Social Innovation Thriving on Hybridity? Lessons from a Street Paper Project for People Experiencing Homelessness in Germany

3.1 Methodological Issues

Case studies are appropriate research tools when they enable ‘an empirical inquiry that investigates a contemporary phenomenon … in depth and within its real-world context’ (Yin 2014: 16) and where scholars are interested in understanding the role, structure, technology, and embeddedness of a complex social arrangement (Flybjerg 2006). While insights conveyed by a single case study are in many ways unique, they nonetheless lend themselves to understanding developments in further settings, either from the same area or within fields exposed to similar regulatory environments. Following this rationale, this section presents results from an investigation conducted between 2019 and 2022 in a big German agglomeration and involving the author of this article, one of his colleagues (Hannu Turba), and a master student via a research internship (Moritz Bachmann). The findings are set out in a condensed manner (see Section 3.2), with the aim of developing propositions about potential dynamics of and around entrepreneurial social innovation, as well as concerning the value-added of a conceptual framework blending institutionalist and praxeologic perspectives on such dynamics.

The case study this article is drawing on is based on different sorts of evidence (see Table 1), including a vast collection of documents (which reflect the evolving characteristics of the setting under scrutiny); semi-structured interviews with six protagonists of the project (each lasting up to 90 min); and a focus group discussion involving this team (over 2 h). This oral data provided insights into the actors’ subjectivities which, according to process theory, are essential to dynamics of collective action. A distinctive merit of the research design was the inclusion of external stakeholders whose perspectives were captured by a further set of interviews (n = 7). The latter were conducted with (middle) managers of providers of homeless assistance established in the same local setting, notably charitable organisations and a public welfare agency. Among other things, these interviewees talked about their own experience with the street paper and collaborative practice in the field more generally – which contributed to a better comprehension of the wider ecology in which the project had developed over the last decades. Regarding the analysis of documents, issues of the magazine produced by the project were scrutinised for a period of 10 years, in order to portray major activities and approaches of the involved actors. The research was also enriched by information contained in articles from the local press. This helped contextualise and validate observations in the field, bearing in mind that mass media can be biased in presenting events and activities. The combination of these different kinds of data enabled a cross-check of all the information obtained during the case study.

Allowing for thick description and in-depth exploration, the study was embedded in a broader empirical investigation, including an analysis of the architecture of the entire homeless assistance system (Bode and Bachmann forthcoming). Category-led, qualitative content analysis was used to organise the material and to infer overarching insights from it. Concerning the design of the interviews, major sensitizing concepts included the respondent’s sense-making related to the project’s history and turning points; the interface with various environments; and reported challenges in the day-to-day practice past and present. These concepts guided an inductive coding exercise geared towards identifying situations where disparate institutional logics were, or had to be, enacted simultaneously. Information retrieved from the aforementioned set of documents were used to corroborate and qualify related insights. As it was promised to conceal the name of the researched organisation when publishing findings, the following portrayal of the latter does not specify all details regarding its history and activities. That said, the sources used for the analysis offer a rich panorama of relevant processes and perceived challenges.

3.2 Key Findings

The project under study was set up in the 1990s with the aim of creating a magazine to be sold by people experiencing homelessnes (or similar hardship) on the streets. The founders had felt unsatisfied with the then prevailing approaches to homeless assistance and sought to instigate an undertaking modelled on templates developed elsewhere in the Western world. In formal terms, the project was founded as a subdivision of a (protestant) faith-based welfare organisation but soon enjoyed high operational independence as it became decoupled from the latter in operational terms. A few years after the start, this welfare organisation did not seem to have any strategic influence on the project. At the time of our study, the latter had settled as an independent undertaking, with no ‘organic’ connection to any other organisation in the field.

In the early 2020s, the project’s facilities are located close to the city centre and host a group of employees (n = 30) including (part-time) workers running a reception point for vendors. Besides these workers and the general manager, the staff comprises journalists producing the street paper, a fundraiser, a ‘sales manager’ arranging the marketing process and organising spaces for selling the product (in more than 30 city districts), as well as three social workers providing advice to vendors on an adhoc-basis, referring them to other local welfare organisations if necessary. The local office runs a café where vendors can meet and buy the monthly issues of the journal which they then resell to the local population, by charging them with a higher price. Some (former) vendors have become employed to support the project in terms of technical operations. Occasionally, others contribute to producing features on people experiencing homelessness for the street paper (and receive free copies of the magazine as a reward). Importantly, there is considerable fluctuation in the group of vendors. Only a few have stayed with the project over one or two decades, many have been lost out of sight, some former vendors are reported to have found a way back to ‘normal’ living conditions (in lower-class positions).

