Browsing by Author "Zhang, Junli Jossta"

This research focused on studying how government constructs the phenomenon of social entrepreneurship in the context of Hong Kong. Social psychological perspectives were applied to develop the theoretical and methodological framework of the research. Seven pieces of government papers and one piece of government speech, in total 28 pages of content, ranging from the year 2007 to the year 2017, were selected as research materials. These official materials were chosen because they explained the government’s social enterprise policy in government’s own language. The main research question “how social entrepreneurship is constructed in Hong Kong?” was divided into three subquestions, respectively, concerning on what repertoires were used by the government to construct roles and positions; on how agency was constructed by the government; and on the effects and consequences that might be brought by the government’s construction of social entrepreneurship. The major findings of the empirical study include: eight subject categories were identified from the government’s construction, and eight repertoires were found being used by the government to construct roles and positions for the subject categories. The study revealed that the goals government constructed for social enterprises were twofold: to become competitive to achieve financial sustainability in the long run, and to provide more low-skilled job opportunities for the socially disadvantaged people. Besides, the study found that the government was positioning itself as the principal of the social enterprise sector, and using the ideology of “helping the socially disadvantaged people to become self-reliant” to justify its policy preference for the Work Integration Social Enterprise. The study further revealed that the success of the social enterprise sector was being attributed to the government’s support and effort, rather than to the effort of the social enterprise operators and the social entrepreneurs. Based on the research findings, two major conclusions were drawn: first, in the context of Hong Kong, the government is using the social enterprise sector as a vehicle to tackle its welfare-reform problems, so the social enterprise sector is treated as a subsystem subjugated to the state’s welfare system; second, the phenomenon of social entrepreneurship in Hong Kong has been constructed by the government as a narrow pursuit, and this construction of social entrepreneurship is being too narrow in scope to accommodate the diversified values of social entrepreneurship.