Abstract
In this inductive, exploratory study, we explore how emotions affect the agency of vulnerable persons and their engagement in social innovation to challenge oppressive institutional constraints. By presenting the in-depth case of a successful entrepreneur from a shantytown, we show how emotions affect the construction of a self that contributes to the reproduction of social order rather than change, and how effective interventions can break the cycle of poverty and hopelessness that is dominant among excluded people. We find that this process is fragile and contingent on the presence of known strangers—that is, a web of actors that contributes not only resources but also emotional engagement that helps the emergence and development of low-power actors’ projectivity. We identify mechanisms for and provide a model of the development and emergence of the projective self that is necessary to engage in future-oriented agency.
An increasing interest in social inequality and injustice has motivated the growth of a literature on social innovations that aim to develop and implement solutions for major social problems (Amis, Munir, & Mair, 2017; Moore & Westley, 2011; Mulgan, 2006; Mulgan, Tucker, Ali, & Sanders, 2007). This line of research has focused on the antecedents and causes of social change, specifically the actions that lead to the dismantling and recreation of routines, practices, social structures, and institutions as well as the forces and circumstances that block those efforts (Dacin, Dacin, & Matear, 2010; Mair, Marti, & Ventresca, 2012).
In particular, one strand of this literature explores how marginalized, low-power actors can break through their institutional work (Lawrence & Suddaby, 2006), the “iron cage” of misery, to bring about change for themselves and for their communities (Creed, DeJordi, & Lok, 2010; Leung, Zietsma, & Peredo, 2014; Zietsma & Lawrence, 2010). Within this strand, recent studies have identified the crucial role of emotions in these processes (Creed et al., 2010; Creed, Hudson, Okhuysen, & Smith-Crowe, 2014; Fan & Zietsma, 2016; Toubiana & Zietsma, 2016; Voronov & Vince, 2012; Voronov & Weber, 2016). Here, we contribute to that conversation by focusing on the emotional component and the antecedents of institutional work carried out by low-power actors aimed at challenging the institutional constraints constituting the context of exclusion in which they are confined (Lawrence & Suddaby, 2006; Zietsma & Lawrence, 2010). Our central argument is that actors must think beyond the institutional constraints in which they are embedded to successfully engage in social innovation. They must become reflexive about these constraints, developing the capacity for the future-oriented projective agency (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998) that social innovation requires. However, when actors are poor and marginalized, such development is difficult to achieve. We argue that the emotions associated with being poor and marginalized sap emotional energy and limit projective agency. This study focuses on the role of emotions in the development of projective agency among low-power actors; without projective agency, such actors are unlikely to engage in (or obtain lasting benefit from) social innovation.
We present below the in-depth case study of an unusually successful entrepreneur from a shantytown in a large Latin American megalopolis who managed to break through institutional constraints to create a successful social enterprise. His business initiative aims to build connections between the slum and the business world, dismantling the social distance between the slum and the “normal” city while creating jobs, generating profits, and contributing to the community. The organization recreates the entrepreneur’s own journey and mimics his life experience of escaping poverty, focusing on the issues and the moments that were crucial to overcoming his own exclusion. In examining this case, we analyze our subject’s entrepreneurial process and identify the difficulties that he had to overcome to become a successful social entrepreneur.
Our core research interest is actors’ emotional dimension and how it precedes and conditions agency. We build on the idea that “agency is intrinsically social and relational” (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998, p. 973), and consequently, viscerally personal, and that actors can construct mental self-images that are distinct from the reality of their current situations. In so doing, we respond to recent calls to focus on the “interpersonal dynamics, the social and symbolic nature of interactions, and the motivations, commitments, and conflicts people experience as they engage and enact the institutional world” (Hudson, Okhuysen, & Creed, 2015, p. 236). Accordingly, we look at how “emotional states” (Gould, 2009) affect (both enhancing and limiting) low-power actors’ capacity to build up projective agency (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998), thereby affecting their possibility of engaging in projects conducive to a better social reality. We believe this textured view of low-power actors allows scholars to understand why people who are “dissatisfied with existing practices” (Zietsma & Lawrence, 2010) might not even consider engaging in collaborative efforts to initiate or implement change (Lawrence, Hardy, & Phillips, 2002; Voronov & Weber, 2016), facilitating social reproduction processes (Bourdieu, 1977, 1984) and limiting social innovation.
Our article makes two contributions to the understanding of social innovation in a context of extreme poverty. First, we argue that in situations of exclusion and vulnerability—particularly when these have been naturalized by the actors through socialization—the presence of certain negative emotional states associated with poverty and exclusion limits the capacity to think and act beyond the oppressive context in which low-power actors are embedded. Consequently, low-power actors need to undergo emotional changes before the process of challenging institutional constraints can begin, sustaining a positive emotional state through their journey as they reconstruct, develop, and mobilize their social network. This process of emotional shift is long and difficult; in the case we studied, it involves a network of “known strangers” (Martí, Courpasson, & Dubard Barbosa, 2013), that is, nonexcluded people who help the actor and provide connections between disconnected social networks. Accordingly, we extend the work of Martí and colleagues (2013), by arguing that known strangers play a significant role in helping low-power actors to develop future-oriented projective agency. Specifically, we argue that known strangers help, through different mechanisms—challenge, respect, presence, and availability—to connect low-power actors with new realities and allow them to project themselves into a better future. We find that by being present and available, known strangers engage in interactions that challenge and offer respect to low-power actors, allowing them to imagine a better future, enhancing their roles and their capacity for entrepreneurial agency, and providing comfort in their struggle. Through this process, low-power actors become more and more projective, seeing themselves as capable and legitimated to challenge oppressive institutions.
Our second contribution rests on a process model that extends Suddaby, Viale, and Gendron’s (2016) study on reflexivity and institutional work. This study explains how different social situations affect actors’ ability to be reflexive and, thus, their capacity to engage in institutional work. In our model, we argue that reflexivity is a relational and dynamic phenomenon stemming from social interactions, and that low-power actors can become more and more reflexive over time. As a result, low-power actors may become capable of challenging the social constraints that constitute their exclusion. We define the construct of “projective self” as the emergent cognitive reflexive capacity associated with an emotional energy surge that allows the actor to think and act beyond institutional constraints to engage in projects of social change. In the case we study, this capacity is linked to the subject’s imagination, role enhancement, and comfort, and allows him to exit a background of poverty and misery and to start a social enterprise devoted to closing the gap between the slums and the city. Our findings show the different relational mechanisms that allow marginalized people to break social constraints and produce change; we also underline some complex consequences of this journey and the tensions that individuals in this situation confront.
This article is structured as follows. First, we begin by reviewing the literature on the connections between institutional work, low-power actors, and emotions. Then, we explain the research methodology and present the case study (and life story) of a social entrepreneur, along with our analysis and findings. Finally, we present a model, discuss our contributions, and include suggestions for future work and implications for public policy.
Institutional Work Among Low-Power Actors and the Role of Emotions: Between Reproduction and Change
Low-Power Actors and Institutional Work
Institutional theory, a dominant theoretical framework in organization studies (Greenwood, Oliver, Suddaby, & Sahlin-Andersson, 2008), is ideally suited to study social innovation as it is interested in the rules, beliefs, and shared meanings that constitute social orders and their change (Fligstein, 2001). One of the salient characteristics of social orders is that they shape actors’ perceptions, behaviors, and expectations, imposing a type of order that becomes legitimate, that is, dominant but unrecognized as such. Within the social order, each actor has his or her place and role to play, even if that role is accepted, rather than embraced and imposed through “symbolic violence” rather than espoused (Bourdieu, 1980). This is true for all social actors to a varying degree, but pressures to conform to one’s role and remain in one’s position are particularly strong for those deeply embedded in a field (Greenwood et al., 2008), and for those excluded, living on the margins of society (Lawrence, 2008).
