Words matter. They can inspire and they can wound. They are the foundation on which meaning is communicated and understanding is forged.

We begin with the simple belief that the words we use are of great consequence. That language has power. That striving for a common lexicon among the participants of the blended value universe—those mountaineers climbing the peaks of social enterprise, corporate citizenship, socially responsible investing, strategic philanthropy, and sustainable development—is not only a worthwhile endeavor, but also a necessary one.

The profound revolution in thought and practice that is unfolding around the globe is occurring beneath the shadow of a genuine Tower of Babel. One person’s social enterprise is another person’s social-purpose business venture; one person’s investment is another person’s grant. Who do we identify as a social entrepreneur? How do we know a sustainable practice when we see one? Is the revolution best characterized as an interdisciplinary movement or the birth of a new sector? And if it is a sector, what should it be called?

Consider that last question again. If we can’t even name the sector in which we work and the movement of which we are a part, how can we expect others to understand us, to join us, and to invest in us?

The absence of a common language impedes our work, divides one group from another, and marginalizes the efforts of the whole from effectively communicating its passion and practice to the mainstream. The result is not only inefficiency and illegitimacy for ourselves, but injury to the people and issues that we serve.

Click here to read the glossary (PDF)!

spitzer - Sep 28, 2004 9:57 pm (#1 Total: 10)
Stanford Graduate School of Business


Lexicons may not be the sexiest topic on Social Edge (indeed, the Blended Value Glossary has won its architects nary a single date since we started working on the thing six months ago), but the BVG takes aim at a problem plaguing everyone in this community: we work towards fundamentally similar goals but talk about that work in fundamentally different ways. If existing terms just don’t capture exactly what you do, if you have spent an inordinate amount of energy debating exactly what a “social entrepreneur” is, or if you’re not familiar with the dialect of other blended value silos--then we need your contribution to this conversation!

Please take a few minutes to explore the BVG document (accessible through the link above). It is version one, compiled by several of my colleagues with the guidance of Jed Emerson and Sheila Bonini—-and with the input of the Social Edge community.

The Blended Value Glossary remains a work in progress; accordingly, this conversation can move in any number of directions. This document is an “open source” project, and as such it needs people like you to express ideas about how to advance it. (How can the BVG become more useful? How should it be kept up to date and relevant?) This event might include debates over certain terms, and it might address words that should be added to the BVG. We might even swap linguistic war stories.

I look forward to a lively conversation!

Josh

Ineta - Sep 29, 2004 2:45 am (#2 Total: 10)


I agree that by creating a common vocabulary we could get the message of sustainable development and social entrepreneurship across in a more focused manner. Appropriately ‘charged’ words reinforced by thousands of users could change a vision of some into a belief of many.

Yet, wasn’t it Jed Emerson himself (at the conference in Oxford) who said that we should not waste time on labeling or institutionalizing a new sector; it doesn’t matter what we call it, what matters is what we do, and the more we do to make the world a better place the better? The others will understand us, join us, and will invest in us according to the objectives of every single project…

I vote for the interdisciplinary and cross-sectoral movement avoiding time spent on creating and naming just another silo (with a seed of exclusion in situ). What matters are the values and good that is done, or am I wrong…

Ineta

jimfruchterman - Sep 29, 2004 8:42 am (#3 Total: 10)
Benetech


Words are defined by how they get used, and English is one of those languages where meaning can be quite fluid. I noted that the glossary talks about the differing definitions and usages, which is good. At the same time, I was surprised to see how far some terms were stretched: for example, social enterprise divided into ones with earned income and without earned income. A social enterprise without earned income seems difficult for me to conceive! One of the reasons for renaming the National Gathering of Social Entrepreneurs to the Social Enterprise Alliance was to clearly focus on earned income. We thought that was not controversial...

spitzer - Sep 29, 2004 10:03 pm (#4 Total: 10)
Stanford Graduate School of Business


You’ve raised an interesting question about Jed’s sentiment. I wasn’t in Oxford, but I do know that this glossary was born out of our shared frustration at inefficient and dysfunctional communication within the blended value universe. Indeed, it is counterproductive to drain all of our energy honing our definitions or cramming down new labels on one another. Nevertheless, an investment now in using language thoughtfully and understanding others’ dialects will pay off handsomely. (Unfortunately, Jed is unavailable all week, so we can’t get him to weigh in.)

Throughout the Social Edge community, people are sharing best practices and working to articulating mission, vision, and strategy. Each of those tasks depends on words’ very specific definition and usage. I would bet that many of us are already putting a lot of thought into how we use language.

We’re probably all familiar with the “elevator pitch” (with which entrepreneurs must explain their ventures’ purpose and relevance in only the duration of an elevator ride). Before an entrepreneur can develop her elevator pitch, she must have a thorough facility with VCs’ vocabulary, dialect, and usage—otherwise the VC in the figurative elevator won’t know or care what she’s talking about. The same goes for social entrepreneurs and other folks operating in the social sector (a term and boundary very debatable in its own right). We’re all concerned with scarce resources and must know how to talk in order to get them and distribute them responsibly. Of course, we all have a lot to learn from other silos in the BV universe; knowing how they speak about their work prefigures that the transfer of knowledge and then facilitates it efficiently.

