Social enterprise as a socially rational business

What is the goal of social enterprise policy? Is it the creation of a ‘not-for-profit’ or ‘more-than-profit’ business movement? In institutional policy circles, arguments are shaped by the desire to protect assets for the community, while entrepreneurial discourses favour a mixture of investment sources, surplus sharing and inclusive systems of governance. This article uses data from a critical ethnography to offer a third perspective. Human behaviour is a product of, and support system for, our socio-sexual choices. A grounded theory of social and economic capital is developed that integrates sexuality into organisation development. This constructs business organisations as complex centres of community-building replete with economic and social goals. By viewing corporate governance from this perspective social enterprise is reconceived as a business movement guided by social rationality with the long-term goal of distributing social and economic capital across stakeholder groups to satisfy individual and collective needs.</p

Evidence for Heterotic/Heterotic Duality

We re-examine the question of heterotic - heterotic string duality in six dimensions and argue that the $E_8\times E_8$ heterotic string, compactified on $K3$ with equal instanton numbers in the two $E_8$'s, has a self-duality that inverts the coupling, dualizes the antisymmetric tensor, acts non-trivially on the hypermultiplets, and exchanges gauge fields that can be seen in perturbation theory with gauge fields of a non-perturbative origin. The special role of the symmetric embedding of the anomaly in the two $E_8$'s can be seen from field theory considerations or from an eleven-dimensional point of view. The duality can be deduced by looking in two different ways at eleven-dimensional $M$-theory compactified on $K3\times {\bf S}^1/\Z_2$.Comment: 36 pages, LaTe

Interpersonal dynamics: a communitarian perspective

Conventional theories of power within organisations focus on the extent to which one party can impose their will on others through social influence. Discussion of the way that same-sex and opposite-sex attraction impacts on the workplace is rarely theorised either because it is considered uncivilised or taboo. Investigations are also hampered by resistance amongst research participants even when care is taken to establish mixed groups from different organisations. As a result, holistic theories of management control that take account of sexual behaviour remain rare. This paper examines empirical data from an 18-month critical ethnography to present new theory on interpersonal dynamics, socialisation and identification. A grounded theory is developed that suggests social decisions are closely linked to the psychology of giving and getting attention and assistance. As relationships develop, patterns of giving and receiving create economic and social dependencies that evolve into the tacit rules of social life and affect the bonds between people. Sharp conflicts occur when one party wants to change the relationship and the other party resists. The process of renegotiation affects the stability of directly and indirectly affected relationships and can change patterns of influence and bases of social power. Individuals’ commitment and health can be affected. Decision-making and impacts are affected by the state of other relationships, past experiences, social and economic dependency and the aspirations of both parties. Findings are reviewed against existing theories of power to offer a radical perspective that power has two-faces, the ability to influence and the ability to resist influence. Authoritarian behaviours can be activated by perceptions of powerlessness rather than a sense of power. The implications for handling conflicts and harassment claims are discussed, together with comment on gender theory and its relationship to corporate governance.</p

Gendering, courtship and pay equality: developing attraction theory to understand work-life balance and entrepreneurial activity

Objectives: This paper examines one of the most intractable problems of the last 40 years: the difficulty in closing the pay inequality gap. Current wisdom is that the pay gap exists because of men's power to control the workplace, and men's dominant position in society generally. This paper examines an emergent literature on matriarchal power structures and proposes Attraction Theory as a holistic framework. Prior Work: This paper acknowledges a range of feminist literature that examines the underlying social relations and power structures that impact on pay differentials. This is critiqued on the basis of findings from courtship research as well as studies emerging from liberal / progressive writers in the men's movement. Approach: This paper is conceptual, using an inter-disciplinary understanding of social processes to critically appraise both the dominant discourse on equal pay and its emergent alternative. Attraction Theory is presented as a framework for exploring a complex discourse that unequal pay exists both because of men's power to control the workplace and women's power to control courtship and family life. Implications: Tackling pay inequality and work-life balance issues by focussing on power sharing in the workplace represents only a partial policy solution. Further progress depends on power-sharing in parental rights through academic recognition and political action to tackle negative stereotypes that impact on men during romantic courtship, conception, birth and divorce. Value: The value of the paper lies in the originality of the analysis and the range of insights that Attraction Theory provides into societal dynamics that impact on equal pay. The identification of paradoxes in the dominant discourse opens up new avenues for research and policy development on work-life balance. Whether these will close the pay gap is unclear, but it would advance equality and diversity goals by creating confidence that consensual choices rather the institutional inequalities perpetuate any remaining inequalities reported in statistics.</p

Cooperative social enterprises: company rules, access to finance and management practice

