Impact Work: An Ethnographic Journey into the Craft of Impact Entrepreneurship
- Title of the book: Impact Work: An Ethnographic Journey into the Craft of Impact Entrepreneurship
- Author: Guillaume Dumont
- Published by: Palgrave MacMillan
- Where to find it: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-64661-4
What are your motivations when striking out as an entrepreneur? Is it a passion to create something new to offer the world? Is it a drive for independence? Success? To leave a legacy? Or is it a desire to make an impact?
Usually, it is all of the above – after all nobody throws themselves into the relentlessly demanding world of entrepreneurship casually. Research shows that almost half of entrepreneurs battle high stress in their daily lives, as well as experiencing anxiety, insomnia, burnout and a lack of work-life balance, especially in those early formative years.
But, in recent years, the desire to create impact has been perhaps a greater driving force than others. According to the latest Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) report at least one in two new entrepreneurs identified sustainability as a priority, and more than one in two new entrepreneurs were found to have taken concrete steps to minimise the environmental impact of their new business across 28 of the 45 economies surveyed. Established business owners, the report finds, were even more active, with at least one in two taking steps to reduce environmental impacts in 36 economies. Furthermore, regardless of income level new entrepreneurs were found to prioritise good environmental or sustainability practices above economic performance.
But, great ideas and ethically sound intentions don’t always equate to success. How can socially motivated entrepreneurs ensure that their aspirations can be realised, endure, and create the impact they wish to leave upon the world?
Enter Guillaume Dumont – Associate Professor of Anthropology and director of the Institute for Ethnographic Research at emlyon Business School.
Guillaume’s latest book: Impact Work. An Ethnographic Journey into the Craft of Impact Entrepreneurship, provides a critical, ethnographically grounded examination of the hype surrounding the idea of impact by investigating the work of those attempting to create innovative social ventures.
By exploring the day-to-day running of a social impact accelerator, his book offers readers a behind-the-scenes and first-hand look at how entrepreneurs learn the ropes of impact entrepreneurship – the networks they build, and the key players needed to craft and successfully launch their ideas into the world.
The book, seeks to look beyond and challenge the idea that social impact entrepreneurship is driven by idealistic individuals. There is in fact a lot more that comes into it. Social networks, engagement and negotiation Dumont shares, are a crucial part of whether an idea leaves the drawing board. Collaboration is the way forward.
We sat down with him to find out more…
Can you tell us about the inspiration behind your new business book? What motivated you to write it?
Between 2017 and 2019, I was doing fieldwork in a social impact accelerator, an organisation helping entrepreneurs turn their ideas into a venture with a social or environmental impact. At that time, impact entrepreneurship was relatively new, and my goal was to document the beyond-the-scene work involved in creating these ventures.
I used anthropological fieldwork techniques, which posits that to talk about people, we must spend long period of time working and living among them. Only through this process of cultural immersion can we produce practically relevant and theoretically sound insights.
“Today entrepreneurs must be able to seize opportunities that will have a major social or environmental impact while being economically profitable. More broadly, we need people to think about more than making a profit to positively impact the world.”
– Guillaume Dumont
With this goal in mind, I spent hundreds of days working alongside impact entrepreneurs, program managers, innovation and communication directors, impact investors, policy-makers, and consumers. This book shares their stories and documents the rise of impact entrepreneurship, a new form of social entrepreneurship in which economic profit and social or environmental impact go hand in hand.
What are the key takeaways or main ideas that readers can expect to find in your book?
The book is packed with compelling insights grounded in fine-grained empirical data explaining what it takes to create impact enterprises.
The book challenges the view that impact is a given property of a venture resulting from an intrinsic desire to change the world embodied by gifted and compassionate entrepreneurs. Instead, I show that an impact enterprise is as much the product of a whole series of actors—e.g., program managers, innovation and communication directors, impact investors, mentors, and policy-makers—and their shared norms, roles, and meanings as it is the creation of an individual entrepreneur. The book is very much about how they find ways to collaborate in the production of impact work.
Who is the target audience for your book, and how do you believe it will benefit them?
Impact work lies at the crossroads between the scholarly and trade markets. Given the widespread interest in impact entrepreneurship, I wrote the book with a broad audience in mind, from scholars to policy-makers, students, and impact aficionados.
Readers will particularly enjoy both the anthropological objective to provide a critical take on the challenges involved in creating impact enterprises and the book’s literary style, which brings to the fore the real-life stories of my fieldwork characters. Indeed, the unique craft of ethnographic writing provides stories with rich and accessible analyses that make it enjoyable for a broad readership.
What do you think makes this topic particularly relevant or timely in today’s business world, or for the years ahead?
The subject has timely mass appeal, considering the critical social and environmental issues contemporary societies face on a global scale. Impact entrepreneurship is increasingly promoted as the solution to some of the world’s most pressing social and environmental problems.
“Impact entrepreneurship is increasingly promoted as the solution to some of the world’s most pressing social and environmental problems.“
– Guillaume Dumont
It has become a core focus of public and private actors to foster the development of new and more sustainable paths to economic growth. Indeed, today entrepreneurs must be able to seize opportunities that will have a major social or environmental impact while being economically profitable. More broadly, we need people to think about more than making a profit to positively impact the world.
Can you discuss any specific case studies or real-world examples from your book that illustrate its principles in action?
Central to the development of impact entrepreneurship is the intentionality of the people to have a social or environmental impact. Indeed, there is a widespread belief that entrepreneurs, investors, corporate executives, and the like must have a clear intention to have an impact and not only economic goals. How, however, can we assess of the credibility of their intentions when the risk of deviating from social impact toward economic profitability is high? My book answers this question, emphasising the role of several aspects of entrepreneurs’ behaviours in assessing their intentions and enabling decision-making during the investment process, for instance.
How does your book add to/expand existing discussions on this topic?
While there is no shortage of books about impact and social entrepreneurship (sensational accounts by journalists and entrepreneurs, how-to books by social entrepreneurship gurus, textbooks for aspiring impact entrepreneurs and impact investors, etc.), there are no books that provide an in-depth, ethnographically grounded, theory-driven look into the production of impact.
Impact work offers a fresh and much-needed look into the day-to-day activities of entrepreneurs, investors, mentors, and corporate partners that constitute their main object of inquiry. It provides a rare window into how impact entrepreneurship works, not offered by most scholarship in the field because of its quantitative nature. It also proposes new theoretical tools imported from sociology and anthropology.
Several key insights developed in this book apply to the broader field of entrepreneurship research because they centre on processes shared by commercial entrepreneurs.
Finally, what book written by another author would you consider essential reading for your audience and why?
I found Emily Barman’s “Caring Capitalism. The Meaning and Measure of Social Value” (2016) to be an essential read to understand the inception of the phenomenon and be able to comprehend important aspects of its current stage of development, such as the role of intentionality.
Interview by Peter Remon
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