Fields, Language, and Symbolic Power: Using the Praxeology of Pierre Bourdieu to Understand the Transformation of a Social Enterprise

Background and Purpose: Concerns have been raised that hybrid nonprofit human service organizations that combine social purpose with business enterprise may be transformed into “for-profits in disguise” when a calculus of altruism is replaced by commercial objectives. Still, little theoretically driven research has examined the specific mechanisms that can lead these organizations to replace mission-related goals with market driven ones. Using case study data, this article draws on Pierre Bourdieu's concepts of field, language, and power to examine the processes through which such transformation can occur. Bourdieu argues that multiple worldviews inscribed in diverse vocabularies “provides the base for symbolic struggles over the power to produce and to impose the legitimate vision of the world” (Bourdieu, 1989, p. 20). Power exercised through dominant discourse derives from the relations of domination and subordination within the field. Movement to a new field exposes organizations to new hegemonic stakeholders, both internal and external to organizations, who bring their vision to bear through the use of specialized vocabularies that define the organizational context. These visions become institutionalized when they are accepted by workers as taken-for-granted.

Methods: Data come from an ethnographic case study of a nonprofit agency that serves homeless clients by operating businesses enterprises designed to provide transitional work experience. Data collection spanned a two year period and included direct observation of board and staff meetings, conferences, and email exchanges; semi-structured interviews with staff, board members, and previous employees; and the collection of documents including financial reports, strategic plans, market analyses, and client forms. Data were analyzed for common themes and negative cases that refined and expanded theoretical understandings.

Results: Results suggest that the organization's movement from the field of human services into the field of business introduced a specialized corporate discourse, which redefined 1) the human service organization as a business, 2) workers as corporate employees, and 3) clients as workers. An emergent lens that valued clients primarily as labor filtered out complex and heterogeneous client problems. The agency failed to mobilize a response to these problems, leaving profound employment barriers unaddressed. Consequently very few clients transitioned to employment in the labor market. Instead, apprenticeships that were meant to last from three to six months extended from one to seven years.

Conclusions and Implications: I conclude by discussing the implications of findings for “boundary blurring” activities that occur at the intersection between nonprofit human services and the business field. I argue that when nonprofit human services enter the business field they encounter powerful commercial logics that are opposed to the logic of caring that informs the human services. These new logics have restructuring capabilities that can impact organizational responsiveness to vulnerable populations and quality of services. Research is needed that examines different combinations of social service and business enterprise and explores hybrids that are less likely to compromise the former.