Social enterprise development in Ireland: making a case for actor-network-theory Open Access

This paper outlines the capabilities of Actor-Network-Theory (ANT) as suitable for underpinning social enterprise development research in Ireland. Traditionally, the community development sector in Ireland is recognised as being informal, fragmented, ad hoc, and heavily reliant on personal relationships (Donnelly-Cox and McGee, 2011). However, the past number of decades have seen these relationships change as recognition grew of social enterprise development as being a valuable means of addressing pressing issues concerning poverty and social inclusion (Lee, 2003). This is reflected in a continuing establishment of new relationships which enable government bodies to drive strategies at a national level and address broader issues affecting the country as a whole. This also means that the social enterprise development sector has become more formally organised and centrally regulated (Neville, 2016, p. 724). However, despite the resulting integration of professional agendas (Shaw, 2011), the discourse of community and traditions of community and voluntary work continues to be a longstanding popular currency (O’Carroll, 2002) among Irish social enterprise development networks. As a result, the very idea of community embodies conflicting ideas and emotions, particularly concerning notions of place and identity (Meade et al., 2016). The resulting question is of how we can attune ourselves to the intricacies of social enterprise and community development in order to further progress. Taking this into consideration, this paper proposes the adoption of ANT as a means of understanding complexity as it is presented in its empirical form.

The theoretical foundation of ANT offers justifications to act as a strong point of departure for appreciating the complexities of social enterprise development studies. These complexities have impacted on the practice of social enterprise development to the extent that such organisations and practitioners must be considered as direct products of multiple and conflicting forces (Toomey, 2011). As Eversole defines it, this is a landscape where a clear chasm has formed between “organisations eager to work with communities on the one hand, and on the other, a multitude of communities eager to access resources from organisations” (2011, p. 10). To mitigate this, ANT recognises entities conceptualised under the umbrella of the “social” as not a given but as a heterogeneous product of relations between entities (Michael, 2016). Taking this as the point of departure, therefore, has the potential to account for a sector laden with forces that both shape society and have the potential to do so (Daly, 2007) and instead presents a means of distinguishing progress and improvement in the midst of what Cavaye (2006) terms as “random growth”. As Bhattacharyya states, a theory “advocates a particular kind of social order and a particular methodology for getting there” (2004, p. 10). Taking this into account, ANT can be introduced as a fitting means of advocating for order amongst this random growth. This paper aims to illustrate this by focusing on the theoretical foundations of ANT. To do so, this paper begins by discussing the need for empirical progression within the study of social enterprise development in Ireland. To appreciate how ANT can support progression within this field through the bridging of theory and practice, the primary tenets of ANT are posited against three core concerns of classical community development studies: structure, power and shared meaning (Hustedde and Ganowicz, 2002).

Social enterprises in Ireland, as entities “whose core objective is to achieve a social, societal or environmental impact through labour-market integration and the delivery of a range of services” (O’Hara and O’Shaughnessy, 2021, p. 112) are recognised as part of the fabric of community development. Although not always termed as such, social enterprises have been embedded in the social economy of Ireland since the 1990s (O’Shaughnessy and O’Hara, 2016). As a result, the inherent nature of social enterprises in Ireland is characterised by community ownership (Department of Rural and Community Development, 2023). With this in mind, social enterprise and community development in Ireland can be considered as interchangeable to the extent that social enterprise is recognised as the commercial arm of community development. More recently, the long tradition of voluntary activity in Ireland has been demonstrated through a rate of unpaid and voluntary participation that is higher than the EU average (OECD, 2023). This activity encompasses a broad selection of activities, the most dominant of which include childcare, community infrastructure and local development, health, youth services and social care and heritage festivals, arts and creative industry enterprises (Department of Rural and Community Development, 2023). The plurality of these activities and their respective entities raises a call for collaborative frameworks which Olmedo et al. (2023) propose as being essential for unlocking the full potential of social enterprises as social innovators.