The magazine is fabricated by professional journalists and comprises entertainment pages with no or little relation to the issue of homelessness, as well as articles dealing with housing issues and local social policies more generally. Various issues present biographies of people lacking a decent place to dwell. The magazine also contains adverts the acquisition of which is outsourced to an external company. According to one of the project’s core team – whose six members will be referred to as protagonists of the street paper (PSP) in the remainder of this article –, the journalistic focus of the magazine lies on cultural topics broadly speaking. That said, the core team conceives of the project as being a critical voice in the public debate about homelessness and related policies which is substantiated by various articles published in the magazine. From our investigation into the wider local press, it can be inferred that – up to present – the organisation performs an advocacy role in the public sphere and in the encounter with other stakeholders of the homeless assistance system. For instance, representatives of the project, commenting in the local media, have accused the city government of deterring ‘undeclared’ immigrants by offering only rudimentary support to those sleeping rough.

Over the years, the political stance taken by the street paper seems to have irritated other local actors involved in homeless assistance activities, among which charitable organisations and public welfare agencies. In our interviews, these actors confess that they sometimes feel ‘needled’ by the street paper’s messages, for instance when the latter blame other players in the field for just ‘administering’ social exclusion instead of combating it. An employee of a public day-shelter for socially marginalised citizens, talking about his personal experience with the public communication of the street paper, states that the latter is ‘constantly criticizing those projects I have been involved in’ (interview with public social worker). Other sources confirm that statutory welfare services feel aggrieved by the above allegation.

Concerning the sale of the magazine, busy spots such as the entrance of supermarkets or street corners in pedestrian zones are assigned to individual vendors, often after agreements with owners of the respective space. The latter becomes ‘reserved’ for one or two vendors, to make them establish rapport with buyers, as our interviewees explain. Beneficiaries of the project include socially marginalised people of which many appear trapped in substance abuse and mental health problems, along with younger people rejecting more conventional forms of gainful work and community life. Recently, immigrants have become a growing segment of this group (see below). Vendors have a quasi-franchiser status that shall provide them with possibilities for ‘just earning a bit of own money… which they can spend on what they want, so that they gain autonomy instead of being constantly on a drip – including money to perhaps manage their substance addiction’ (Interview PSP 3). A colleague adds that the vendors ‘definitively are not employees, that’s crucial. Nobody here would say they are clients, they are our vendors, yes, but … we help them to be independent’ (Interview PSP 4). The key idea of the project has always consisted of putting vendors, in their role as a salesperson, ‘on a level playing field’ with those who purchase the magazine. In the eyes of one leading figure, this concept ‘has worked out fabulously up to the present day’ (Interview PSP 5). Over the years, however, there has been internal debate about whether selling a street paper is a humane alternative to beggary. One of our interviewees notes that the magazine exposes people without access to decent housing in ways confirming their social marginality: ‘So if you [as a vendor] want to sell the magazine, you have to sell your biography as well, because you are a bid stigmatised as a socially marginalised person with a distinctive life history’ (Interview PSP 2).

Importantly, vendors must stick to certain rules, especially concerning their presence in the agreed places for selling the magazine. All vendors receive an official badge showing they are entitled to sell the magazine at an agreed spot for specified time slots. Once rules are broken, sanctions apply (e.g. a temporal ban on selling the magazine). ‘One has to tell them what it means when I only sell it on Saturdays while having a[nother] job during the week. The number of vendors and spots we operate is the strongest vector of income generation’ (Interview PSP 4). Obviously, the organisation has an economic interest in enforcing the above rules and publicly invites citizens feeling harassed by vendors to report problematic incidents to the headquarter. In recent times, the undertaking has seen a growing need to discipline ‘franchisers’ who disregard formal prescriptions, including the ‘golden rule’ of not (ab)using the vendor role for begging money. Some of those selling the magazine had counterfeited their badge, others had sold the magazine without the above ‘quasi-licence’. Our interviewees stress the importance of monitoring and information management processes, which one respondent refers to as a ‘energy-consuming endeavour’ (Interview PSP 2). It does not seem easy to keep all vendors ‘under control’, in part because the core team refrains from making sanctions overly sharp.

