ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that a business case narrative is being privileged in the discourse surrounding social enterprise research to the detriment of providing conceptual and theoretical recognition of the social. It identifies a lack of engagement between the social enterprise studies and those in the area of social movement studies and radical geography. The literature on business and management is vast, has an orthodoxy and international legitimacy, is well structured and apparently offers both theoretical and practical solutions. Critical management a discourse within this field has developed since the early 1990s, and has produced a wealth of compelling re-evaluations of the business case drawing upon the approaches of critical realism and critical theory. Social spaces as described so far are not necessarily in contention with existing organisational and symbolic structures of power and domination. The social movement and radical geography literature that is drawn upon in this paper is largely concerned with the former.