Of particular interest to this strand of research are people in a situation of extreme poverty and exclusion, particularly in rigid and marginalized contexts, which make institutional work more hazardous and uncertain (Lawrence, Suddaby, & Leca, 2011), and the consequences of failure much direr. How do low-power, role-conforming actors break through their social constraints in a highly institutionalized environment, especially when they may be only vaguely aware of such constraints (Lawrence, Winn, & Jennings, 2001), and when breaking these constraints may run contrary to what is socially expected of them?
Although we know that marginalized actors are not totally powerless (see, for example, some of the trivial, yet personally meaningful, ways of retaining agency adopted by low-power actors documented in Courpasson, 2016; Hardy, 2016; Martí & Fernández, 2013), it is also clear that their roles, societal expectations of them, and the actions they can engage in are generally confined within a very specific and limited domain. This confinement reduces their influence in other spaces and in society at large (Leung et al., 2014), often leading to accusations of congenital passivity that emphasize a lack of agency but do not shed light on the contextual conditions that exacerbate it: Although poverty and exclusion do not impede agency, they severely limit its depth and breadth.
Low-power actors typically do not imagine alternative, more desirable futures, as “actors who are highly embedded” are not supposed to imagine, desire, or realize alternative ways of doing things “because institutionalized arrangements and practices structure cognitions, define interests and, in the limit, produce actors’ identities” (Maguire, 2007, p. 674). Thus, limitations to envisioning a better future also reside within the person as “inhabited institutions,” that is, as socialized rules and relationships, which imply a position in a social structure and a set of acceptable behaviors, influencing the actor’s identity, sense of self, and her projective behavior (Hallett & Ventresca, 2006). As Lukes (2005) lucidly pointed out, Is not the supreme and most insidious exercise of power to prevent people, to whatever degree, from having grievances by shaping their perceptions, cognitions and preferences in such a way that they accept their role in the existing order of things, either because they can see or imagine no alternative to it, or because they see it as natural and unchangeable, or because they value it as divinely ordained and beneficial? (p. 28)
Self-identity is learned (Lukes, 2005) and interpreted reflexively by the agent where there is continuity across space and time (Giddens, 1991). From this perspective, it is easy to see how low-power actors may shun even imagining social change because it does not appear to them as a “legitimate” activity, that is, an activity that is acceptable for people like them. In institutional parlance, this difficulty in ideation has been defined as the “paradox of embedded agency” (Battilana & D’Aunno, 2009; Seo & Creed, 2002). Efforts to solve the paradox have focused on the cognitive dimension of the actors, trying to identify actors who are less susceptible to institutional constraints because they occupy boundary positions across multiple fields (Leblebici, Salancik, Copay, & King, 1991), or because of their size and power (Greenwood et al., 2008). Yet, as Suddaby et al. (2016) recently put it, the critical question is “how some individuals cognitively perceive the social world as contingent and thus amenable to change while others see it as concrete and immutable? (p. 4).
Intersubjectivity and Institutions
Insights from institutional theory point to the difficulties that actors encounter in the process of ideating and embracing change (Battilana & D’Aunno, 2009). Yet, according to most of the literature, these difficulties reside squarely in the objective conditions emerging from poverty itself, rather than from the subjectivity of the actors, or from the interaction and reinforcement between a weak actor and a constraining structure. Poverty and exclusion, from this perspective, are more a position in a social structure characterized by lack of resources, rather than a subjective understanding of self that includes a limited possibility of agency (Giddens, 1984; Touraine, 1965, 1984).
In this article, we see institutional work as an emergent process, full of errors, hesitations, and faux pas; much less deliberate than currently described by the literature; rationalized when told retrospectively and blurry when looking forward; and, overall, highly uncertain, and carrying a high level of risk for those attempting change, particularly if they were already vulnerable when they initiated the process. We believe, with Powell and Colyvas (2008), that “most micro-motives (of institutional transformation) are fairly mundane, aimed at interpretation, alignment, and muddling through” (p. 277), and are based on low-level, local incentives, rather than on a grand plan that would predate action and later feed into it. To a large degree, institutional transformation depends on the immediate, local emotions and feelings of the actors rather than on long-term, cold, dispassionate calculations. Accordingly, we focus our attention on “how passions and interests are implicated in institutional enactments” (Creed et al., 2014), and on how emotions contribute to processes of social transformation and change (Powell & Colyvas, 2008).
Recent studies have begun to illuminate the connections between identity, roles, and institutional work (Creed et al., 2010; Leung et al., 2014), recognizing the centrality of one’s (inter-)subjectivity for institutional agency (Creed et al., 2014; Voronov & Weber, 2016). Specifically, recent studies are starting to unveil the institutional mechanisms of disciplinary power and how low-power actors manage to contest the very same institutional arrangement that oppresses them. For instance, in their study about gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender ministers of two Protestant denominations in the United States, Creed and colleagues (2010) show the microprocesses through which the ministers came to see themselves as agents of institutional change, and embodied this change through a process that can be viewed as “both conservative and disruptive.” Interestingly, their study demonstrates that institutional work “does not necessarily need to be aimed at either the creation, maintenance, or disruption of institutions, but can paradoxically involve more than one of these categories at the same time” (Creed et al., 2010, p. 1337). Their findings show that institutions are experienced and lived emotionally. Similarly, Leung and colleagues (2014) focus on change initiated by low-power actors in highly institutionalized and rigid contexts. Studying an association of middle-class Japanese housewives who broke through the constraints of their institutionalized role identity and changed that very institution, the authors connect institutional work with identity work. In their study, identity work goes beyond a purely intrapersonal and internal process, highlighting the fact that the link between identity work and structural change occurs through action taken in expanded role domains. Even though the authors do not focus explicitly on emotions, their findings show that desires and feelings are constitutive elements in the identity cycles that allow for the expansion of actors’ roles, and point at the salience of mesolevel interactions, as roles are not only internal to the person but also socially performed in interactions with others. In the same vein, Creed and colleagues’ (2014) study of shame as an explanation of institutional reproduction and change helps explain how emotions navigate levels of analysis. Their study focuses on different constructs of the emotion of shame (felt shame, sense of shame, systemic shame, and episodic shaming), from the beliefs and systems of meaning that support prescriptions of what is right and wrong and what is shameful and what is not, to the individual internalization of those prescriptions through self-monitoring and surveillance (Creed et al., 2014).
Martí and colleagues’ (2013) study of Virgen Misionera in southern Argentina shows the influence of “known strangers” (Polletta, 1999) in the process of “entrepreneurization and politization” of a marginalized community. Known strangers are actors present in the community who possess two qualities: externality and presence. First, they are “strangers” in the Simmelian sense. As strangers, they combine “distance and nearness, indifference and involvement, and they derive their potential influence over community members from their ‘free[dom] from entanglement’ (Simmel, 1908/1971, pp. 404-407, quoted in Polletta, 1999, p. 22)” (Martí et al., 2013, p. 13). Second, these external actors stay in the community outside their formal roles. As such, and because the relationships between community members and known stranger(s) are “person-to-person rather than status-to status” (Martí et al., 2013, p. 24), their role is pivotal in the process of entrepreneurization; specifically, they develop “intellectual, social and affective ties with community members and help them to organize themselves and mobilize for action” (Martí et al., 2013, p. 13). Specifically, known strangers “contribute to foster new knowledge, raise awareness, open the boundaries of the community to broader networks of external actors and other communities, setting the ground for social mobilization” (Martí et al., 2013, p. 17). Although this research points to the creation of durable emotional ties as one of the key contributions of known strangers, we still do not know what micromechanisms contribute to the process of entrepreneurization and how they work.
Emotions and Institutions
Emotions are central elements of the human condition. They are crucial for the construction of self, for the social processes and relationships in which we engage (Creed et al., 2014, p. 279), and for life, in general (Elfenbein, 2007). Emotions have implications for the cosmogonies (Weick, 1993) of persons participating in institutional processes, revealing what is important to these persons and what motivates their actions (Creed et al., 2014; de Sousa, 1987; Voronov & Vince, 2012) or lack thereof. Emotions shape decisions we make (Gould, 2009) as “people make judgments not only by evaluating the consequences and their probability of occurring, but also (and even sometimes primarily) at a gut or emotional level” (Bechara, 2004, p. 30; see also Clore, Schwarz, & Conway, 1994; Schwarz, 2000). Consequently, emotions influence agency by shaping the way people make sense of their environment and their position in it (Barrett, Mesquita, Ochsner, & Gross, 2007, p. 377). Emotions also help people connect with one another, constructing long-lasting social bonds (Tracy & Robins, 2004), and contribute to creating the conditions necessary for innovation in collective sense making and for collective action (Fan & Zietsma, 2016; Gould, 2009). It is through these bonds that new ideas and possibilities develop, as durable, predictable, and stable bonds are indispensable for any sustainable collective action (Marti et al., 2013).
