Abstract

"Social Entrepreneurship, Utopianism and early Co-operative Thought in Britain 1820-1855"

David Smith, Wilfrid Laurier University (dasmith@wlu.ca)

In the minds of its promoters, the emergence of modern co-operatives in Britain during the nineteenth century offered radical possibilities to reshape the capitalist order. Robert Owen is the best known of these individuals and has fit nicely into the hero narrative of social entrepreneurship (Teasdale et al. 2023, 4; Chliova, Mair, and Vernis 2020, 1025). Yet recent historical research has demonstrated not only the vibrancy of earlier co-operative thought, especially among the working-class and women, and its non-Owenite influences, such as Christian ideas about reform (Lucas 2023; Madden and Persky 2019; Yeo 1988). This paper uses the social entrepreneurship concept to investigate how working-class and Christian social entrepreneurs were motivated by and relied upon utopian ideas to shape cooperative ventures in Britain from 1820-1855. It takes its orientation from the research of Simon Teasdale and others on the importance of utopianism or the imagining of “desired possible worlds,” to provisioning structuring narratives and linguistic resources to bind social entrepreneurs in a collective process of social innovation and organizational design (Teasdale et al. 2021; Fernando et al. 2018, 779). Records for pre-Rochdale cooperatives are rare, and this paper relies on recently discovered manuscript evidence, newspaper accounts, and early co-operative tracts (Chan Smith 2019; Claeys 2005). The paper proceeds by identifying different utopian visions put forward to advance co-operation by those among the working and upper-classes, explaining how they enabled social entrepreneurs of different classes to combine resources despite mutual suspicion, and examines their practical implementation in early co-operative businesses. The paper thus highlights the importance of sense-making narratives to social entrepreneurship, motivation and organizational design while also tracing the creative potential of utopian narratives, addressing key questions in the literature (Williams et al. 2023). Christian co-operation, in particular, lay behind networks that exported the co-operative model among freed slaves in the United States as well as stimulated educational reform.