Between the Lines: Sheila Cannon

When did you first come up with the idea for the book?

Trinity Business School is part of a collaboration of business schools called the Council on Business & Society (CoBS). During Covid, they organised a webinar on social entrepreneurship. Through preparing and delivering this webinar I got to know Dr Concepción Galdón, Professor of Social Entrepreneurship in IE Business School in Madrid. Our conversations coalesced around a shared message: through our work with social enterprises and social entrepreneurs much had been accomplished to date and research had captured some of it; but what wasn’t captured well yet was how some of the excessively promotional messaging around social entrepreneurship had actually stunted its development. We both saw this unmet potential in social entrepreneurship, and we started outlining what that looked like. At that time, CoBS was developing a book series, and we proposed co-authoring a book on this topic.

Did you start out with the intention of writing a book about a particular topic, or did a book begin to make sense as you were researching?

The overall idea for the book grew from our teaching and engagement with social enterprises. In terms of my research, I had studied social enterprises in Ireland and tested out some of the international typologies in an article published in 2023 in the Irish Journal of Management. One of the conclusions of that article that warranted further research and thought was the Four Failure Theory, the idea that social entrepreneurship is seen as an improvement on the three sectors (public, for-profit, and non-profit), and on the sector model in general, as it is a hybrid approach to organising for social purpose. For me, this became an explanation for the focus of the book because it provided a basis for understanding “How every sector got so excited about social entrepreneurship” (the title of Chapter 2).

What are the book's main ideas?

The message of the book is two-fold. First, you can’t just throw business tools at social issues and expect a miracle to happen! That is a terribly naïve expectation, but one that is found in some social entrepreneurship approaches. And second, business is not separate from society; while we have learned a lot about how businesses address social issues through the research and practice of social entrepreneurship, this learning has not filtered through to mainstream business, and we still have these simplified conceptions of ‘saints’ and ‘sinners’ – social vs profit-making.

We broke this message down into three parts: the promise, the pitfalls, and the potential of social entrepreneurship. The promise is the idea that much research has taken place over the past twenty years, much has been achieved, and we have learned a lot about how businesses can address social issues. This promise can be seen in four key topic areas: the promotion of individual social entrepreneurs as heroes; an emphasis on measuring social impact; pressure to scale social enterprises; and assuming the necessary ecosystems are in place. The pitfalls section spells out the problems with the high expectations, that contrasts with the promotional approaches to social entrepreneurship. Individual social entrepreneurs were burning out, impact measurement was too reductionist; scaling wasn’t always the best way to increase impact; and ecosystems were fragmented. And finally, the promise lays out where we can go from here, such as how to choose the most appropriate impact lens for your organisation; how social entrepreneurs can find the supports they need from within those ecosystems and elsewhere.

What did writing a book allow you to do that wouldn’t have been possible in another medium eg. journal article?

Writing a book allowed us to talk to a wider audience, and to practitioners. Journal articles are primarily aimed at other researchers, and while that is a valuable way to develop new knowledge, it was particularly rewarding to be the bridge between that research and practitioners in a field that is so applied, and that is filled with so many wonderful practitioners! I hope this book connects practitioners with the research on social entrepreneurship and makes that research more relevant to practice. I also hope that we have provided a synthesis of research and practice that can guide social entrepreneurship into a new phase that can overcome some of the challenges identified in the book.

How did you decide which publisher to place the book with?

CoBS was organising a book series with Routledge (Taylor & Francis Group). They came to us with a proposal that we write a book on social entrepreneurship; the content, message or even approach of that book was open for us to design. The book series intended to convey inspiring ideas, connecting practitioners with research, so it was a great fit.

How long did it take to write?

We held our first meeting with CoBS and agreed to write the book in September 2022. We signed the contract with Routledge in December 2022, and submitted the final edited manuscript in December 2023. So all in all from idea to completion it took just over one year. How did we do that?!

Conchita and I devised an incredibly effective and efficient writing plan! First, via video calls, we mapped out the key topic areas. We then broke this down into chapters and we assigned a word count to each chapter in an Excel document, so we knew the parts we would have to create to make the whole. This helped us to keep track of the overall message throughout the book, and not get lost in any one point we were making. This plan helped to keep all the points (chapters) of similar lengths, and clearly part of an overall narrative, so that the end result wasn’t a list of chapters, but an overall story. More like an album than a playlist, to use a music analogy!

Next, to help us bring the content to life, early on in the process, we agreed on a set of interview questions around the key themes we had identified, and we each interviewed five social entrepreneurs. This helped us to keep the content grounded in the practitioner experience, and also provided us with some rich direct quotations from social entrepreneurs. We are very grateful to them!

For the actual writing, we did most of it during writing workshops. We met for 2-3 days on three occasions, first in TCD (January 2023), then in Segovia (May 2023), and then in Drogheda (September 2023). I had never done intense writing workshops before, and I had my doubts that I would be able to write in such a concentrated way, and in discussion with another person! Normally writing for me is a solo activity. However, we structured our days around writing sessions with good coffee, and reviewing each other’s work, so that we managed to get a lot done in those days and without distractions. Of course, there was also some editing and re-writing outside of the workshops.

Did you ever experience any moments of writer’s block? What did you do to overcome this?

Because of the process we planned, we did not have the chance to experience writer’s block! We broke the task into manageable pieces, so we didn’t sit down to write a whole book, which can be so intimidating. We only ever sat down to write specific chapters in places where we had no distractions, and no other commitments. This was key as both of us have very busy schedules, and it takes serious effort to find concentrated writing time.

What advice would you give someone thinking about writing a book?

Writing is an open creative process, but you can still provide a firm structure around it. This is necessary to protect your writing time! I found it helpful to have a co-author – we held each other accountable to the schedule we had created.

If you could go back in time and give yourself one piece of advice before you started writing, what would that be?

Don’t be afraid that you don’t have time. If the message is compelling, you’ll find the time.