Given that institutions reproduce or change “through the everyday activities of individuals” (Powell & Colyvas, 2008), emotions that directly affect people’s understanding of their social fields and the positions they occupy within these fields are particularly relevant for understanding institutional work and social change (Voronov & Weber, 2016). As some emotional states can be “both conservative and disruptive” (Creed et al., 2010), this article asks in what ways emotions can influence the capacity of low-power actors to engage in institutional work. This capacity, as Emirbayer and Mische (1998) remind us, is a “social and relational” phenomenon; as such, it also implies a temporal orientation of the individual, which is crucial because “an orientation towards the future enables the imaginative generation of possible future trajectories of action defined by actors hopes, fears, and desires” (Dorado, 2005, p. 388).
To understand how low-power actors’ emotional states might affect their capacity to ideate and change their actions in the present to work toward a different future, we follow Gould’s (2009) conceptualization of emotional habitus, defined as “the socially constituted prevailing ways of feeling and emoting, as well as the embodied, axiomatic understandings and norms about feelings and their expression” (p. 10). As Emirbayer and Mische (1998) point out, “not all time periods, cultures, theoretical traditions, or even individuals are equally projective” (p. 985), so here, we focus on those culturally created emotional states that hinder or facilitate institutional agency. We focus our attention on the emotional dimensions of institutional work to ask three questions: 1) How do emotions affect the emergence and evolution of institutional work in a context of absolute poverty? 2) What are the emotions that impede or foster institutional work, and what are the emotional mechanisms that allow low-power actors to engage in it? 3) What are known strangers’ (Martí et al., 2013) roles in that process?
Method
Our research interest in the connections between low-power actors’ institutional work and emotions led us to choose an exploratory, inductive case study (Eisenhardt & Graebner, 2007) of a successful entrepreneur who came from extreme poverty. We decided that the most useful research design would be an in-depth, longitudinal case study (Marshall & Rossman, 2011; Silverman, 1985; Yin, 1981, 1989) aimed at creating the entrepreneur’s “institutional biography” (Lawrence et al., 2011; Suddaby & Viale, 2011). These types of biographies offer several theoretical advantages: they “complicate” the subject, revealing the social structural influences on the subject’s life, opportunities for agency, and the successes and failures of the subject to change his or her world. In this way, they capture the “complex, reflexive, and recursive relationship . . . between an individual and a set of institutions” (Lawrence et al., 2011, p. 55). From the very few possible cases, we chose the story of Martin (pseudonym), which met three of our selection criteria: He was a successful (objectively, self-reported, and triangulated) CEO of his own company, he came from the margins of society (extreme poverty and a broken, abusive, and violent household), and his enterprise was both self-sustainable and socially motivated, and had been so for 5 years.
Research Context
Martin is a middle-aged man living in a very humble house near the large shantytown 1 where he grew up, in the vicinity of a South American megalopolis. This shantytown is one of the poorest and most violent places in the country, though it borders one of the city’s richest neighborhoods (see Figure 1). The shantytown grew in the lowlands, in a huge pit that was dug to extract dirt and sand for construction. Given its topography, it is a very humid place that does not handle the rain or inclement weather well; due to a lack of infrastructure, it does not have running water, electricity, or sewers. Waste treatment is, therefore, substandard, which increases the presence of insects, feral animals, and vermin that bring discomfort and disease to the community. The shantytown was settled about 40 years ago, and throughout its existence has largely lacked the basic infrastructure services that are a constitutional human right in neighborhoods only a few hundred yards away. 2 It is also poorly connected to public transportation, and getting in and out is costly, time-consuming, and laborious.
Aerial view of the shantytown.
We first met Martin in 2011, when he was working as human resource manager of Trendy Co (a pseudonym), a midsize apparel company. At that time, he alternated his professional activities with voluntary initiatives in the shantytown where he grew up. In 2013, two of the authors invited Martin to participate in a community program for MBA students of their home university. During the program, Martin explained to the researchers that he was considering creating a firm to “build connections between two worlds, the slum and the city.” He described four projects that he conceptualized as products. First, he planned to design creativity workshops for corporate teams. In these workshops, artists from the slum would teach corporate employees their skills, helping participants expand their managerial capabilities. Second, he envisioned coworking spaces where traditional entrepreneurs would share space with social entrepreneurs and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) working in the slum. Third, he wanted to organize “open-slum days,” TED-style talks delivered by slum dwellers who could share their stories of engagement in social transformation. Finally, Martin imagined a leadership development course that would set a high standard for education in social leadership. This course would include modules on leadership, communication and conflict resolution, ethics, social innovation, and talent management.
Martin’s firm started its operations in late 2013 and has been both successful and profitable over the subsequent years (objectively, self-reported, and triangulated). More than 2,000 people have participated in 20+ creativity workshops, six “open-slum days,” and two leadership courses. In August 2016, the firm opened its coworking space, which now hosts 12 commercial and social organizations. A corporate volunteer program has also been added to the initial set of projects.
Case Construction
To build the in-depth, “thick” case (Geertz, 1973), we followed Martin and his activities for about 18 months beginning in June 2013, and conducted five in-depth interviews with him and eight more with additional subjects who could triangulate his views and complement his narrative. These additional subjects were theoretically sampled to enrich our sense of Martin’s social milieu: All belong to Martin’s network, four of them live in the shantytown, three have known Martin for several years, and one works with Martin in his enterprise. Interviews were conducted in a variety of settings, including Martin’s home and office, and were recorded with authorization and transcribed with the standard promises of anonymity and confidentiality. Throughout this period, we also participated in activities organized by Martin and/or his company, and followed him regularly to social and professional activities, taking notes during the process, and talking to people who knew Martin and his story. Table 1 summarizes the types of data collected as well as its sources and uses.
Data Sources and Their Uses in the Analysis.
Case Analysis
As our goal is to probe the emotional antecedents of the development of agency by low-power actors, we followed Langley’s (1999) approach, conducting our analysis in multiple stages and moving iteratively between the data, the emergent ideas, and the literature to build theory.
Phase 1: Organizing the data
The first phase of analysis consisted in listening to the recordings of the interviews and in reading our field notes, with the objective of producing a narrative of Martin’s “institutional biography” (Lawrence et al., 2011; Suddaby & Viale, 2011). Next, we considered the themes emerging from the data. We identified two core concepts: the idea that entrepreneurial agency may not be subjectively legitimate for low-power actors and the idea that, through interactions with connections external to the shantytown, Martin experienced a change in his emotional state that helps explain the development of future-oriented agency.
Phase 2: Mapping and categorizing the data
With the two emergent insights from Phase 1 in mind, we moved to analyzing the data, looking for interactions between Martin and his connections outside of the slum and focusing on the emotional dimensions of these relationships. We listened again to the interviews and reread our synopses and notes, this time with special attention to manifestations of emotion. This search focused not only on the language being used by the interviewee but also on his or her manner of speaking: repetitions, breaks, difficulties in articulation, and changes in vocal intonation or speed helped us to understand the emotional content and dynamics in play. We then used this material to construct Martin’s emotional life story, focusing our attention on the crucial moments—emotions, interactions, and events that were pivotal for the advancement of his project. We categorized all Martin’s connections who did not come from the shantytown as known strangers. These individuals satisfied two conditions: externality and continuous presence in Martin’s life (Marti et al., 2013). Then, we worked to extend our understanding of the known strangers’ role in fostering the “entrepreneurization” of a community, probing for the emotional dimensions of such connections. We, thus, focused on the social emotions present in Martin’s narrative, that is, on the “emotions that pertain to the state of the social relations” (Sayer, 2005, as cited in Creed et al., 2014). Social emotions emerge as “reactions to our perceptions of our social standing and that of others relative to norms and standards within social structures” (Creed et al., 2014, p. 279; see also Haidt, 2003; Hareli & Parkinson, 2008; Tangney, Stuewig, & Mashek, 2007; Tracy & Robins, 2004). The social emotions observed in the data include shame, sorrow, guilt, pride, fear, anger, and gratitude. See Table 2 for the definitions of the observed social emotions.
