Assessing Community Stakeholders
Introduction
A good social entrepreneur is always on a mission to work with other members of their community to solve existing socio-economic problems. In the current three part series of articles on social entrepreneurism we will undergo a step-by-step process that will help us to concretely understand both the nature and process of social entrepreneurism. First, we will begin with an assessment of our socio-economic conditions; Secondly, we will assemble the elements of our socio-entrepreneurial task force, and; Finally, we will design a structured response to a specific set of socio-economic problems that draws from the strength of our task force members and promises to bring about change that would positively and effectively impacts upon our socio-economic reality.
Global Influence:
In today's world order it would be a fatal mistake not to take global influences into consideration when attempting to understand our local socio-economic reality. Over the past decade, the world has witnessed the entrenchment of a global infrastructure that supports economic activities and transactions that are still very much in the process of defining their own parameters without regard to localized economic factors. What this means is that if your local economy is adversely being impacted by such activity, your concerns will not factor into the negotiation. Therefore, large businesses are free to place the profit motive over the welfare and well being of the citizens of its own country.
It is no longer possible to romanticize the slogan, "truth, justice and the American way" and argue that our large corporations would never abandon the people of our country in this way. That is, it has already happened and as a result hundreds of thousands of American workers are out of a job. The ineptitude of our government is implicit in President Obama's hollowed out threat reminding these profiteering corporations that the government will direct its tax breaks to those that do not ship jobs overseas. Although there is no doubt in my mind that the President will make good on his threat, it is like imposing a $ 20,000 fine on a corporation for illegally dumping toxic waste while the corporation earned $ 40 million in profits for doing just that. Stated differently, in the same way that global business interests are in the process of defining their parameters in the new world order, so too is government attempting to find new ways to reinsert compliance and accountability into the equation of large corporate behavior.
In the mean time, naturally, displaced workers in Detroit are very much without jobs and every time you call Hewlett Packard for technical support you will have your call directed to India. Sadly, when you do call tech support, you will not be able to communicate effectively because, as we are now beginning to realize, communication is more than knowing words and their definitions. Without the shared cultural context of being an American, your communicative effectiveness with India's tech support personnel will be more like one android talking to another with only input and output to govern the quality of the assistance you receive. Still, Hewlett Packard saves millions on employee costs by farming out the work where the cost of living is much lower and they are not required to provide health benefits to people they neither know nor care about.
Specific examples of corporate entities that abandon their own citizens do indeed reveal how globalization has impacted the local economies in areas where they previously did business. However, globalization has impacted more than just the local economies where large corporate entities originate; it has also had a very profound impact on small businesses and the way that business itself is performed in association with modern technological sensibilities.
In today's business environment it is completely possible for neighboring contractors to engage in a bidding war for a 100 home construction contract only to have the contract awarded to the one that submitted the lowest bid because they imported their lumber from Brazil where the quality of lumber is better and it is cheap enough to absorb the transportation costs and still allow for a lower bid. The moral of such a scenario, of course, is that it is in the best interest of all small business owners to engage in international trading as part of their business strategy or fall by the wayside and die.
National Influence
The subtext of the contractor's scenario has not fallen on deaf ears. That is, the leadership of the American small business community is fully cognizant of the paradigm shift that is taking place in the global economy and with the advances in technological capabilities. Stated differently, our concern should not be with the small business owner of the future, as every graduate from this point forward will be fully versed and prepared to cope with the demands of today and tomorrow. Rather, if we simply approximate the numbers, we can say that more than 80 % of our country's Gross National Product can be attributed to small business. Let us further say that of that pool of small business owners, 20 % have already made the transition into the new technological sensibilities of today and tomorrow. From the remaining 80 % we can say that another 20 % will still be able to make the transition in the near future. It is the remaining 60 % of our small business community that I will say is "at risk".
The percentages I have just espoused are pedestrian at best. I take poetic license in defense of their use as they are simply intended to illustrate a point. Allow me to create a narrative context within which to understand the point I am attempting to make. Throughout the entire twentieth century we have developed and perfected what can be referred to as industrialized business practices. In this context, for example, it makes perfect sense to ask that all of our corporate documentation be prepared in triplicate; one copy for your records, one for finance and one for management. When someone in the secretarial pool is asked to round-file a document, they are being instructed to get rid of it, to throw it away. Suffice it to say that there are many years of learned behavior that has, for all intents and purposes, become obsolete virtually over night.