Aligned with this is the more recent increase in social enterprise development and community development practices which are more formally organised and centrally regulated (Neville, 2016). This is particularly evident through the development and delivery of the National Social Enterprise Policy for Ireland (2019–2022) as the first document of its kind published in Ireland. This was shortly followed by the establishment of a comprehensive baseline data collection of the country’s social enterprise sector (Department of Rural and Community Development, 2023). In hindsight, this rapid development of centralised actions appears in contrast to, and often contesting, the traditional locally embedded origins of social enterprises in Ireland. The result of this is a distinction assumed to exist between the state and communities (Meade, 2012; Kenny, 2016). To date, there has been an over reliance on selected case studies which reinforce this distinction by presenting individual frames of reference (Van Twuijver et al., 2020). Therefore, in attempt to reconnect these frames of reference, this paper adopts an alternative point of departure in order to understand social enterprise development beyond the existing tensions of state vs community.

Crucially, the recognition of this dichotomy between state and community, or the bottom-up versus top-down divide (McDonagh, 2017), signifies a broader trend of movement within social enterprise development studies. As Kimmitt and Muñoz (2018) describe, this involves exploring what the “social” in social entrepreneurship means in terms of purpose and outcome. In this way, the core of this movement is focused on the potential role that can be played by social enterprises in solving complex challenges, primarily regarding environmental degradation and social inequality (Muñoz and Cohen, 2018; Steiner et al., 2019; Christmann et al., 2024). Taking into consideration the contextual sensitivity of social enterprise development studies (Van Twuijver et al., 2020), this movement can be further evidenced within the social enterprise sector in Ireland. Rather than over-emphasising definitions and further reinforcing binary divides, contextually embedding a theoretical discussion offers descriptions through characteristics (Forde, 2023).

This includes, for examples, the three key objectives of the National Social Enterprise Policy for Ireland (2019–2022): to build awareness of social enterprise; to grow and strengthen social enterprises; and to achieve better policy alignment (Department of Rural and Community Development, 2023; Breen, 2023). These goals have been designed to align with identified challenges in Ireland that social enterprises can strategically address such as decreasing labour force participation and levels of youth employment, Ireland’s high debt-to-income ratio, the aging population and significant regional disparities in terms of social and economic development (OECD, 2023). To give legitimacy to this alignment, Ireland was one of nineteen member states which signed the Toledo Declaration on the Social and Solidarity Economy (2020) as a driver of, and commitment to, strengthening economic and social progress within the European Union (Forde, 2023). In reference to this, the Irish Minister for Rural and Community Development declared an ambition for Ireland to become a European leader in the area of social enterprise (Department of Rural and Community Development, 2020).

Despite the evident steps undertaken, there are still concerns regarding the lack of a bespoke legal framework for social enterprises in Ireland. Specifically, these concerns flit between the need for such a framework and the fear over how this might restrict the organic, community-led nature of social enterprise development (Breen, 2023). Combined with both the entrepreneurial culture and strong sense of community in Ireland (OECD, 2023), the question arises of how can social enterprise development studies best support this nascent phase in line with existing strategic goals, aims and policies? From this, it can be appreciated as to how the value of creating progress within this sector lies in the ability to better understand and direct growth and development as it manifests within communities. As Hustedde and Ganowicz state, the ever-changing field of community development cannot be made entirely subject to a single theoretical approach (2002). Particularly, when considering how community enterprises are both “elastic entities” (Kenny, 2016) that provide informal support, and yet are capable of supporting or catalysing professional endeavours (Henderson and Vercseg, 2010). In light of this, there is a need for the assumed separateness of the state and community sectors (Meade, 2012) to be recalled for reconsideration.

Beyond reconciling this level of understanding and accessibility, empirical progress contributes towards directing the changes that are brought about within social enterprise development networks. It is the difference between designating the very idea of community as being something that we already have or something that we want to build, be that for ourselves or for others (Meade et al., 2016). With this in mind, what also needs to be accounted for here is not only the aspirations of individuals of communities but also the many organisations, authorities and agencies that are also attempting to drive varying goals within the same space. To this extent, it is often the social enterprise groups and individuals themselves that get preoccupied in having to react to complex demands and occasionally contradictory requests (Crowther and Shaw, 2020). The significance of this is only increasing with the complex interplays of geographic, demographic, social, political, economic and institutional factors of overlapping crises (Van Twuijver et al., 2020). As a result, communities have found themselves positioned as the “watchworld” of crises (Meade, 2020).

Therefore, in order to effectively direct change, theories and approaches to understanding social enterprise development need to ensure that all participants are “on the same page” and can coordinate in their response to a situation at hand (Weick and Sutcliffe, 2001). As such, theories are often disregarded by practitioners as they are not inherently recognisable in the “day-to-day” practice of social enterprise development (Hustedde and Ganowicz, 2002, p. 2). Given that it is these practitioners who are crucial to the development of social enterprise networks, theories developed within this field need to be both empirically informed and recognisable within the working environments of this cohort. This coordination involves reaching across the conceptual divide between theory and action (Hustedde and Ganowicz, 2002).