It is noteworthy that, over the years, the project has also initiated some social inclusion activities, mostly on a fixed-term basis (regarding the entire portfolio of actions, see Table 2 below). Beneficiaries have engaged with collecting waste for a public transport venue; operating a food kitchen serving ‘up-market cuisine’ (during the COVID-19 pandemic); offering guided tours to city spots frequented by people experiencing homelessness; or running temporary accommodation. Given the small number of involved workers and the fixed-term character of most of these activities, the latter appear symbolic in kind. They are often geared towards sending out certain messages to the wider public – whether related to the fate of socially marginalised people or ‘good causes’ more generally. For instance, the aforementioned waste collection initiative in a public transport setting grew out of a political campaign against such people having been expelled from that setting. As one of our interviewees points out, such activities have a ‘marketing purpose’ in the sense of show-casing that the street paper project goes beyond providing emergency relief. ‘We need new [social inclusion] activities in order to be not reduced to homelessness issues, in order to attract public interest, of course’ (Interview PSP 3). In the light of the street paper’s ‘economic power’, a further interviewee adds, the project ‘has gained a public reputation of being able to shoulder and kick off such activities’, with some of the latter getting started ’because no one else in the city wanted to run them’ (Interview PSP 4).

According to our informants, embarking on such social inclusion initiatives has not been without drawbacks: ‘In our organisation, we have many talented people able to take action, but in doing so, they are definitively missing in our marketing department or elsewhere’ (PSP 4). The priority lies on the project’s ‘core business’ whereby one seeks to overcome the logic of mere charitable support which is looming behind many social inclusion activities. Alluding to a neighbouring local initiative offering mobile bathrooms to people without a place to dwell, one of our interviewees expresses his reluctance to adopt this logic: ‘Providing opportunities to people to have a shower close to where they are sleeping rough, this is kind of an Americanisation [of homeless assistance] which I find we should reject’ (Interview PSP 3). A colleague adds that‚ in political terms, ‘we carry on to have the opinion that there should be humane accommodation, that there is a right to home – and hence we can’t say: Splendid, oh, you are distributing soups!’ (Interview PSP 1).

Importantly, the economic situation of the project has evolved markedly since its inception. Compared to the early days of the magazine, there has been a sharp decrease in sales, with a circulation down to one third of the issues printed at the outset. To an extent, the product competes with other types of media (for some time, even a further street paper was distributed across the city). In this context, journalistic content resonating with a more classical charitable discourse has gained traction. The issues of the magazine still contain a mix of entertainment, political articles, and stories that appeal to the compassion of potential buyers – yet one has become more eager to concentrate the product’s content on cultural issues while political features have become less radical overall. She points out that, nowadays, one should avoid an excess of ‘gloomy’ messages and cover sheets showing people experiencing homelessness – instead, ‘it’s better to start with positive news in a given issue’ (Interview PSP 2). Sought-for is a balance between presenting ‘content signalling political concerns… and reaching out to the many people who do commonly not talk about such content’ (ibid).

Meanwhile, the persistence of the magazine as such is predicated on a regular flow of donations. In the early 2020s, income generated through the sale of the magazine only covers half of the project’s budget. Hence the ‘laws’ of the charitable sector apply. Donations are peaking before Christmas, even as some of the money is raised from businesses the organisation’s protagonists would rather like to evade (e.g. the tobacco industry). Members of the core team consider the critical role of donors as being delicate in some way, given that there is considerable rivalry throughout the above sector: ‘We really receive much money in terms of donations, and sometimes, I believe, this hurts others [neighbouring organisations] in some way’ (interview PSP 3). Yet they perceive that the project ‘needs a spearheading role because we are self-reliant’ (Interview PSP 3) and is pressurised to excel in inventing novel, visible, and fashionable forms of prosocial activities.