Observed Social Emotions and Their Definitions.
Observed social emotions were then clustered into emotional states (Gould, 2009), which we referred to as low and high emotional energy states. Emotional energy is defined as the “feeling that one is eager to act and capable of acting” (Quinn & Dutton, 2005, p. 36, quoted in Fan & Zietsma, 2016). Emotional energy builds up in social situations through social interactions and persists across situations (Fan & Zietsma, 2016, p. 15); high emotional energy causes a person to experience feelings of “excitement, enthusiasm, passion and the gushing of energy towards a target” (Fan & Zietsma, 2016, p. 15). On the contrary, when emotional energy is low, a person feels “frustration, disappointment, disinterest and a sense of boredom” (Fan & Zietsma, 2016, p. 15). Fan and Zietsma (2016) explain that emotional energy reinforces and intensifies moral and social emotions, motivating continuous engagement.
Phase 3: Interactions between Martin and known strangers
The third phase of analysis involved identifying each emotional state and linking it to the chronology of our subject’s transition from excluded teenager to successful entrepreneur. We provided context around each of the emotional states, paying particular attention to the transitions between each stage of Martin’s life, the presence of known strangers, and the emotions attached to them. We observed that known strangers performed three relational roles for Martin, which we termed challenge, respect, and presence and availability. Challenge refers to all the events in which known strangers offered Martin new tasks and roles, such as becoming a teacher or taking on responsibilities in an NGO. Respect categorizes all the interactions in which known strangers recognized Martin’s value and/or his actions. These include, for instance, valuing Martin’s musical tastes or hiring Martin as human resource manager because of his experience in the community. Finally, presence and availability capture the effective, continuous presence of known strangers in Martin’s life—being available and responsive at Martin’s request. For example, visiting Martin’s firm’s new offices or sending emails expressing support (when Martin had received negative comments from the community).
We observed that these relational roles corresponded to three responses from Martin: imagination, role enhancement, and comfort. Imagination captures the instances in which Martin was able to think about a different, better future, such as thinking about offering cooking courses to women in the shantytown, or challenging the idea that poverty is natural and thinking that things could be otherwise. Role enhancement describes the events in which Martin was able to see himself contributing to the creation of that better future in domains previously unthinkable for him, for example, creating his own business or becoming a tutor for prisoners. Comfort corresponds to the moments in which Martin was able to shift from a low emotional energy state to a high emotional energy state, as he once said to Researcher 2: “it feels good to have you here, working with us.”
Phase 4: Hindering and enhancing agency
The final phase of analysis aimed at theorizing about our findings. We divided Martin’s institutional biography into three analytical stages. We did so by looking at the events in the narrative that marked a transition from one state to another. Each stage verifies a change in Martin’s capacity to think and act beyond the institutional constraints constituting his exclusion. The first stage (“The naturalization of exclusion”) covers his first years, when he lived and moved in the shantytown. The second stage (“Building up a projective self”) involves his exit from a state of naturalized poverty when an NGO, and especially his piano teacher, built up Martin’s confidence and presented him with new, previously unthinkable opportunities, as well as the process by which he became a social entrepreneur. The third and final stage (“From neither here nor there: A stranger to both worlds”) comprises how he lives and feels now, as someone who struggles to belong to the two worlds. Along these stages, we observed a clear increase in Martin’s ability to engage in projects of social change.
Table 3 summarizes the emotional dimension of Martin’s institutional biography, from his initial poverty and exclusion to becoming a successful entrepreneur. It illustrates the main social emotions constituting his emotional states through exemplary quotes. Table 4 shows known strangers’ roles and Martin’s responses, with exemplary data.
Emotions and Emotional States in Martin’s Institutional Biography.
Note. NGO = nongovernmental organization.
Interactions Between Known Strangers and Martin.
Note. NGO = nongovernmental organization.
Findings
The Naturalization of Exclusion
Martin arrived at the slum from a remote, rural province as a young child in the 1970s with his nuclear family (father, mother, and six siblings). Although poor, Martin’s family was not destitute. Martin’s father came to the city with the promise of employment at an established company, which would have included accommodation for his family. This promise never materialized, however, and finding themselves without an income, the family settled on a patch of land in what was then a small but growing shantytown. Martin’s father never got work in the formal sector and turned to alcohol abuse, which fueled preexisting domestic violence. The household in turn became severely abusive, including physical violence. Nevertheless, this was normal to Martin. He reminisces: When I was a little kid I did not know that I was poor. I thought things were normal. I thought everything was like this, and that we all had the same things more or less.
In Martin’s milieu, poverty is naturalized through socialization: One learns to be poor. For Martin and others such as him, this situation appears normal, because his immediate circle is just as poor as he is. Martin is aware of this now, but was not early on when he “did not know he was poor.” He claims that most people in similar situations cannot truly evaluate their objective condition, either denying their objective reality, appealing to “slum dweller pride,” or simply consoling themselves with schadenfreude—the perverse joy that one feels when one learns about others’ suffering. Still, as Martin explains, exclusion is naturalized: Persons in a context that excludes do not know that they are excluded, they think that is how things are, and this is how you are supposed to live. The vast majority of people in this situation [of poverty and exclusion] are too attached to that situation and they cannot walk out of it.
The naturalization of exclusion has consequences for agency. Excluded people often become convinced that the locus of control for key events in their lives is external—that personal efforts do not affect their success. Indeed, young slum dwellers we interviewed often see themselves leaving the slum through fortuitous events (such as a lottery win or a well-executed heist), through innate athletic talent that will result in a career in professional soccer (for males), or beauty that will lead to a modeling/TV career (for females).
When I grow up, I want to be a football [soccer] player. They are rich, and they can buy the car they want. Y [famous soccer player] has a BMW of the year! My friends tell me I am really good at soccer, I have a gift. When I am older I want to become a player of team X [a top team in the best league of the country], and with the money I will buy a car and a house for my mother. (José, 10, slum dweller, born in the slum) My little sister dances very well, she is very pretty. She wants to be a model, and I think she should try on the TV talents show: she is beautiful and dances like an angel. I think she should be able to get a job on TV as a model. (Leila, 15, speaking about her sister Luna)
Martin was neither very good at soccer nor beautiful, so he never envisioned such career choices. When his father passed away at 38 years of age, Martin was still a child. Shortly thereafter, his mother and siblings ran into severe financial distress and were forced onto the street. They collected garbage (to recycle and sometimes to eat), begged for money in wealthy neighborhoods—including one a few hundred meters from the shantytown—and regularly committed a series of petty crimes, including theft and larceny. As a young teen, he was also exposed to violence, abuse, drugs, and petty crimes in his neighborhood. At that time, Martin explains, no alternative seemed viable and reproduction looked inevitable: That’s what we were, this is what we are, this is what we will be (silence) shantytown dwellers . . . In the shantytown you do not live, you are barely surviving. You can’t even project yourself, you can’t choose what you want to do, what you want to study . . . You can’t ideate a better future for yourself.