As Meade et al. (2016) describe, understanding community development is a dialectical manner means acknowledging that it is always a historically situated, ideologically contested and contextually specific set of practices. By presenting ANT, the idea here is not to try to negotiate against the multiple and varied understandings of community development, but rather to leave them as they exist in their proliferate states and understand how, theoretically, the state of affairs can be captured and further examined. This is the baseline necessary for progression that is inherently empirical to the context of any particular community. Within this, ANT acts as the mobiliser in order to reclaim an “empirical grasp” on social enterprise development. That is, reclaiming the ability to create empirical progress within communities by understanding the social enterprise development sector as a network as synonymous with the seamless fabric that is lived experience.

Given that no single theory can accommodate the combination of understandings and presentations of social enterprise development, it may only be plausible to understand communities and their development by investigating the precise ways in which the term is used across various contexts and from this, to extrapolate these varied meanings and purposes (Meade et al., 2016). Here, ANT is proposed as an approach with the capacity to take into account the intrinsic and nuanced interactions that happen within the field of social enterprise development. As a theoretical methodology, ANT can be best understood as an approach used to understand and analyse the world as a collection of relative networks (Latour, 2005). These networks are heterogeneous in nature and are understood to be continually produced and reproduced as an effect of the relations between the actors of a network (Law, 2008).

The theory was first introduced by Bruno Latour and Michael Callon, science and technology scholars who were attempting to understand the social construction of laboratory practices, in particular how laboratory practices and the production of scientific knowledge were attributed as being objective (Michael, 2016). Their approach was to stress the work and the movement that occurred, revealing how the objective accreditation was produced as a result of the work and movement of actors within the laboratory (Latour, 2005). From this, ANT was developed as an approach through the consideration that networks could be understood as functional, living laboratories from which the social is produced as an effect of relations in a network, rather than a cause for the state of a network (Latour, 2005).

In terms of social enterprise development, ANT seeks to understand the networks in operation which construct communities as a result of their interactions and practices. In turn, this offers a means of understanding how a social enterprise network operates as a system for storing, processing and disseminating information (Gilchrist, 2009). More specifically, how it manages to simultaneously embrace multitudes of objects (Strum and Latour, 1987) within an increasingly complex sector. Significantly, “objects” refers to the material resources which are as essential to networks of relations as the human actors are. It is these material objects, as non-human actors, that work to stabilise pure, human interactions and render them durable (Murdoch, 1997). To not recognise the roles these actors undertake is to therefore limit our understanding of human actions and interactions to social skills alone (Latour, 1994; Strum and Latour, 1987). Of key importance here is that, as a theory which embodies a poststructuralist sensibility, ANT maps networks from the frames of reference from within that network with the results therefore recognisable to all involved in the network. Furthermore, this discourages the integration of abstract concepts and theories as all elements of the network are traceable back to active participants of the network (Michael, 2016).

To adopt ANT is to utilise a set of conceptual tools to undertake a material operation of creating order among actors (Nimmo, 2011). However, underpinning this is a set of tenets to be adhered to. These tenets form the point of departure necessary to be able to reclaim an “empirical grasp” (Latour, 2005) of a particular network and to understand the complexities within it. Therefore, the dominant focus of this paper as follows discusses the interface between tenets of ANT, as systematised by Michael (2016), and core concerns in the field of social enterprise development. Specifically, the ANT tenets focused on within this paper state that.

1. A network must be approached with no prior assumptions or prescribed frameworks,

2. A “flat ontology” is the primary point of departure, and

3. There are no analytical differences between human and non-human actors.

When applying ANT, it is crucial that a network should be approached with no prior assumptions or prescribed frameworks. The use of pre-designed structures restricts the perspective of a network to within the boundaries of that particular structure (Latour, 1996, 2005). Rather than doing so, ANT instead attempts to reassemble the network in question by assembling it from the inside out (Latour, 2005). Therefore, any existing structures found are understood to be a product of interactions between actors within a network. Corresponding to this, when applying ANT to a research project, ontological distinctions are eroded, and a “flat ontology” is adopted. This flat ontology rejects the perspective that society is organised around different levels or depths, and instead upholds that society is organised in flat lengths of associations and relations between actors (Latour, 2005; Law, 1992). In this way, a flat ontology should be recognised as a borderless metaphysics that accounts for technologies and wider industries as inherent parts of nature (Haraway, 2015).

