Social Enterprises in Postcolonial Economies: Articulating Neoliberalism in Practice for a Public Economic Geography.

Social enterprises are primarily seen as entities that further neoliberal hegemony based on dominant Western idioms of the economy and development. Consequentially, the layers of meanings emerging from the varied publics and rationalities that entrepreneurial approaches must reckon with and negotiate within postcolonial economies are obscured in theorizing the field. In responding to the call for a public-centered economic geography, in this article, I argue that the realities of social enterprise practice in postcolonial economies show relationalities between neoliberal and non-neoliberal rationalities. Spotlighting vignettes from my research on mediating social enterprises in India and South Africa, the article aims to initiate discussions on how neoliberalism can be serviced for diverse, reformist, and possibly progressive ends. When understood through concrete tensions and contradictions of practice, the varied ends of neoliberal rationalities challenge established conceptualizations of social enterprises, development, and, subsequently, the economy. Specifically, it enables us to reinscribe the economy as a relational, embedded, and context-dependent category with individualized and collective experiences, opening the possibilities to engage with public experiences of development interventions such as social enterprises instead of relying on dominant universalized conceptualizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]