An entry in the field notes from Researcher 2 serves to confirm Martin’s self-reports. Hopelessness and a generalized low-energy emotional state are prevalent among shantytown dwellers. The entry reads, Martin invited me to participate in the first Transformational Leaders Workshop organized by him in partnership with a Consulting Firm (CF), one of the Big Four. The workshop comprised different modules of Organizational Behavior. People from the CF covered different topics, and Martin asked me to lead the Communication and Emotional Intelligence module. People attending the workshop belonged to different social organizations selected by Martin’s new firm. All of them came from the same shantytown where Martin grew up. As it was the first workshop, all the participants were very close to Martin. The different modules were delivered in the offices of the CF and in the different social organizations. The one that I taught was in the shantytown, in the house of the founder of a social organization. The workshop was intended to be very dynamic, so I asked the participants to prepare different role-plays to perform the problems they face in terms of communication. All the representations were very similar, and the main issue was how to communicate to the people that live in the slums the different benefits of health, education, art, and microfinance. It struck me that the beneficiaries (shantytown dwellers) were represented by the workshop participants (shantytown dwellers themselves) as people without attitude, with no confidence, talking in a very low volume, almost not asking anything, very passive and incapable of ideating, or at least not doing it very often. The faces of the people that played the role of the beneficiaries changed to faces without hope, to sad faces. After the role-plays, while debriefing, people from the social organization raised this issue of the lack of attitude and hopelessness as one of the key barriers to working in the slums and with marginalized and poor people. What struck me the most was the feeling of impossibility, the idea that, “I might have the best solution for your problem but I can’t communicate (and implement) the solution because you do not have the capacity to connect with me and my message.” One month after the module, one of the participants, working for an NGO that is creating banks in slums for local people, wrote me an email telling me that he realized after the module that emotional intelligence and communication skills are fundamental. He asked me if I could help them think about how to connect with the emotions of the people in the neighborhoods.
The entry above exemplifies the low-energy emotional state characteristic of slum dwellers facing life’s difficulties. Martin began to experience this emotional state when he discovered that he was poor, during his formative years when he was taunted in public school because he was poor, and felt ashamed of himself, of his family, and of poverty in general. This emotional state continued for a few years, during which social distance and social stratification became evident. Martin explains, In the shantytown you feel that rich people, those living outside the slum, they are different, they are not like you, they have things that you don’t have, they have different values, there is a huge distance between you and them.
After Martin discovered he was poor, he felt ashamed; like many of his friends and classmates, he was on the verge of engaging on antisocial behaviors. He reminisces, I discovered that I was poor between 9 and 12 years of age . . . If at that age you believe you aren’t good for anything, that you have no potential, that is when you begin to consume [drugs] and you fall into criminality, and that is when poverty hits you deeply. The worst of the worst is to have to go out to find something to eat, to dive into someone else’s trash . . . [When you do that] you have no dignity left.
This period of hopelessness and the naturalization of Martin’s exclusion is characterized by a low-energy emotional state constituted by sorrow, shame, and fear. We observed that these emotions toward the world outside the slum turn the shantytown dweller inward to his or her own family and close friends, most of them neighbors living in close physical proximity with similar profiles and issues, even when they are somewhat dysfunctional. Martin explains, One day I asked my mom, “Why are we so poor?” She asked me, “Don’t you have brothers and sisters, and don’t you love them? Don’t you have friends? Don’t you have me?” I said yes. So she told me, “What poverty are you talking about?” I was the last one to leave my mother’s house. We used to sleep in the same room, and I left with tears.
In sum, the naturalization of misery and exclusion, the social distance from the “outside,” and a negative, low-energy emotional state that is a natural consequence of poverty tend to encourage the reproduction of a situation of social exclusion. One who is nothing, and feels like nothing, cannot legitimately conceive of himself or herself as a full actor. Social emotions such as fear, shame, and sorrow converge into a low-energy emotional state, which turns the shantytown dwellers inward, looking for support and comfort in others just like themselves, increasing the sense of distance from the outside.
Building Up a Projective Self
When Martin was 10 years old, a friend invited him to attend music lessons given by an NGO working in the shantytown. Founded by a world-famous dancer, this NGO sought to bring the arts to underprivileged children; it provided music classes and art lessons as a mechanism for self-expression and self-improvement as well as a way to keep teenagers out of trouble. Martin was reluctant to attend, and his mother was not keen either. But his friend insisted, so Martin visited the NGO and met a piano teacher. Martin explains he did not feel that he was able to make music, but the teacher encouraged him to play any style he liked, respecting his musical tastes. Martin recalls, I liked cumbia,
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and that was not considered serious music but the teacher told me that if I liked cumbia that was OK, that music needed to be felt and it was OK to feel what I felt, and I began to learn an instrument, to play my music, to play cumbia.
Martin proved to be a keen student, relying more and more on his piano teacher, who encouraged him to play his music and began acting like a family member, taking a deep interest in Martin and his family. In so doing, Martin began to appreciate other forms of music, unknown to him until then or perceived as snobby, and he learned to play them with virtuosity. Encouraged by the NGO and his teacher (“my second mother”), Martin applied to, and then earned, a scholarship to travel to Europe as a youth with musical promise. At the age of 14, the NGO founder asked Martin whether he could become a piano teacher himself. He accepted the challenge and started to teach music in the NGO to community members using the same approach employed by his teacher, which focused first on ensuring that participants—mostly youngsters—felt they were capable of making music, and that their musical tastes were valid. Reflecting on this intervention, Martin explains how the continuous interaction with the piano teacher and the NGO, based on challenge and respect, opened new opportunities for him: Through art, the NGO helped me find something I could identify with, something I could be good at. If you believe you are good for nothing, you are doomed . . . My piano teacher never taught me piano, she taught me to develop a passion for music . . . [She] has no idea what she did for me, she did not teach me piano, she gave me her passion for music and that was truly transformational, and she believed she only was teaching me how to play the piano . . . Two years later I could start doing the same thing with others, teaching them to play music . . . then they started calling me “teacher” . . . [Silence] WOW! That was great [he suddenly stands up, knocking a chair] I felt wonderful!
The extract above highlights how the NGO’s intervention in Martin’s life helped him to (re)construct his self-esteem, and gave him the ability to imagine himself beyond what he had thought possible. Martin felt respected and, thus, validated and supported: someone who was not from the slum, someone who was legitimated to value music because “she was a professor,” valued his music, the music he liked. Martin points to the emotional support that built up his confidence and self-esteem as something that gave him determination and allowed him to engage in new projects: All the love I had for my piano teacher is what I needed to build upon. That emotional capital is stronger than any other form of capital.
A few years later, Martin accepted an offer from the NGO’s founder to become the coordinator of different programs and activities for slum dwellers. It was a big step for him, as he realized that he could do things he had never even thought about. After 6 years of running different programs, Martin realized that he needed to do something different, as he “had given everything he had to give to the NGO.” Sometime earlier, he had met the founder and manager of Moment, a social enterprise working to develop entrepreneurship that had been created in the aftermath of a political and social crisis in the country. Martin decided to join the organization. At that time, Moment was running some projects in areas such as shantytowns and prisons. Martin remembers, The project in the prison consisted in working with the inmates to develop “life projects,” a way to acknowledge and to learn from what they have done wrongly in the past, to start something new. So we had to go there for some time. I was shocked when one of them (an inmate whom Martin knew from the shantytown) asked me: “would you do this for me?” I said that I would.
In another project, Martin joined forces with a chef who owned a restaurant in a privileged area of the city that was located close to the shantytown. They developed a training program to teach women from the slum practical skills that could be applied concretely in the job market, ultimately helping them find better jobs (better remunerated, including benefits, offering more responsibility, and more socially accepted). Martin recalls, Marcos (the cook) asked me whether I could help him in doing something to give opportunities to those living in the slum. So together we created a program consisting in cooking lessons for seven women from the slum. Together we shattered the idea that they [the women of the slum, and specifically the ones attending the course] needed to do menial work, they could have an office, start a career.
During his time at Moment, Martin met Juan, founder of Trendy Co, a start-up that ultimately became a successful business in the apparel industry. Juan and Martin met at a conference about entrepreneurship where they both were speakers. When Martin finished his talk about his personal life and work experience, Juan said to him, “You have to work with us doing in the company the same thing you do in the shantytown and in prisons [where Martin did volunteer work with inmates]. I want you to become the human resource manager of Trendy Co.” At first, Martin rejected the job because he “didn’t know anything about human resources.” However, Juan insisted, telling Martin that his experiences in connecting with people and addressing people’s needs were enough, and ultimately convinced him to accept the job. Later, Martin took the initiative to change his position at Trendy Co to director of happiness and culture. Martin remembers his first days at the firm: I needed to get rid of many prejudices . . . First and foremost that someone like me could never manage to work in a business, with business people. But Juan trusted me and I am totally grateful to him.