This aligns with the final, and perhaps the most controversial, tenet of ANT that an analytical distinction between human and non-human actors of a network is refused. Instead, ANT holds that networks are heterogeneous in nature, consisting of both human and non-human, or object, actors (Latour, 2005; Williams, 2020). As Law states, all actors of a network are understood to have no inherent qualities, that these are instead produced as a relational effect of the network, and therefore, the distinction between human and non-human actors is of little analytical importance and should therefore be considered a secondary matter (Law, 2008, p. 147). In this instance, an actor is “any entity that more or less successfully defines and builds a world filled by other entities with histories, identities, and interrelationships of their own” (Callon, 1990, p. 140). As such, the actor as a collective or as an individual is regarded in the same way under what has become recognised as generalised symmetry (Latour, 2005; Michael, 2016).

Despite the shared goal of developing social enterprises, the multifaceted nature of social enterprises has led to contested understandings of what the realisation of this development should actually be. The varied range of interests in social enterprise development in Ireland is described as a “tapestry of networks” (Kelliher et al., 2023), a term which captures the plurality of social enterprise models as well as the need for an ecosystem capable of supporting ongoing, and rapidly changing, development (Defourny and Nyssens, 2021). As such, the need to bridge the gap between theory and practice has been recognised under structuralist lenses which reinforce the idea of the gap as the distinctly defined chasm between the state and communities (Hustedde and Ganowicz, 2002; Kelliher et al., 2023). Significantly, the pluralist lens which anchors ANT’s point of departure directly opposes this through the understanding that the actors involved in these networks are multifaceted and have multiple and varied interests which rarely are neatly aligned to one entity over another. This is the recognition that, for example, a local government employee is also a member of, and has an interest in, their own local communities. Therefore, if the scale and impact of social enterprises are to be developed to any extent, theory and practice need to be bridged in a sense which encompasses all involved and not just a select few (Defourny and Nyssens, 2021).

In attempt to address this, the advantages of adopting ANT as a theoretical methodology can be raised. Firstly, by approaching a network without prior assumptions or frameworks, ANT creates the opportunity to negotiate a shared frame of understanding recognisable to all involved. Especially when considering the rapid pace of change for social enterprises, resulting vulnerabilities are often underpinned by fear, uncertainty and doubt surrounding the ill-management of change (Chong and Ng, 2011). This accounts for the idea that social enterprise stakeholders operate among many collaborative dimensions, often combining different resources and different logics to achieve their objectives (Van Twuijver et al., 2020). As Steiner et al. (2019) describe, social enterprise is a marriage between opposing values.

Following this, the adoption of a flat ontology works to dissolve the structuralist concepts which become blind spots to the development of versatile and adaptable ecosystems. As a result, the environment of a social enterprise can be further related to a local context through interobjective associations (Latour, 1987). This attachment grounds activity into the context of a social enterprise in place of abstracting particular frames of reference as levels. Steiner et al. (2019) describe how these levels, micro as the community level, meso as the institutional level and system as the regime level, can be taken together and understood collectively as evidence towards the development of social enterprises. However, following this approach, then the cohesive and intertwined nature of social enterprise ecosystems are lost to the necessity of translating insights between these fixed levels of interpretation. With this in mind, the flat ontology anchoring ANT can be used to appreciate the potential impact of social enterprises as a central driver of growth through directing understanding from the inside out, rather than across levels.

Finally, by upholding no analytical difference between human and non-human actors, ANT instead places significance on the actors who are mediators of a network that will “transform, translate, distort, and modify the meaning or the elements they are supposed to carry” (Latour, 2005, p. 39) through a network. That is, the entities that translate information and elements in such a way that they directly contribute to the resulting state of affairs. For social enterprises which connect social, spatial and cultural boundaries (Steiner et al., 2019), being able to identify the entities which produce these connections enables us to further understand how collective action occurs among different stakeholders. To demonstrate the capabilities of ANT in undertaking this task, the core tenets of ANT can be applied to the concepts of structure, power and shared meaning as key concerns within the field of social enterprise development studies.