Finally, I would assert that good work and good values do matter profoundly, at least to me, but impact--wide-ranging, replicable, system-changing impact--matters most. To achieve that kind of goal, we must communicate more efficiently.

Josh

spitzer - Sep 29, 2004 10:34 pm (#5 Total: 10)
Stanford Graduate School of Business


Indeed, the glossary does not intend to settle prescriptive definitions. Jim, as you indicated, English just doesn’t work that way. (The many failed efforts to create a gender-neutral singular third-person pronoun serve as an excellent, if pedantic, example of how a living language remains resistant to deliberate change.) Accordingly, the authors were aiming to describe how various terms are used.

Not being one of those authors myself, I don’t how they arrived at the “social enterprise without earned income” item on the organization spectrum. I would guess that the rubric applies to social entrepreneurs’ ventures that are innovatively addressing social ills without a fee-for-service/product model. Perhaps all of us could debate some examples.

Example 1:
Today’s New York Times featured a moving Op-Ed piece by Nicholas Kristof called “Sentenced to Be Raped.” http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/29/opinion/29kris.html In it, he describes Mukhtaran Bibi, who suffered a tribally sanctioned gang rape to punish the alleged sins of her brother. Instead of committing suicide, which was roundly expected of her, she channeled her fame (rather her infamy) into creating schools in her village, an enterprise without a revenue model.

Example 2:
Childline is an emergency hotline in India for street children. It started in Mumbai, helped tens of thousands of children in danger, and now it is being scaled up and implemented in cities all over the country (and I think it has spread to other countries as well). Childline’s founder, Jeroo Billimoria, is an Ashoka Fellow.

What do we call these endeavors? What are the implications of the labels we apply?

Josh

nglock - Sep 30, 2004 5:18 pm (#6 Total: 10)
HIGHER EDge


Dear Josh, Jim and Ineta

I am glad you are working on this issue. Here are some thoughts. First, you may wish to check out the work of Tom Wason on this subject. It is both an excellent example of a glossary and explication of the words ABOUT words.
http://wason.home.mindspring.com/TDW/Glossary.htm

1. The challenge and the power of cross fertilization of ideas has been exponentially increased by Internet whereby folks from everywhere, speaking not even the same natural languages, let alone technical and specialized ones are suddenly trying to make sense of each others worlds. A wonderful thing, but no small challenge.
2. As new practices emerge, words are usually chasing the practice. I thought Jed’s map a good start based not on what words should mean, but on practices as they are in fact emerging, some helpful distinctions built into the model, then try to figure out what words will best convey the desired distinctions.
3. The task that is, is neither merely to describe nor to prescribe. Rather it involves the much more interesting work of building conceptual models robust enough to inform and clarify our discourse. That is, the first task is to make sense of the pheneomena we are tracking, even if we can’t yet communicate about it to well with each other. Good models are quite compelling.
4. A helpful starting place for me: Israel Scheffler (my dissertation advisor), many years ago wrote a discerning little book (all his books are both discerning and little!) on the language of education. In it he distinguished three kinds of definitions or of definitional efforts:
a. Descriptive: Trying to get at the various things people mean by the same word. (Done thoroughly takes you into analytic philosopy where the distinctions can become quite esoteric—yet important, sometimes profound.) The main thing here is to be sensitive to the various uses and clear which one is in play at any given time—without grinding it so fine that we can’t talk anymore. ANY discourse requires a large measure of mutual trust, sort of pointing in a general direction, and cleaning it up as we go—where the distinctions REALLY matter. Otherwise, who cares?
b. Stipulative: When we are in a bounded discourse—law court, computer program, technical field, or just a given meeting and discussion, we can agree to mean the same thing, more or less, by the same words. Thus one more, semi-autonomous language community is created, but the conversation within that community at least can move forward with a minimum of understanding. (See comment number 5.)
c. Programmatic: Where an argument about words isn’t really about words but about behaviors. When a grade school teacher insists she IS a “professional” or a 17 year that he IS an “adult”—the issue is not about words but about how one is to be treated. For that matter, arguing about “murder” isn’t about words either. It’s about whether or not someone’s actions fall in a category that merits, in some states, the death penalty.

Bottom line then: distinctions—and agreements on what to call them—matter WHEN they matter, which is a matter, of what purpose the conversation, and the use of the words is supposed to accomplish in the first place.
5. So, regarding the “descriptive” part.
a. We cannot impose a vocabulary onto the world, but we can help clarify and organize the one that is emerging out there. That takes looking at how people are using the words.
b. Right now the “Ashoka” foundation has a big claim on the word, and the book largely inspired by their work, How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas, by David Bornstein, is having considerable play. He is pretty careful about words. His first chapter makes some helpful distinctions. I think his definition is way too narrow and way too focussed (implicitly) on Ashoka chooses and funds its “scholars”.
c. What happens if you google the word? Some consideration of that is probably in order.
d. Have you checked out the WIKIPIDIA? A lovely exercise with 8000 participants I am told in collective meaning making. And they seem to be doing pretty well. There search function is down today. They may not yet have a term there, so we could “seed” a discussion. Check it out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia
e. The issues raised there are nicely handled by Jebds map. That does capture much of the range of activity swimming around that word.