In 2013, Martin convinced some friends from different social backgrounds—including shantytown dwellers—to create the firm K&F. The firm was conceived as a social business connecting slums and companies to develop leadership skills for both slum dwellers and corporate employees. The rationale behind this idea, according to Martin, was that “both worlds could enrich each other if they open up to each other.” Today, K&F provides professional services to large companies, showing “how different realities can coexist in the same moment, but some escape us because we are not used to seeing them.” The idea is to create what Martin calls “transformational leaders,” that is, individuals who are capable of understanding the issues they face, but more important, “of sensing how others feel and the backgrounds they come from.” This type of leadership, in Martin’s opinion, allows firms to be closer to the customer, and more important, to increase the happiness of managers and workers, ultimately leading to better workplaces that are more effective and humane. In Martin’s view, From the slum side, being in contact with “businesspeople” allows slum dwellers to familiarize themselves with the world of business management in general and the management of people in particular, with an emphasis on how to create and organize effective teams, but also to simply be less afraid of the “outside,” and begin to think of other possibilities for themselves and for their families.
Thus, the firm offers a series of programs that aim to showcase one world’s talents for the other, organizing activities where people from the business world share their knowledge in the shantytown, and people from the shantytown visit firms to share their artistic, productive, or creative work. Martin is clear about his objective: I don’t know what he [a business executive] would learn about when going to the shantytown, but I know he might end the day changed. Maybe he might start breaking his prejudices about the shantytown dwellers, and think [differently] about how he defines “success.” The same can happen with the shantytown dweller, they need to believe they can change.
Interestingly, Martin’s social enterprise mimics Martin’s own journey, including his effort to help others in his community, and aims at providing others with the same opportunities that he identified as important to his own success: What I want to do is to provide more than human capital, economic capital, and relationships . . . I want to give them emotional capital. Without it, poverty turns into deep vulnerability, and from there it is very hard to move out of. Anywhere you can find people, even with lots of money, but who can’t ideate, or who only ideate in terms of accumulation, to own more houses and more cars. It is difficult for them to project because they already have a lot . . . Because everyone expects something from them, and they don’t know what they want for themselves . . . The social mandate is too strong and it generates poor people.
Along the second stage in Martin’s narrative, we observed that Martin’s journey, out of his naturalized state of exclusion, was supported by the presence of known strangers who collaborated in the recreation of an identity that saw change as a possibility. Researcher 3’s field note reads, Today, we [Researchers 2 and 3] went to the presentation of Martin’s book about his experience as Happiness and Culture Director at Trendy Co. The presentation took place in Marcos’ restaurant [the chef who organized the cooking course with Martin]. There were 50 people: Martin’s family—some came from their original province, 1200 km away—and friends. The founder of the NGO, the founder of Moment, the piano teacher, and Juan from Trendy Co were there. After a short introduction from Martin, he invited each of them to say a few words. It was a very emotional presentation. There were hugs and tears. Martin cried every time he had to introduce one of these people who “changed my life,” and some of them were deeply touched and sobbing too. It was interesting to note that Martin said to his family: “look, all these people are real, you never believed me, but they can tell you what I do for a living” [laughs]. We [Researchers 2 and 3] had a discussion on “what the celebration was about,” it struck us what a deeply emotional climate it had generated.
In summary, in this second stage, we observe that Martin’s escape from a naturalized state of exclusion was made possible by a network of known strangers, who provided challenge, respect, and continuous presence and availability, helping him to recover a sense of self capable of envisioning a different future for himself and others. At the same time, Martin’s actorhood and scope of possibilities widened: Apart from playing piano, he could become a piano teacher; apart from being a friend of an inmate, he could help him become a better person; apart from being part of the “corporate world,” he could found his own business.
From Neither Here nor There: A Stranger to Both Worlds
We observed a succession of different emotional states in Martin’s narrative, sometimes high energy—characterized by pride, gratitude, and anger—and at other times low energy—comprising emotions such as shame, sorrow, and fear. High emotional energy developed through the presence of known strangers that invested in him. For instance, pride stemmed from the recognition he received in the township as a teacher and the possibility of helping others; gratitude to his friends appeared when he realized that an alternative future was possible and when opportunities actually materialized (becoming a teacher, obtaining the scholarship to travel to Europe, being offered a position in the corporate world, etc.). Nevertheless, Martin’s way out of a situation of exclusion also proved frustrating. After all his struggles and successes, his family still has a hard time conceptualizing the “work” he does, all the more so because he assumed the role of director of happiness and culture. This incomprehension forced him, during the presentation of his book, to insist that his friends and his job were “real.” In this section, we elaborate on this ambiguous emotional state related to his condition as mediator between the shantytown and the city.
As mentioned above, Martin aims to link two distant worlds through his company. But this is not an easy task. For the city dweller, the shantytown represents a mystery wrapped in a threat. Most city dwellers only see the slum from afar or in pictures, and the stories told about them involve drugs, crime, and illegal trafficking of things and people. Even satellite navigation systems remind drivers that they are “approaching a dangerous area.” The slum is associated with crime and danger, and its inhabitants are, by association, threatening people who could be dangerous criminals. Cynthia, a student who joined us on one visit to the slum, explains, I was terrified when we entered the slum, I walked closer [to the facilitators] to feel safer. I was almost shaking. (Cynthia)
Another student says, You go to the slum trying to hide that you are from a richer milieu. You try to dress down . . . but I think they know instantly that you don’t belong there. (Cecilia)
Similarly, for the shantytown dweller, the city is a place where he or she does not necessarily belong. Maria, the principal of a school next to a shantytown, explains, It is a shame, but our girls do not go out from the shantytown. They never visit the city [only 10 km away and well connected by public transportation]. They just come to the school, and then go back [to the slum]. We try to take them to visit museums, parks, walks. If it is not with us, they would never go out.
Martin’s way out of the shantytown and the extension of his network of friends and connections did not come without a cost. Now and then, Martin’s confidence, trust, and loyalty are challenged. He explains, The others [in the neighborhood] felt that I had abandoned them. My first years in Trendy Co . . . I worked there for 5 years . . . were very tough, I was criticized a lot, but it was even worse when I left the NGO. I decided to leave because I was blocking the growth of others. Then I was a traitor.
Martin feels that poverty marked him in a deep way, and that these scars are difficult to heal. Emotions such as sadness, guilt, loneliness, and sometimes resentment are recurrent in his conversations. He feels he cannot enjoy the “better situation (he is) living now” and often experiences guilt, as if he is committing treason. In addition, some people in the shantytown point to him as someone who does not belong in the community anymore, which hurts Martin. So, he often turns to friends and connections for comfort to alleviate these emotional costs of his success. As the book presentation described above shows, the presence and emotional support of these known strangers seems to help Martin manage the emotional distress that results from living between two worlds. We noticed on many occasions that we ourselves had become another support network for Martin to draw comfort from in times of distress. Often, we receive emails, calls, or messages through social media, especially when he experiences difficulties. A field note from Researcher 2 reads, Yesterday, Martin was mentioned in LN, Info, and C [three national newspapers] as he participated in a meeting with the president [of the country] and the social cabinet to discuss vulnerable people’s situation. A number of negative comments and press articles followed, trashing Martin, saying he has now been co-opted by the right-wing ruling party, or mocking him for becoming the “Minister of Happiness” (which is not true). Today I talked to him. He said he is devastated, that certain people cannot see that he is trying to help improving the life conditions of the poor and vulnerable. I said that I know that, and that he can count on me. He thanked me: “Thanks a lot for calling me, thanks for being there.”