Classic approaches to community development, primarily functionalism, conflict theory and symbolic interactionism (Hustedde and Ganowicz, 2002), have embedded the idea of structure into the foundations of the field with the idea that social enterprise is constructed around the ideologies prevailing in a society (Kenny, 2016) that need to be challenged and subsequently transformed. The limitation here, however, is that this idea of structural transformation infers the idea of an “ideal community” that development efforts are working towards. This is especially evident in the ingrained idea that social enterprise development and community development practice exists within a macro- and micro-social dichotomy (Meade et al., 2016; McDonagh, 2017). Investigations into social enterprise development and particular paradigms of community development therefore focus their energies on exposing structures of power and transforming the relations which result in marginalisation and exclusion (Shaw, 2011).

Attempts have been made to mitigate this dichotomy, the adoption of Giddens’ structuration being a notable example (Hustedde and Ganowicz, 2002; Collins, 1988). However, the “in-between” level of analysis this proposes ignores the inherently material basis of communities by reducing actions to happening within these “levels” that exist outside of time and space (Collins, 1988), creating, as a result, a disconnect from the empirical social system of the actors involved (Hustedde and Ganowicz, 2002). Equally, the “meso-”level has been proposed as a space where tensions are experienced by communities of place, interest, struggle or identity (McCrea et al., 2017). However, this depicts an area where influences overlap between the macro- and micro-level and does not account for a plurality of individual realities and the multiple and varied nature of associations that any one individual has.

With regards to structure as a key concern in the community development field, the application of ANT as a post-structuralist approach requires that no prior assumptions of structure or frameworks are applied to cases of social enterprise development research. The value of approaching a network with no prior assumptions within the field of social enterprise development lies in the implicit and complex nature of community development practice. This considers the impossibility of recognising and understanding the multiple realities within a particular network without first exploring the current state of affairs of the existing network. To illustrate this, Latour uses the analogy of a painter who picks a frame for a painting, before painting the actual picture itself (2005). This is coupled with the slogan to “follow the actors”, implying that the actors, as the constructors of their own networks and realities, are those who teach by disclosing information and enabling observations about their networks, rather than be given social explanations about their lived experiences by experts who carry and apply assumptions to an analysis.

From a perspective unfamiliar with processes of particular sectors, in this instance the social enterprise development sector, actions and interactions can appear chaotic and improvised (Boin and Van Eeten, 2013, p. 442). Without the guidance of prescribed frameworks, active relations between actors are captured as an actor-network. Yet, where frameworks enact the traditional tendency of emphasising structure and stability as guiding the behaviour of actors (Steen et al., 2006), this carries the assumption of a boundary to action and limits identified behaviours to the boundary of corresponding classifications, regardless of what actions are ongoing. Latour (2005) instead emphasises that the focus of enquiry should be the mediators of the network in question, as the actors who translate information and elements internally into the network and consequently are direct contributors to the current state of affairs of a network. Therefore, although the application of ANT is without a traditional framework to benchmark the actions of a network, if a mediator’s actions hold enough significance to have a great or lasting effect on a network, then it will be recognised when attempting to visualise or analyse the relations between actors of a network.

Without a stabilising framework to benchmark insights, the continually changing social enterprise development environments flit between tensions and possibilities that emerge amidst the changing dynamic of the relationships of stakeholders involved (Meade et al., 2016, p. 10). Instead, the application of ANT works to build an existing network from the inside out, with any resulting structures understood as products of interactions between actors of a network (Latour, 2005). For the social enterprise development sector, this approach holds that it is impossible to know all elements which compose a network without first exploring the existing structures. A key example of this is the recognition and understanding of social enterprise expertise. There is a consensus that local knowledge has the potential to complement expert knowledge that typically informs the development of policy and regulation (Eversole 2011). This so-called professional knowledge stems from the recognition that community development practice requires particular skills and expert knowledge that is not inherently found in communities (Kenny, 2016, p. 49).

Notably, neither labelled forms of knowledge are in any way isolated. Rather, these can be recognised as organised sets of relations which are seen to represent distinct fields of knowledge and expertise (Tortoriello et al., 2012). However, actors can be involved in multiple and continuing translations across a single set of relations ordering, as well as being embedded within multiple networks with varied interests to be upheld. From this, it can be understood how the social enterprise development practitioner’s role has been characterised as ambiguous. Negating this perspective means approaching the social enterprise development sector using means of mobilising development that are sensitive to the local reality that it is intended for (Fussell, 1996). In line with this, any results or insights uncovered by ANT, including the character and nature of a social enterprise network, can be understood through the empirical specificity of the relationship between actors (Michael, 2016).

