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Much has been written about the reasons for and impact of marketisation on charities, their clients, and wider civil society. A central component of the marketisation thesis is that charities are substituting grants and donations with commercial revenue. However, there is no consensus in the existing literature as to whether the two sources of revenue are substitutes or complementary. This paper shows that between 2003 and 2007 there was a significant increase in the proportion of overall revenue attracted from commercial sources by charities in England and Wales. Using our preferred generalised method of moments estimation model we show that the annual persistence of commercial revenue overtime was 44 %. In particular, a +10 % change in grants and donations was associated with a −3.1 % change in commercial revenue.

The following acknowledgement was omitted from the original publication:The authors would like to acknowledge the support of the BBSRC (The Biotechnology and Biosciences Research Council) for the funding of IKnowFood at York which is 4-year research programme being funded through the Global Food Security-Food System Resilience programme with contributions from BBSRC, ESRC, NERC, and the Scottish Government.The authors apologise for this oversight.

Of late, social enterprise has been portrayed as a ‘muscular discourse' which ostensibly transforms, by dint of ideological force, third sector organisations and practitioners into economic agents. This paper argues that such a critique chiefly ignores that ‘social enterprise' does not automatically and indeed not fully determine third sector organisations. Asserting that discourse, rather than being imposed on the individual, implies a subject who affirms its power, we argue that discursive conceptualisations of ‘social enterprise' are incomplete without empirical studies focusing on the actual reception of its call in concrete (linguistic) situations. Drawing from a longitudinal research study in the UK third sector, we use Pecheux's work on dis/identification to illustrate processes of identification, counter-identification and disidentification which refer to how third sector practitioners, to a greater or lesser extent, endorse or reject the discursive invocation. By placing the complex identity work of practitioners at the heart of our study, the article aims to develop a fuller, more ambiguous and politicised understanding of processes of dis/identification, pinpointing how the different patterns perpetuate or transgress respectively the broader (discursive) context in which they are enacted.

Evidence can be symbolically managed to legitimise policy actions and conceal ideology. Social enterprise is a contested concept which has become a site for policy intervention in many countries. In the UK the government has invested significant resources into social enterprise infrastructure, partly to increase the capacity of social enterprises to deliver public services. Government publications show the number of social enterprises to have increased from 5300 to 62000 over a five year period. This paper explores the myth of social enterprise growth in the UK through a methodological critique of the four government data sources used to construct and legitimise this myth. Particular attention is paid to how political decisions influence the construction of evidence. We find that growth is mainly attributable to a political decision to expand the concept and include new organisational types in sampling frames. We conclude that contested concepts provide particular scope for the politically motivated construction of evidence.

The contested concept of social entrepreneurship has gained particular prominence in academic literature over the last few decades. To explore how patterns of understandings relating to social entrepreneurship have emerged and shifted over time, we undertook a critical historical review focusing on the most highly cited social entrepreneurship articles in each of five time periods over the last 30 years. We identify four thematic areas—conceptualization, theoretical approaches, the search for data, and social change outcomes—characteristic of each period, allowing us to plot the terrain of social entrepreneurship scholarship over time. We show how patterns emerge across these themes over time and relate our analysis to wider developments in the field. In concluding, we discuss how the concept has been theoretically and conceptually enriched by an ability to accommodate critique.