In summary, Martin’s emotional state at this time oscillates between both high- and low-energy emotional states. He is aware—and proud—of his achievements and the transformations he produces in people, challenging prejudices held by inhabitants of both the shantytown and the “normal” city and offering opportunities to shantytown dwellers. Although this makes him happy, he is also hurt by not being recognized as a member of his community. It is on these occasions that the emotional support of known strangers becomes crucial, offering comfort to Martin. This comfort allows Martin to shift from a low- to a high-energy state, while expressed gratitude to friends and connections serves to cement the bonds between them and him.
Low-Power Actors’ Projective Self-Emergence and Development Model
Drawing on our findings, we present below a model explaining the mechanisms of the emergence and development of low-power actors’ projective self (Figure 2). Based on the literature on institutional work and emotions and broader sociological conceptions (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998), we define the construct “projective self” as the emergent cognitive reflexive capacity associated with an emotional energy surge that allows the actor to imagine a desired future state of affairs, typically better than the current one, and a future that one can help create. This happens, we believe, when imagining a better future has become a legitimate activity for the actor, and, at the same time, the actor experiences a surge in the emotional energy spurred by this imagination. We see the “projective self” as a useful construct to study the connection between emotions and institutional work. Nevertheless, we do not see the projective self as a heroic, voluntarist, or narrowly instrumentalist phenomenon, but as an “interactive, culturally embedded process by which social actors negotiate their paths toward the future, receiving their driving impetus from the conflicts and challenges of social life” (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998, p. 984).
Low-power actors’ projective self: emergence and development.
Our core theoretical assumption is that the projective self is intimately linked to an “emotional state” (Gould, 2009) affected by social emotions elicited through interactions. The projective self entails both cognitive and affective dimensions, which are intertwined (Cosmides & Tooby, 2000; Elfenbein, 2007; Forgas, 2003) because “thinking and feelings are inextricably linked most of the time” and “[c]ertain ways of interpreting one’s environment are inherently emotional . . . few thoughts are entirely free of feelings, and emotions influence thinking” (Ellsworth & Scherer, 2003, p. 572). In our view, low-power actors’ projective self emerges and develops through a series of cognitive and emotional responses to interactions with known strangers. In the case we studied, known strangers challenge, respect, and remain present and available to the focal actor, triggering actors’ imagination, role enhancement, and comfort. Although the dyad challenge/imagination stresses the cognitive dimension of the emergence of the projective self, we see it also as an affective reality, as the challenge itself is emotionally infused and is received emotionally. Similarly, respect/role enhancement comprises both cognitive and emotional elements: One is respected both as a person, for what one is, and also for what one has done or can do (Rogers, Corley, & Ashforth, 2016), allowing the person to see that she can have a tangible impact on her surroundings. Finally, the presence and availability/comfort pair stresses the emotional dimension of the construct, capturing the transition from low to high emotional energy.
Our model shows that a fundamental condition of the social status quo is the rigidity and resilience of the hard rules and soft understanding it creates, with strong social control mechanisms enforced through symbolic, emotional, and sometimes material means to impede change. These control mechanisms are often perceived as natural and obvious by the actors, rather than contingent or arbitrary and lopsided. Because of imperfect mobility among social strata, the poverty and exclusion found in the shantytown are part of a highly institutionalized, well-defined, and clearly understood social distance, which separates those from here (the shantytown) and those from there (the gated community, the city), visibly manifested as a 10-foot-tall brick wall that separates luxury houses from dwellings without running water or electricity. The divide is also clearly demarcated by subtler signs, such as one’s skin color, the way one talks, the words one uses, the clothes one wears, the music one listens to, and the way bodies smell or do not smell. All these elements are the subject of shaming and stigmatizing interactions that contribute to the experience of low emotional energy by low-power actors.
Our model indicates that new possibilities can be imagined when a person begins to move beyond a low emotional energy state that prevents projective agency. This state, which is pervasive among excluded persons, acts as a barrier to imagination and collaboration. Characterized by emotions such as shame, sorrow, and fear proliferating in a context of misery and naturalized exclusion, this emotional state hinders the capacity to think of an alternative to being cold, hungry, sick, or dirty all the time. We do not argue that there is no actorhood in the slum, but rather that it is severely limited and linked to institutionalized understandings, practices, and routines within a situation of exclusion. In other words, status markers, role-enforcement mechanisms, and low emotional energy contribute to reinforcing the social distance separating the slum and the city, culminating in the socialization and reproduction of exclusion.
Because bringing about change involves dealing with a social structure that tends to reproduce itself, going beyond institutional constraints necessitates a subjective perception of self that incorporates the possibility of projective agency. Our research strongly indicates that a precondition of institutional work in contexts of high vulnerability is the (re)construction of the projective self of low-power actors, that is, the emergent capacity of the self to imagine and to plan for future agency. This capacity is taken for granted in many writings about institutional work but appears to be scant in contexts of extreme social exclusion. Excluded actors, according to our research, often cannot conceive a better future at all; when they do, it is possible only through external factors. For instance, many slum dwellers can only imagine leaving the slum through physical beauty, marriage (mostly for females), lottery wins, or sports prowess (mostly for males), rather than through institutional work of any kind.
The relative absence of a projective self appears to be one of the major obstacles to initiating social change among low-power actors. As mentioned above, we see this projective self as a relational and dynamic phenomenon: One projects himself or herself into a future, and one is also projected by others. Along these lines, our model shows how a new, high-energy emotional state can emerge from a series of interactions with known strangers. These known strangers must belong to the “outside”—they cannot be as deprived as the focal actor (or at least not in the same way). Our model points to the mechanisms contributing to the emergence and development of low-power actors’ projective self. We argue that interactions between low-power actors and known strangers entail the cognitive and affective mechanisms of challenge, respect, and presence and availability from the known strangers, which bring about imagination, role enhancement, and comfort for the low-power actor, allowing him or her to think and act beyond the context in which he or she is embedded. The respect and validation given to Martin by known strangers served as a means of overcoming shame and building pride. The challenge dimension (along with exposure to alternate templates or models), coupled with the support involved in presence and availability, helped Martin to overcome fear and sorrow, turning low emotional energy into high emotional energy. Challenge, respect, and support together enabled the imagining of other possibilities. Martin’s connection to known strangers effectively presented contradictions of his view of himself, setting the stage for him to develop projective agency. The challenge, respect, and support provided to Martin also enabled him to take action outside his slum domain (enacting projective agency), which helped him become even more reflexive as he saw the results of his actions.
In sum, our research shows that known strangers contribute not only by offering sources of capital but also, and more important, by providing emotional engagement and support that helps mend some of the deepest wounds of poverty and exclusion: the difficulty, or even the impossibility, of dreaming of a better and more just future for oneself and one’s community. Finally, our model documents that projective agency develops through continuous cycles of interactions, as the low-power actor becomes more and more projective, resulting in more and more opportunities becoming available to him or her.
Discussion
Our objective in this article was to contribute to the understanding of how low-power actors can develop a projective self that allows them to think and act beyond institutional constraints to engage in projects of social change. We joined the incipient conversation about the emotional dimensions of institutional theory (Creed et al., 2010; Fan & Zietsma, 2016; Hudson et al., 2015; Toubiana & Zietsma, 2016; Voronov & Vince, 2012; Voronov & Weber, 2016) to explore the interplay of emotions and social innovations in marginalized contexts, looking at the role emotions play in that process of institutional work and change. We explored these issues by studying a successful entrepreneur inhabiting the margins of “normal” society who rose from abject poverty and a violent, abusive household.
We observed in our data that socialization in slums and the “normal city,” and the interactions that follow, create and maintain social distance between categories of people. Such categories ultimately translate into positions in a stratified society that deeply influence people’s expectations, desires, feelings, and reflexive capacity. For excluded individuals, these positions limit the possibility of engaging in projects of social change. Paraphrasing existentialist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, one is not born a poor person, one learns to be one. Indeed, we found that both the slum and the city create and recreate significantly different emotional states (Gould, 2009) that contribute to creating and reinforcing a subjective reality, which incorporates (or not) the possibility of future-oriented agency (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998). For low-power actors, institutional work requires adequate emotional states and backgrounds that predate such agency, and is considerably reduced when these are not present.