ANT upholds that there is nothing but actor-networks; however, these are not networks in the sense of technical networks (Latour, 1996, p. 369). Rather, the actor-networks presented in ANT act as a relational materiality in the sense that the relations between entities of a network are more fundamental for the application of ANT than the entities themselves. The entities of a network, therefore, achieve their form as a consequence of the relations which form the network (Law and Hassard, 1999). By investigating a particular case as an actor-network, a researcher sets out to describe, rather than to explain, the actor-network at hand. As Latour states, “only bad descriptions need an explanation” (2005, p. 147). In doing so they piece together the relations of, for example, a social enterprise, as an actor-network “map”.

Beyond “mapping” together relations between entities, ANT acts as a “conceptual toolkit” in order to add a legend to this map. The adoption of ANT sets out a disparate family of material-semiotic tools (Law, 2008) which can be used to map a particular network of heterogeneous actors as it exists in its current state of affairs. Although this presents a landscape in which there is nothing but networks (Latour, 1996), the intriguing thing about ANT is this ability to let the processes happening reveal themselves through this process of “following the actors” (Latour, 2005). As a result of this, the work undertaken has a strong empirical attachment. Rather than being stabilised through the application of theoretical frameworks, the stabilising factors in this case are the contextual conditions of the environment being studied. For the study of social enterprise development, the benefit here lies in the ability to present, or reveal, a network at hand which relates the contents with the context of a particular community.

Therefore, by refraining from applying prescribed frameworks to the case of a social enterprise network, it becomes possible to look beyond the contested historical and political influences on the community development sector and look at the intricacies of what is happening in the “here and now”. The focus is shifted to empirical process of organising and how this produces particular divisions or distinctions as effects or outcomes (Law and Hassard, 1999). In this way, the application of ANT to social enterprise development networks has the capacity to enable the examination of a network while also being able to accommodate the constantly shifting nature of the working environment (Latour, 1999).

Power has always had close semantic connections (Meade et al., 2016) with community development, primarily through the concepts of empowerment and power in relationships. Within the study of community organisations, it has been suggested that the issue of power needs to be central to analysis and outcomes, including a recognition of the power held and translated by the larger political economy (Meade, 2012, p. 14). More specifically, in the same way that action is mediated through relations, autonomy and control is determined as a result of such actions and relations. In this way, power within social enterprise development studies arguably takes shape as “power over”, that is, power that shapes personal and social lives in such a way that communities converge, and collective action is organised (Meade et al., 2016). However, under an ANT lens, power is acknowledged, not as a cause, but as an effect, or a function of network configuration (Law, 2008). That is, ANT scholars do not assume the possession of power but rather trace how power is produced as an effect of wielding influence, deploying resources and establishing durable patterns of association among actors (Michael, 2016). As Shaw (2011) states, the role of community development in enhancing agency is second to understanding how power and agency mediates and enacts control. Therefore, to fully appreciate the interface of this understanding of power within the field of social enterprise development the realisation of power as the designation of agency takes centre stage.

When discussing agency within an actor-network, the agents at hand are heterogeneous in nature. Actor-networks are entities that do the tracing and inscribing in the sense that it is the relations between humans and non-humans which co-create a network by producing the resulting effects and outcomes (Latour, 1996). As such it is the different types of forces woven together through their differences which produces this collective action (Latour, 2005). This is recognisable within a social enterprise as a spatially and culturally bounded entity (Meade et al., 2016). By taking into consideration and defining the mediums through which collective action is negotiated, it makes it possible to identify the roles that various actors undertake within a network, and in turn the influences and factors that determine their character (Bielenia-Grajewska, 2020). In the field of social enterprise development, this highlights the influences which shape the frames of reference of members of the wider community and the influences which shape the collective reality of the network (Fussell, 1996, p. 45). It is the material, or non-human elements of a network which translate a social enterprise from a “reality conceived” to a “reality practised” (Czarniawska and Joerges, 1995).