6. From descriptive to stipulative: Do you know the book “Linked: How Everything is Connected to Everything Else and What it Means for Business, Sceince, and Everyday Life” by Alber-Laszlo Barabasi? It is a very readable tidy explanation of network theory by a leading expert. Anyhow, I find myself applying that theory to this question:
a. Thus, it seems to me, what we get are communities of discourse, “clusters”, who evolve their own vocabularies and understandings.
b. A few of their members enter into discourse further afield (weak links) where the meanings are negotiated, and each carries back the most useful distinctions and definitions to their original clusters, where they gradually gain credence.
c. At the “hub”, say at Stanford and other graduate schools, the matter will get settled authoritatively, encoded in course titles and textbook definitions and new professions, etc. All of this is now evolving. This is the “stipulative” exercise, by which discipline eventually assert themselves. Jed’s work goes HERE.
7. And then, of course, underlying much of it really are issues of conflicting and evolving values and agendas—the “programmatic” stuff.

Personally, I am interested in all three and will try to roll up my sleeves and tackle some actual words the next time I have time to write. Meanwhile, thanks so much for your careful efforts.

a. I just googled Scheffler’s book. You can get it for 2.95, if you want to read his discussion more fully.

spitzer - Oct 3, 2004 10:02 pm (#7 Total: 10)
Stanford Graduate School of Business


Nglock,

Thank you for your thoughtful post full of compelling suggestions and insights. The taxonomy of glossary efforts (descriptive, stipulative, and programmatic--ala Scheffler) is very helpful, and some elaboration on these various functions probably should go into a preface to the next version of the glossary. The second generation BVG editors might also do well to read Barabasi’s book.

When we started the glossary effort, we explored the wiki and the wikipedia--the folks at Social Edge even built tool by which people could develop a glossary through the wiki and could then use a voting mechanism to indicate favored definitions. We never pushed it very far because we first wanted to catalogue the definitions that had already been settled by other glossary efforts across the blended value silos. We decided that a clearing house approach would first help us understand what was out there, and second would ensure that other efforts were recognized and credit would be given appropriately. Now, though, perhaps it is time to invoke the wiki tool. Does anyone have suggestions about how we might use that tool to bring the glossary to its next stage of evolution?

Our original plan for the BVG also included involving academic and practitioner experts; however, before asking them to assist, we wanted to build a product and see how it would be received. This approach follows the way that Jed and Sheila approached the Map: build it then set it free with the hope that the rest of the world will find it useful and develop it further.

I hope that this discussion continues to suggest how the BVG might evolve and become more useful.

Josh

Shores_J - Oct 4, 2004 9:56 am (#8 Total: 10)


It's great to see the struggle with evolving a lexicon. On one hand, we want a set of clear concepts and definitions that people adopt more broadly. On the other hand, we don't want the use of the terms to become so frequent and inappropriate in media and marketing as to dilute the meaning and confuse the audience(s).

For example, the term "ecodevelopment" arrived on the scene in the 1960's (as I recall. Too early for a good Google search <grin>). It had seven or eight conditions (ecological, political, economic, cultural, etc.) attached to it -- too many to remember easily. The 80's and 90's saw more use of the term "sustainable development" and what became the real driving force (perhaps because it was both clear and memorable) behind the concepts you are struggling with here. For the past 20 years or so, we have been calling it "the triple bottom line" to highlight that there is more than just a financial measure of success for true enterprises. The neat feature of "triple bottom line" is that it quickly leads to the next question: what are the three bottom lines? At that point we get to engage the questioner in a discussion of the environmental, social, and economic elements of the triple bottom line.

Unfortunately "blended value" as a term stumbles in two key areas: (1) it's already used in the investment world and is easily confused with similar terms we all see in the 401(k) literature and just about every mailing I get from Fidelity, Vanguard, and T. Rowe Price. And (2) it doesn't self explain nor lead to that crucial follow-up question. To some ears, "blended" triggers images of "mixed" or "compromised."

"Triple Bottom Line" gets about 79,000 hits on Google, while "Blended Value" gets about 2,000. So while it is a new *term*, it is certainly not a new concept, nor particularly unique. Ecodevelopment and eco-development get maybe 15,000 Google hits. Ecotourism, an area where a lot of attention had been paid to the triple bottom line, gets about 627,000 Googles hits. So we have a ways to go -- "Sustainable Development" gets more than 3.8 million.

// John //

soxten - Oct 5, 2004 5:29 am (#9 Total: 10)
president founder of youths sporting help association


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Ineta - Oct 6, 2004 4:07 am (#10 Total: 10)


Dear Nglock,

I am sorry I have dropped out of discussion for several days, and this delayed message will probably fail to deliver my gratitude for the thoughts you've expressed in your message. Very interesting and useful... I am working on a related conceptual model myself, and your insightful reflections are very helpful, so thank you.

Ineta