Previous studies within the institutional work literature offer three reasons to explain the fact that some actors can ideate alternative possibilities for their field even while most cannot. The first explanation focuses on the “social skills” (Fligstein, 2001) of the potential actor, suggesting that some individuals are both more sensitive than others to the intersubjective relationships of people in social structures and more knowledgeable about the kind of actions that would be proper and legitimate within the field. Although this explanation might serve for certain actors and fields, in extremely oppressive situations such as those of the slum, the social skills mentioned in the literature seem to be absent. In fact, skills learned within the slum tend more to mere survival: How to navigate poverty rather than how to escape it. In addition, the status markers that tend to reproduce the social distance between slum dwellers and outsiders are difficult (if not impossible) to change. A second approach focuses on social position in the field, explaining that actors with privileged access to different forms of capital are less susceptible to institutional pressures to conform (Battilana, 2006). Again, this explanation may be useful in describing actors belonging to the elites or even middle classes, but it does not seem to be helpful in explaining low-power actors’ agency in highly constraining social systems such as the one we studied. Finally, the third explanation, offered by Suddaby et al. (2016), points to the reflexive ability of actors. They maintain that reflexivity, an individual and social phenomenon, varies across individuals depending on their position in the field and their social skills. They observe that an individual with a high social position (i.e., member of the elite) and with more social skills is more likely to be more reflexive, and thereby more capable of institutional work. However, they argue that, “people with low social skills and low social positions show relatively low degrees of reflexivity” (Suddaby et al., 2016, p. 43). This idea is confirmed by our study, particularly in the first stage of Martin’s institutional biography, which we call the naturalization of poverty.
Nevertheless, we found that low-power actors’ reflexivity can develop, and with it the capacity for institutional work. We observed that the ability to imagine a different (and better) future begins with the development of the projective self of the potential actor. We defined the projective self as the emergent cognitive and emotional reflexive capacity that allows the actor to think and act beyond institutional constraints to engage in projects of social change. This argument addresses Emirbayer and Mische’s question regarding the possibility of developing projective agency. According to them, agency is a temporally embedded process of social engagement, informed by the past (in its habitual aspect), but also oriented toward the future (as a capacity to imagine alternative possibilities) and toward the present (as a capacity to contextualize past habits and future projects within the contingencies of the moment). (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998, p. 963)
Depending on their temporal orientation, actors will either be able or unable to engage in projects of change. Actors oriented to the past tend to maintain their “habitual schematic responses and relations that have become embodied and institutionalized” (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998, p. 1006). Those oriented to the present respond to the demands and contingencies of the moment, improvising and navigating the circumstances they face, either actualizing the past or the future plans they might develop. The crucial question—according to Emirbayer and Mische—is how actors oriented toward the past or present can increase their capacity to orient toward the future. Our findings suggest that this switch in orientation, which Emirbayer and Mische (1998) termed “recomposition” (p. 964), happens along the interaction between low-power actors and known strangers. We argue that it is after the connection between the focal actor and the known stranger is established at an emotional level (specifically through offered respect) that other resources (e.g., knowledge) can flow. We, thus, suggest that institutional work linked to projects of social change requires a subjective experience capable of being attached to a new imagination of the future. This subjective experience is not primarily about cognition; it is accompanied by an emotional state attached to the belief that a different reality is possible. Our findings about the relationship between low-power actors and known strangers bring to mind Emirbayer and Mische’s (1998) conceptualization of agency as a communicative process: It is through interactions with nonexcluded others that the ability to evaluate the current situation and to envision a new (and better) one develops. Also, our study of Martin’s institutional biography highlights that the continuous presence and availability of these known strangers may help explain how the same emotions work differently depending on the context and the interactions: Sorrow and shame could lead to reproduction or change, to hopelessness or to rebellion. In this respect, we observe that the role of known strangers does not end when the low-power actor starts to make his or her way out of exclusion. Rather, it continues as the actor faces the difficulties of living between two worlds, never fully belonging to either.
Our findings have immediate and direct implications for public policy. The lack of entrepreneurial agency among low-power actors has been theorized to stem mostly or exclusively from a lack of resources, rather than a lack of projectivity; as a result, the solutions proposed generally involve providing low-power actors with resources. For example, certain programs aim to provide financial capital to the excluded person. But we believe that this is naïve at best; our findings provide strong evidence that the limitations to agency and institutional work among excluded people are at least partially, and probably predominantly, internal. These internal limitations serve as a platform upon which other, more material limitations become salient. Thus, addressing a lack of skills, instruction, or even seed money will be helpful only when the agent has had her projective self reconstructed, and has internalized the idea that agency (with the goal of entrepreneurship and institutional work) is not only possible but also desirable. This legitimated capacity to create cannot be established without the emotional support that helps to heal the deep wounds of exclusion.
This last point should help policy makers (and others interested in the ignominy of misery) working to increase the chances of developing truly impactful programs. The emotional state required for attempting to initiate change is difficult to achieve through bureaucratic organizations, public offices, or state programs, as often these assume that the entrepreneur is ready and treat the beneficiaries with distance and in impersonal ways, reinforcing the existing obstacles to action. For this reason, we think that an important role for agencies is to work closer with and support community-based projects and grassroots movements, which tend to be more personally oriented and develop closer bonds to the beneficiaries. These community-based and grassroots organizations can serve to create the emotional states leading to the (re)construction of a projective self.
We conclude this discussion by reflecting on an unexpected, and yet troublesome, discovery. Connecting two worlds (the slum and the city), for all its reputed benefits, can also have heavy emotional costs. Indeed, although Martin managed to escape poverty, his success leaves him in an in-between place that is not easy to inhabit: Loneliness, sorrow, and guilt are recurrent emotions in Martin’s daily life. To many people in the upper classes, Martin’s case proves that exit from poverty is possible: “If Martin could do it, then others can too.” This comforting interpretation ensures that no realization (nor moral assessment) of an unjust social distance follows. Martin’s case can soothe our conscience. More, by singling him out and celebrating his success, we may contribute to pushing Martin out of his original community, as people in the slum stop seeing him as one of them. Thus, although Martin managed to cross the gap that separates the slum and the city and has even helped others to do the same, social distance remains persistent and resilient. As Dorado and Ventresca (2013) suggest, complex social problems require crescive, collective solutions. Entrenched poverty and misery, and the social distance that separates those who have from those who have not, require more than the efforts of one individual to solve them.
Conclusion
In this article, we studied the emotional dynamics that hinder or enhance the possibility of low-power actors thinking and acting beyond oppressive institutional constraints. We presented a “thick” case study of an unusually successful social entrepreneur who escaped from a background of poverty and exclusion. We observed how the continuous presence of known strangers contributed to the inclusion process by providing early emotional support, allowing the entrepreneur to feel and think differently and imagine a different future. Finally, we showed how a successful entrepreneur who has escaped poverty may continue suffering from the divide created between these two worlds, and we discussed how this emotional state also requires support.
We believe this article makes two contributions. First, by studying the connection between emotions and agency to produce institutional change, we shed light on the personal conditions and circumstances that hinder or foster low-power actors’ ability to think and act beyond institutional constraints. Accordingly, we extend our understanding of known strangers’ role in fostering projective agency among low-power actors. Specifically, we highlight the mechanisms through which their interventions (and interactions) with low-power actors help develop the projective self that is necessary to engage in projects of social change.
Second, by understanding the antecedents of effective institutional work among vulnerable people, we provide a process model of the emergence and development of the projective self. The model allows us to understand how vulnerable people might become capable of engaging in processes of institutional transformation to challenge oppressive contexts in which they are embedded. The recursive cycles of interactions between low-power actors and known strangers, together with an enhanced subjective projective self, allow low-power actors to learn that they can challenge the status quo and that they can participate in changing their own lives.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Charlene Zietsma for her exceptional guidance and, more important, encouragement and support, and to the anonymous reviewers who challenged and helped us with their insights and thoughtful advice. We are also grateful to Tomás Farchi, Roberto Vassolo, Ignasi Martí, Héctor Rocha, Silvia Dorado, and Tammar Zilber for their constructive comments and suggestions on the earlier drafts of this article.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.