It has been debated that the lack of distinction between human and non-human actors in a network does not take into account the intentionality of humans (Walsham, 1997) and instead emphasis is only placed on whether the actors strengthen or expand the network in question (Amsterdamska, 1990). However, to prioritise the intentionality of human, a distinction between the human and non-human actors would require the isolation of actions and movements to one particular actor, something which would be difficult to do when considering that the agency of human actors cannot be enacted without the agency of non-human actors (Nimmo, 2011). This occurs within networks to the extent that non-human actors can perform ambivalently, as Michael (2016) states; non-human actors can “oblige their users” to act in particular ways. A key example here is a community centre that has been designed and organised in a particular way to facilitate the function of producing solidarity within a local environment.

As a result of the proliferate perceptions of community development, often the human actors themselves are not aware of the presence of the network or their individual role and contribution to movement through the network (Latour, 2005). In this way, the total exclusion of non-human actors would severely limit the capacity to explore a network being researched. Without the inclusion of nonhuman actors what is assembled would rely entirely on the intentional and meaningful actions of humans. However, by doing so the resulting depiction is one of a network that only exists in the domain of causal relations (Latour, 2005). This then neglects to consider that the composition of a network is also highly reliant on the reflexive, or symbolic domain of associations. The agency of a network is reliant on the production of collective action. Referring again to a community centre, it is the contribution of such material entities, the building itself and any other equipment and materials used, that enables the realisation of social enterprise and community groups. As Strum and Latour (1987) note, without necessary materials, actors could not build stable societies using only their bodies as resources. Therefore, the value of recognising power as an effect produced by heterogeneous collective action lies in the inclusion of all entities involved in the empirical form of a social enterprise or community group.

Bridging the idea of society as collectivity (Latour, 2005) is the understanding of shared meaning. Within social enterprise development studies, given that community development is about the strengthening of solidarity (Bhattacharyya, 1995), then practitioners must be concerned about the meaning people give to places and people (Hustedde and Ganowicz, 2002). This depicts an interesting paradox in the field of community development where on one hand, there is an increasing homogeneity of context as people across the world experience shared conditions (Meade et al., 2016), and on the other, there is a keen acknowledgment of difference as crucial to processes of claims-making across the globe (McCrea et al., 2017). To understand the production and effect of shared influence within the field of social enterprise development, ANT provides an alternative point of departure capable of taking into account meanings as they are negotiated and shared among varying collectives of social enterprise actors. This point of departure is underpinned by a “flat” ontology. This is a relational point of departure which enables the empirical specificity of any identified shared meanings to be unpacked and defined (Michael, 2016) by focusing in on the connections between entities rather than on the entities themselves.

A flat ontology rejects the perspective that society is organised around different levels or depths, and instead upholds that society is organised through relations between actors (Latour, 2005; Law, 1992). A key application of this to the field of social enterprise development is the rejection of the analytical distinction between the macro- and micro-social (Latour, 1996; Law, 1992). Within the field of social enterprise development, this displaces the prevalent dichotomy between “top-down” institutions that operate on a macro scale, such as national governments or the European Union, and “bottom-up” social enterprise groups which operate at a micro-, or grassroots level (McDonagh, 2017; Daly, 2007). Social enterprise development organisations can be positioned, and argued, to straddle both of these realities, making this dualism redundant. As Haraway (2015) states, in this sense a flat ontology should be recognised as a borderless metaphysics that considers both industry and technology to be inherent parts of nature. By doing so, all elements of a network can be visualised and analysed at the same level, enabling the reclamation of an empirical grasp (Latour, 2005). This new grasp is a collective of present realities no longer represented as the mega-social entity that is not tangible, to something that can be recognised and traced back down to individual actions of actors in the network. It is not limited to the boundary of one specific depth and does not need to flit between depths as a result. The relational roots of a flat ontology therefore provide an opportunity to theorise the current state of affairs of a network by reconciling both the contents and the context of an actor-network.

However, the difficulties here lie in the fact that the lack of prescribed structures adds an additional layer of exploration to an investigation of a particular social enterprise network. Although the tenets of ANT provide a theoretical underpinning to investigate networks, such as social enterprise development networks, its value lies in the fact that it is a theoretical methodology. Where ANT offers a means of exploration from which an explanation can be built, it does not dictate where the limits of the exploration lie. Particularly when considering that a cross-sectional analysis of any network can be never ending in terms of the realities that construct it, there is then a challenge of knowing when the exploration can be considered to be finished. Therefore, a significant time commitment is needed, leading to ANT being dubbed as a “slowciology” (Latour, 2005, emphasis in original). However, aligned with community development studies this echoes calls against quick fixes (Meade et al., 2016) which dull the richness and quality of work being carried out. Although limiting, time, therefore, is a vital requirement for undertaking a material operation of creating order and working towards empirical progression.