Objectives: In light of the faster than expected take up of the Community Interest Company (CIC) in the UK, this paper revisits findings from a study undertaken in 2000 on the impact of asset-locks on the longevity, growth and management styles in co-operative social enterprises. Prior Work: The co-operative and employee-ownership movements played a leading role in the establishment of Social Enterprise London and the Social Enterprise Coalition. The heritage of the UK co-operative movement, however, differs from its continental counterpart in placing a much stronger emphasis on common ownership that inhibits the transfer of capital and assets to private interests. Approach: This paper is both conceptual and empirical. It examines different worker co-operative traditions and develops a meta-theory that explains underlying assumptions in different forms of co-operative social enterprise. Using empirical data from 5 common ownership co-operatives and 5 equity-based co-operatives, this exploratory study found differences in management style, access to finance and growth prospects both within and between the two groups. Implications: Devolution of management responsibilities was more prevalent in co-operatives permitting both individual and collective ownership, as opposed to common ownership. Access to external finance was less problematic for organisations where individuals had made investments. Despite this, it was not established that organisations with external equity or loan finance grew quicker or faired better over the longer term. Value: The value of the paper lies both in the development of a meta-theoretical framework for differentiating forms of worker co-operative, as well as empirical evidence on the impact of asset-locks in the management and development of social enterprises. The study suggests that the CLS version of the CIC, or abandonment of the CIC in favour of an appropriately structured CLS or IPS model, may be appropriate for social enterprises wishing to grow, but makes little difference in small service oriented social enterprises.</p

The Octonionic Membrane

We generalize the supermembrane solution of D=11 supergravity by permitting the 4-form $G$ to be either self-dual or anti-self-dual in the eight dimensions transverse to the membrane. After analyzing the supergravity field equations directly, and also discussing necessary conditions for unbroken supersymmetry, we focus on two specific, related solutions. The self-dual solution is not asymptotically flat. The anti-self-dual solution is asymptotically flat, has finite mass per unit area and saturates the same mass=charge Bogomolnyi bound as the usual supermembrane. Nevertheless, neither solution preserves any supersymmetry. Both solutions involve the octonionic structure constants but, perhaps surprisingly, they are unrelated to the octonionic instanton 2-form $F$, for which $TrF \wedge F$ is neither self-dual nor anti-self-dual.Comment: 17 pages, Latex; enhanced discussion on supersymmetry, some references adde

Strings, Fivebranes and an Expanding Universe

It was recently shown that velocity-dependent forces between parallel fundamental strings moving apart in a $D-$dimensional spacetime implied an accelerating expanding universe in $D-1$-dimensional space-time. Exact solutions were obtained for the early time expansion in $D=5,6$. Here we show that this result also holds for fundamental strings in the background of a fivebrane, and argue that the feature of an accelerating universe would hold for more general $p$-brane-seeded models.Comment: 8 pages, harvma

Putting string/string duality to the test

After simultaneous compactification of spacetime and worldvolume on $K3$, the $D=10$ heterotic fivebrane with gauge group $SO(32)$ behaves like a $D=6$ heterotic string with gauge group $SO(28) \times SU(2)$, but with Kac--Moody levels different from those of the fundamental string. Thus the string/fivebrane duality conjecture in $D=10$ gets replaced by a string/string duality conjecture in $D=6$. Since $D=6$ strings are better understood than $D=10$ fivebranes, this provides a more reliable laboratory in which to test the conjecture. According to string/string duality, the Green--Schwarz factorization of the $D=6$ spacetime anomaly polynomial $I_{8}$ into $X_4\, \tilde{X}_4$ means that just as $X_4$ is the $\sigma$-model anomaly polynomial of the fundamental string worldsheet so $\tilde{X}_4$ should be the corresponding polynomial of the dual string worldsheet. To test this idea we perform a classical dual string calculation of $\tilde{X}_4$ and find agreement with the quantum fundamental string result. This also provides an {\it a posteriori} justification for assumptions made in a previous paper on string/fivebrane duality. Finally we speculate on the relevance of string/string duality to the vacuum degeneracy problem.Comment: Replaced by version to appear in Nucl. Phys.

M-Theory on a Calabi-Yau Manifold

We compactify $M$-theory on a Calabi-Yau manifold to five dimensions by wrapping the membrane and fivebrane solitons of the eleven-dimensional supergravity limit around Calabi-Yau two-cycles and four-cycles respectively. We identify the perturbative and non-perturbative BPS states thus obtained with those of heterotic string theory compactified on $K3\times S^1$. Quantum aspects of the five-dimensional theory are discussed.Comment: 12 pages, 1 figure, uses harvmac, eps