social entrepreneurship institution will precipitate positive changes in all the other social institutions. Another key theory of social change is the social development theory. This theory attempts to try and explain the various qualitative changes that are seen to occur throughout the society’s framework and structure, and subsequently help the society in better realizing its inherent aims and objectives. By using this theory, social entrepreneurs can be able to effectively drive social change through a process of progressively increasing awareness so as to improve better organization. According to the theory, when society is able to sense better and new opportunities that could probably help it in progressing, it ends to develop various new forms of organization that help it in successfully exploiting these new opportunities. The new forms of organization that are created are generally able to better harness the availability of resources, social skills and energies so as to get the intended results. An example of this instance is the social change driven by President John F. Kennedy during the space race as he sought to firmly establish the place of capitalism over communism. One of the most influential social entrepreneurs was President John f. Kennedy. After the events of the World War II came to close during the mid-20th century, a new conflict that came to be known as the Cold War gradually started to emerge. The war pitted the democratic United States which advocated for the global adoption of a capitalist market economy where the various means of production, industry and trade were freely controlled by market forces with minimal intervention by the state against the totalitarian Soviet Union which had previously been an oligarchy and actively advocated for the global adoption of a communist-state market economy which is a form of government that mainly characterized by its governance under a dominant-party system or single party rule. In this system, the market economy is normally controlled by the state which attempts to redistribute wealth in the country such that the wealthy upper class are, progressively brought down to the very same social and financial level as members of the middle class. With each global power seeking to promote and spread its politico-economic system to other countries across the world, both sides soon started creating innovations in technological and military power that were designed to prove both their superiority and the superiority of their political-economic system. The cold war had the effect of causing widespread panic across the capitalistic United States as people across the country were forced to live under the threat that a war with the Soviet Union could possibly erupt at any time. By the mid-1950s, the effects of the cold war had managed to work themselves into the everyday lives of citizens in both the Soviet Union and the United States. This war fuelled by the aggressive arms race between the two countries and the every growing threat of nuclear weapons. The widespread espionage and counter-espionage between the two countries was further exacerbated by a number of events such as the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, the 1961 construction of the Berlin war as well as the outbreak of war in Southeast Asia (Collins and NASM, 1999). When the Soviet Union launched the sputnik 1 satellite into space in 1957 which became the world’s first ever satellite. The Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik 1 sent shockwaves across the world. The news that the first man-made object to successfully be placed in space, had been placed in space by Russia came as an unpleasant surprise to most Americans and this further fuelled fears across the country that the Soviet Union and Communism were proving to be better than the United States and Capitalism. The use of the Soviet R-7 missile to launch the satellite demonstrated that the Soviet Union was ideally quite capable of successfully delivering a nuclear warhead into the air space controlled by the United States. America’s and capitalism’s position was suffered further when Yuri Gagarin a soviet cosmonaut eventually became the first person to successfully orbit the earth in April 1961. During this time, the United States designed a cone-shaped capsule that was considerably lighter than the capsule that Gagarin used to orbit the earth, however as they were still in the stage of testing the craft using chimpanzees, they were again beaten by Gagarin’s launch and it was not until a month later that Alan Shepard was to eventually become the first American in space (Collins and NASM, 1999). Although Shepard’s flight managed to reach suborbital space where it lasted for about 15 minutes before it eventually splashed down into the Atlantic ocean as had been planned, Shepard was not able to orbit the earth as Gagarin had done and it would eventually take almost a year before the United States would finally be able to successfully duplicate Gagarin’s feat when the American Astronaut John Glenn managed to successfully orbit the earth in Feb 1962. While the launch of Sputnik and Gagarin’s orbit were definitely bitter pills for America to swallow, it is argued that without these stinging and challenging defeats, the United States would probably not have been able to successfully land a man on the moon’s surface before the close of the 1960s. To help in rallying up the spirit of Americans across the country, President John F. Kennedy showed himself to be a true social entrepreneur who was advocating for a capitalistic system over the communist system when he made a bold public claim that by the end of the decade, the United States would successfully land a man on the moon. This was essentially a revision of America’s original intention of proving the dominance of capitalism over socialism by first developing a space shuttle before attempting to push to the moon. After Gagarin’s orbit, landing a man o the moon as it would be difficult for communist Soviet Union to top this up. In his determination to score a win for capitalism over communism, President Kennedy earmarked funds and caused NASA’s budget to increase by an estimated 500 percent between 1961 and 1694. In what was considered to be a clear example of the social development theory, as well as a first win for capitalism in regard to the space race. The United States launched Apollo 8 in December 1968 and this satellite became the very first manned space mission to successfully orbit the moon. The successes of Apollo 8 were soon followed by those of Apollo 11 which managed to make a globally televised successful moon landing. After this successful moon landing, the American Neil Armstrong made a successful moon walk in what was an overwhelming and decisive victory for capitalism and the United States. In another victory for capitalism over communism, the Soviet Union failed four times between 1969 and 1972 in successfully launching a lunar landing craft. These failures included the rather spectacular July 1969 launch-pad explosion (Collins and NASM, 1999). By the end of America’s Apollo’s project in 1972, the country had spent an estimated over $25 billion which in today’s dollars is an approximate $100 billion. Conclusion Over the past decade there has been an explosion of healthy competition and entrepreneurship across the entire social sector. Social entrepreneurs have emerged as the critical factors that have helped society in reorganizing itself and the manner in which it approaches social problems so as to promote change. As opposed to business entrepreneurs who are primarily motivated by profits, social entrepreneurs are motivated by the urge to improve the society; this does not however mean that social entrepreneurs are less innovative than business entrepreneurs as social entrepreneurs are as change oriented and innovative as their business counterparts. Social entrepreneurship is not defined by the normal business measures such as sales figures and size and can be engaged in by large organizations, small communities and even by individuals. By constantly attempting to try find better and new methods that can be used to solve the problems noted as continuously be plaguing society, social entrepreneurs are able to firmly establish themselves are change agents. References Banaszak, A. L. (2001). Why Movements Succeed or Fail: Opportunity, Culture, and the Struggle for Woman Suffrage. Princeton : Princeton University Press. Boundless. (2013). Sociology. Boundless. Collins, M. J. and NASM. (1999). Space race: the U.S.-U.S.S.R. competition to reach the moon. San Francisco, Calif. : Pomegranate Communications. Kickul, J. and Lyons, T. (2012). Understanding Social Entrepreneurship: The Relentless Pursuit of Mission in an Ever Changing World. Routledge. Martin, Roger L., and Sally Osberg. "Social entrepreneurship: The case for definition." Stanford social innovation review 5.2 (2007): 28-39. Read More