Towards a better understanding of Christian social entrepreneurship

Abstract

The purpose of the thesis is to explore the softer, implicit aspects of lived experience (Anderson, 2016) of prosocial/procommunity entrepreneuring practices of Christian SE from my co-inquirers’ perspective in the context of a growing sense of inadequacy of global capitalism and the mainstream materialist-individualist market logic. The thesis highlights the past, current and future life narratives of fourteen Christian-identifying SE and explores how they respond to the tensions arising from balancing the three elements that constitute their narrative identity: the Spiritual Self, the Committed Self, and the Entrepreneuring Self. By giving a voice to the actual experiences of this cohort of Christian SEs, this enquiry has produced valuable descriptions (Moustakas, 1994) of various facets and aspects of the co-inquirers’ experiences of the phenomenon of interest (Vagle, 2014) – namely, living out the trifaceted narrative identity. Each of the two intertwined, complementary modes of analysis has addressed more specific research sub-questions related to the narrative identity construction grounded into the life-story interviewing and adult narrative identity (McAdams, 1985, 1996); and, questions related to meaning-making of the lived experience grounded into an existentialist interpretive, hermeneutic phenomenology (Seidman, 2013; Smith et al, 2012; van Manen, 1997). My co-inquirers stories demonstrate a three-fluid plasma-like character of the trifaceted narrative identity, which flows through the lifeworld, defying materialimmaterial, or worldly-spiritual compartmentalization of the existence. Going “against the grain” of a variety of status quo limitations, the co-inquirers strive for wholistic life, forging their true self through “a synthesis of the finite and the infinite.” Rather than using spirituality and faith for economic instrumentality, they unify their Christian faith, Christian humanistic values, on one hand, and concrete human commitments to prosocial entrepreneuring, on the other, as the force for good in the world. The research didn’t aim to do any psychoanalysis of the co-inquirers or to generate universally generalizable theory.