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This paper aims to examine the suitability of a social enterprise model for community health promotion organisations working in disadvantaged neighbourhoods. It focuses on organisational culture, social resources and capacity as pre-requisites for entrepreneurial activities.

This paper is based on ethnographic case studies in England, including semi-structured interviews with the organisations’ staff, trustees and external stakeholders; participant observation; creative method workshops with staff; and feedback meetings with staff and trustees.

The paper provides empirical insights into the potential for, and the consequences of, introducing entrepreneurial ways of working to community health promotion organisations. It suggests that pre-existing capacity, competencies and skills, as well as the ability to manage cultural hybridity, are key factors.

Studying three organisations allowed comparative analysis, but time constraints limited access to some stakeholders and meant that the researcher could not be continuously present. Fieldwork generated a series of “snapshots” of each organisation at several time points.

Community health promotion organisations should be mindful of the social and cultural implications of following the entrepreneurial route to income generation. Policymakers need to be more aware of the challenges community health promotion organisations face in taking on entrepreneurial ways of working.

This paper contributes new empirical insights into the process of community health promotion organisations adopting entrepreneurial ways of working. This is underpinned by Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, which provides a new theoretical lens for examining the social and cultural aspects of this transition.

As a critical and intimate form of inquiry, ethnography remains close to lived realities and equips scholars with a unique methodological angle on social phenomena. This paper aims to explore the potential gains from an increased use of ethnography in social enterprise studies.

The authors develop the argument through a set of dualistic themes, namely, the socio-economic dichotomy and the discourse/practice divide as predominant critical lenses through which social enterprise is currently examined, and suggest shifts from visible leaders to invisible collectives and from case study-based monologues to dialogic ethnography.

Ethnography sheds new light on at least four neglected aspects. Studying social enterprises ethnographically complicates simple reductions to socio-economic tensions, by enriching the set of differences through which practitioners make sense of their work-world. Ethnography provides a tool for unravelling how practitioners engage with discourse(s) of power, thus marking the concrete results of intervention (to some degree at least) as unplannable, and yet effective. Ethnographic examples signal the merits of moving beyond leaders towards more collective representations and in-depth accounts of (self-)development. Reflexive ethnographies demonstrate the heuristic value of accepting the self as an inevitable part of research and exemplify insights won through a thoroughly bodily and emotional commitment to sharing the life world of others.

The present volume collects original ethnographic research of social enterprises. The editorial develops the first consistent account of the merits of studying social enterprises ethnographically.