There is no doubt that the national influence on the small business community at this point and time is to inform the small business owner that they must either make the transition into modern 21st century business practices or wither and die. In a capitalist country the small business owner must do for themselves and this is at the heart of the problem. There are entirely too many old, dinosaur-like business owners that will insist that their practice of providing quality work at a "reasonable" price will still be enough to keep their business alive. Still others feel that keeping their books by hand has been good enough for them for the past 45 years that it will continue to be good enough for them for 45 more. In addition to the technophobic aspect of this type of thinking is the fact that they are so out of tune with technology they fail to envision the competitive edge that technology represents as well.
State Influence
When it comes to our regional economy, the state of Arizona is in the unfortunate position of being poised to receive the "bad timing" award. That is, just prior to the bottom falling out of the housing industry and the near crash of the American economy as a whole, the state of Arizona had already decided it was time to force its residents to undergo the additional economic hardship of its own paradigm shift. When the national economic downturn first began, Arizona was in the middle of a self-imposed shift from an economy based on cotton, cattle, climate, copper and citrus, to an economy based on a high tech, research, medical and militaristic base of operation. What this means for the suffering masses is that the residents of Arizona were already experiencing higher levels of unemployment for its own set of factors when national economic factors began producing higher unemployment and hardship across the country.
However, due to the fine planning and preparation that was accomplished when Arizona still had a Governor, before the Governor's seat became nothing more than a pass-through entity to facilitate the further enrichment of the wealthy at the expense of working and middle class children, our state is now able to maintain a level of unemployment that is lower than the national average. It is also true that a healthy economy must be able to maintain a labor pool of unemployed from which to draw workers. Unfortunately, even with our unemployment average being lower than that of the rest of the nation, it is still twice the amount that most economic theorists would describe as healthy.
When we shift our focus to small business, it stands to reason that retail sales of goods and services have decreased across the board as well. While home foreclosures may catch the attention of the media as the most devastating consequence of our problematic economy, it must also be assumed that many business owners have had to close their doors due to our struggling economy. In this context we must also consider the inability of the majority of small business owners to engage in contemporary business practices. In other words, the competitive edge in small business during this period of a struggling economy will necessarily go to those small business owners that are already capable of doing business beyond their locality and under a variety of relations such as business to business sales, procurement with the government, that are facilitated by internet access and contemporary business sensibilities.
Let us shift our focus once again and consider the prospects and opportunities that our graduating high school seniors have to look forward to. I will not do the same for college grads simply because they will have received the appropriate training to become a part of the contemporary business environment. However, not everyone can afford to go to college and so those that must content themselves with their high school diploma must now look forward to gainful employment and the possibility of upward mobility in their chosen career path. The fact that Arizona has a propensity to lose its high school graduates to other locations across the nation is nothing new. Living in the dessert and lacking the luster of large city attractions has been a causal factor in such an exodus for many years. In fact, it is one of the missions of the Tucson Regional Economic Opportunities (TREO) to seek ways to attract and retain our wondering youth. However, unless TREO plans on offering these graduates jobs at their own agency, and in spite of all of their good efforts, they will not be able to succeed in this mission. I do not know, nor can I determine the value of TREO's efforts in these regards under our current economic conditions. What is needed above and beyond anything else is the creation of jobs. Once jobs become available then the efforts of groups like TREO can have a more positive impact.
The Problem Explicated
As this is the first in a three part series aimed at creating a social entrepreneurial project from scratch, so to speak, evolving from the initial assessment of the socio-economic conditions of our target community, to identifying the appropriate stakeholders to invite to the table and culminating with a proposed project that would address and potentially solve the problems identified, it is now time to explicitly state our chosen problems. Thus, having completed our considerations and assessment of the socio-economic conditions of the Tucson area, our community should be extremely concerned with small business owners at risk of losing their businesses as well as with the unemployment rate, particularly as it relates to our population of graduating seniors.
We would do well to keep in mind that since this procedural exercise is being conducted entirely in abstract thought, I, as an individual, am making decisions that could be potentially made by vested stakeholders. For example, I am the one that is concerned with at risk business owners and graduating youth. A committee of community representatives may very well have selected other issues completely different from my own. One of the liberties of being a social entrepreneur is that you get to decide at what point to invoke the participation of the community. Since most social entrepreneurs are almost always either maternalistic or paternalistic, and I am no exception, I will always inevitably identify the problem I wish to have addressed by the community before bringing it to their attention. Naturally, you are free to do it otherwise.
In part two of this series we will be considering the process whereby we bring vested stakeholders to the table to begin the ironing out of a solution to our socio-economic problems. Please be sure to join us on August 16 for the publication of the second part of our series, “Social entrepreneurism: part-2 who to invite to the table”.
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