This paper proposes ANT as a conceptually sound theory suitable for application to social enterprise development studies in Ireland. In order to do so, the tenets of ANT are woven in through key concerns of community development theory as a means of outlining the theoretical capacity and possibilities of this application. The adoption of ANT involves approaching a case at hand with no prior assumptions or frameworks. The significance of this within the social enterprise development field is that makes traditional frameworks, for example the structuring of macro and micro entities, redundant. Instead, under an ANT lens a social enterprise is recognised as a self-organised web of relations (Gilchrist, 2019), the production of which can be traced through relations between the actors involved. This works to account for the production and reproduction of long-standing themes of community development, as well as being able to account for distinctly new tensions (Meade et al., 2016).

These processes of production are recognised as being carried out by collectives of heterogeneous actors who, as a result, perform the function of network configuration (Law, 2008). Where individual actors may not be aware of the presence of the network or of their individual role in the network, the effects of the networks such as power and influence can be traced back to particular configuration of actors. Significantly, this takes into account the involvement and agency of all entities involved, be they human or non-human. The decentring of the human actor coincides with the recognition of plurality within social enterprise networks. That is, the frames of reference of the multiple and varied actors involved can, and should, be taken into account in order to appreciate the construction of shared meanings within and throughout social enterprises.

From this, the social, political and historical practices within social enterprise and community development can be reattached to their working environments. Therefore, the current state of affairs of a network can be theorised through the reconciliation of both the contents and the context of an actor-network. Adopting ANT as the overarching perspective, therefore, proposes a means of “mapping” and analysing elements of a network through their relations with one another, doing so, focuses in on the action at hand within and among these actor-networks and enables the reclamation of an empirical grasp (Latour, 2005). The key advantage of this is the ability to work towards empirical development in place of dispersed theoretical understandings, the necessity of which is heightened in light of the increasing crises that our communities are faced with.

Where this paper presents an overview of ANT as a theoretical approach, it also proposes, and invites contributes towards, the application and testing of ANT within the field outlined. With this in mind, the following directions for future research can be proposed. First, in recognition that ANT is taken to be a theoretical methodology, the next natural step is the application of ANT to a case of social enterprise development to put the theoretical basis to the test. In recognition of the discussed tenets of ANT, this involves testing of theoretical limitations. For example, to what extent is it possible for a researcher to approach a particular case with no prior assumptions or prescribed frameworks? This is especially the case where prescriptions, such as existing structural dichotomies, are heavily embedded into both the theory and practice of social enterprise development. Equally, how can the dissolution of analytical differences between humans and non-humans be upheld? Where the inscription of agency into non-human actors can be theoretically appreciated, communicating this in practice requires an additional level of consideration and sensitivity.

By testing these theoretical limitations of ANT, the capacity and ability of ANT to understand and map the complexities of social enterprise development can be further explored. Where social enterprise development studies have been approached through integrated theories from fields such as economics, sociology and entrepreneurship (Van Twuijver et al., 2020), the limits of ANT are yet to be tested within this particular sector. This proposes the question can ANT challenge Hustedde and Ganowicz’s (2002) observation that no single theory is solely sufficient to investigate the complexities of societies, communities and social change? Equally, does ANT have the potential to align with other approaches within social enterprise development studies as a relatively young and rapidly growing academic field? (Van Twuijver et al., 2020).

Alongside this, the evidence gathered through further application of ANT works to build on the currently “patchy” (Steiner et al., 2019) publications on social enterprise development studies. Particularly when considering that much of the existing theoretical evidence relies on siloed structural lenses, there is an urgent need to piece together the current state of affairs of social enterprise development in Ireland across the varying stakeholder networks. Following on from the recent policy developments, the social enterprise sector in Ireland is at a pivotal stage where further deliberate approaches are needed to realise the full scale and impact of social enterprises. As an approach to doing so, ANT provides the conceptual basis to move action from considerations made in hindsight to strategies made in foresight. Therefore, where there is a need for an approach which can accommodate the complexities and fluid dynamics of social enterprise development, ANT offers a plausible alternative to understanding how we can direct change in place of random growth.