Indeed, fellow initiatives at local level equally depend on successful fundraising, including those serving the same clientele. One example is a late-night lorry run by a charity employing professional street workers. In our interview, its manager declares to be ‘proud to be independent’ but reports tough challenges when striving for donations. For instance, some wealthy donors do not want to pay for staff, but only for support items such as sleeping bags. The aforementioned mobile bathroom project – whose approach of interconnecting emergency support and public lobbying resembles the strategy of the street paper under study here – is faced with similar challenges and feels urged ‘to watch out where we can get donations and attention from’ and to work hard for ‘bringing a new product to the market’ (interview with manager).

Overall, with time going on, the street paper has been confronted with various phenomena running counter to the initial ‘social business plan’. This is exemplified by the establishment of the social work department with a remit to assist vendors in arranging their precarious living conditions, along with a ‘sales department’ monitoring their ‘market behaviour’. Vendors have been found to (ab)use the act of selling the magazine for soliciting money, sometimes without any interest to hand over the product. While the investigation undertaken for this article did not include observations of the selling act itself, beggary has been a frequent topic in internal debates. Furthermore, the arrival of numerous migrants to the city in question since the 2010s has entailed a new, tension-ridden composition of the project’s clientele, with many ‘native’ vendors being hostile to taking ‘strangers’ on board. Some reports in the magazine dealing with immigration issues therefore collide with the mind-set of some of those selling it. However, the core team, considering refugees as victims of (local) immigration policies, has decided to deliberately include them into the project and to revise internal processes accordingly, for instance in the social work department for which a foreigner was recruited to mitigate language problems. Importantly, many non-native vendors have no command of the German language which clashes with one of the key ideas of the project, that is, eliciting verbal communication between salespersons and customers.

All this suggests that there is a gap between the underlying social innovation approach and experiences related to its implementation. A statement published on the project’s website (at the end of 2023) laconically comments that ‘the objectives of the street paper and many other social initiatives have not been met’ – which, from the angle of the involved actors, does not imply a complete failure but a need to develop more modest expectations towards what can be achieved by this above approach.

3.3 Discussion

In many respects, the project portrayed in this article fits the image of ‘entrepreneurial social innovation’ based on economic action with benevolent objectives (Pache and Santos 2013; Battilana, Besharov, and Mitzinneck 2017; Mair and Seelos 2021). As a self-standing undertaking, it pursues a prosocial meta-goal while seeking creative solutions to a wicked problem. The bulk of the beneficiaries is included in a rather informal manner – yet, nevertheless, the project relies on constant and rule-based interaction; a group of protagonists who perform classical leadership roles; an executive manager and a ‘sales director’ working hard to standardise practices (for example by spatial arrangements for vendors and marketing efforts); as well as regular exchange between employed professionals and external stakeholders through which the former attain an actorhood status vis-à-vis the latter. Hence, in important categorical dimensions, the project under study exhibits characteristics of a conventional formal organisation.

Apparently, the undertaking, drawing on the projective capacities of its core members, forges ‘creative responses to multiple institutional logics’ (Binder 2007) as various social worlds become intermingled in its day-to-day sense-making. First of all, these responses borrow from the specific (meritocratic) value order of the modern capitalist economy to develop a business model which is geared towards ‘upgrading’ marginalised individuals within that order. They invoke a private market logic imbued with entrepreneurial spirit which is fundamental to the project insofar as the latter has grown as a hazardous venture and with a permanent need to revamp established routines. Vendors are construed as independent workers ‘mimicking’ a role model which enjoys considerable reputation in Western societies, that is, business action at one’s own risk. This role had to be newly designed for victims of that very rationale, given that, within these societies, social exclusion frequently emanates from market dynamics. To ensure this conversion, the project appeals to the consumer ethics of a ‘moral marketplace’ (Singh 2018, emphasis added), hoping that customers play the game. Secondly, enacted practices appeal to a more traditional charity logic which rests on values of benevolence and the idea of emergency help. Beggary is part of this universe, but street papers are aimed to overcome this imaginary and related repercussions – that is, dynamics of stigmatisation – by using this logic as a mere stimulus for making addressees adopt a more emancipatory attitude. Thirdly, the project invests in purposeful public communication (or advocacy) and engages with a social policy logic that guides ambitions to gain influence in the realm of government writ large – albeit via a quasi-commercial vehicle through which related claims are brought to the fore.

