“That’s a very white thing to say, isn’t it – ‘I had good intentions’”: Reflections and reproductions of power structures in the social enterprise

Building a business motivated by the opportunities inherent in helping vulnerable people is a complicated prospect. In engaging with a question of the ‘dark side’ of social entrepreneurship in the social welfare sector, this paper situates the question of unexpected harmful outcomes in the context of race, gender and class. I argue that social entrepreneurship reflects and reproduces structures of white supremacy, patriarchy and capitalism. I examine ‘Warm Hearts’, a social enterprise delivering material aid, to demonstrate how the organisation incorporated the good intentions motivating their work to construct their beneficiaries as an imagined vulnerable recipient (Daya, 2014). Analysis of empirical data collected during a 12-month digital ethnographic study grounds the values and emotions inherent in the work of this social enterprise by ‘good white people’ (Sullivan, 2014) to explore the tensions of balancing doing good with doing social entrepreneurship, and the unintended and unexpected harmful outcomes that follow.