Hence, blending logics in various and changeable ways, the project cuts across institutional (and sectoral) boundaries. It resorts to different ‘higher order belief systems … as cultural toolkits that are available’ and pliable (Cloutier and Langley 2013: 369). This works by sense-making processes bridging these systems which, while commonly being detached from each other in the contemporary ‘society of organizations’ (Perrow 1989), become intertwined through the very practice of ‘hybrid organising’ (Battilana, Besharov, and Mitzinneck 2017). Distinctive learning experiences make the project ‘co-enact’ disparate institutional logics – which is often seen to be a vital source of creativity within contemporary organisations (ibid: 144). In the terms used by praxeological accounts, this reflects an ‘ongoing and continuous effort to order, segment, analyse’, by constantly processing and rearranging elements found in a compound organisational environment (Lorino 2018: 276). Thus, the key idea of turning objects of charitable action into salespeople earning their living on their own builds on the value order of (ever more) market-oriented Western economies. Likewise, the project’s protagonists discover how this approach can be combined with a political claim for the respect of fundamental human rights. Furthermore, in the course of time, the protagonists become aware of options (and requirements) of attracting resources by appealing to charitable motives – whereas these motives remain, at least symbolically, discarded from the encounter of vendors and buyers.

However, these different imaginaries, when being co-enacted in concrete situations, combine to elicit systematic ambiguity – which arguably has implications concerning their potential for effective social innovation. The ‘uneasy coexistence’ (Battilana, Besharov, and Mitzinneck 2017: 143) of institutional logics in situated actions is imbued with ‘irreconcilable sets of cultural meanings and associated practices’ (Garrow and Hasenfeld 2012: 121) and prone to cause disruptions. From the perspective of the project’s protagonists, these dynamics were not predictable but force the organisation to alter its approach in important respects. The experiences made are in stark contrast with conceptualisations suggesting that hybrid organisations easily manage to internally segregate incompatible institutional logics (see Skelcher and Rathgeb Smith 2015) or find opportunities to ignore inconvenient ones at critical moments (Binder 2007). Rather, considering the handling of these logics, one can discern challenging boomerang effects that are rooted in the wider realms in which the invoked logics are ingrained.

Thus, those involved in the project must learn that the market logic, while being fundamental to the anti-stigma approach of the project and playing with the imaginary of ‘proud’ economic independence, also spurs strategic behaviour on the side of vendors who sidestep the project’s impetus to reduce stigma and just ask for money. There are attempts to contain such behaviour, yet practical and ideological considerations set limits to such efforts. Moreover, people who are offered a copy of the magazine may always believe they are asked to commiserate with a vendor (for instance, a refugee), rather than being a conventional costumer. Our interviewees allude to this when noting that vendors ‘sell’ their deviant biography in some way. Once the social world of charity becomes activated, various facets of this world come into play– not just the one the project tries to exploit. Further research on German street papers suggests that many vendors seek to elicit compassion and thereby ‘perform’ their social stigma (see Altenbuchner, Melzl, and Sonntag 2018; Buchmayr 2019) while buyers may not necessarily internalise the project’s philosophy of making all parties meet on a level playing field. This easily leads to situations where a passerby feels mercy, offers some money, and, if the magazine is bought at all, ditches the latter without having read a line. Besides, the charity logic takes centre stage with organisational communication seeking to attract donors and attempts to adapt practices to the latter’s preferences.

After all, the overarching idea of inalienable human rights, as invoked in the project’s public communication, collides with both the ‘laws’ of charitable action and the characteristics of market institutions. Thus, while claiming bold welfare programmes, the project also sends out a symbolic message according to which ways exist by which marginalised citizens can unfold a potential for self-help and may not need legally institutionalised forms of social support (e.g. public welfare programmes). Moreover, the franchiser model can be experienced to harbour risks of failure which range from poor weather conditions over the capricious behaviour of co-actors (shop owners; passers-by) to turbulences such as those during the Corona pandemic. Competing projects are a further source of uncertainty. In addition, the special approach of the project makes the latter a ‘lone player’ in the local system of homeless assistance, as other welfare organisations observe or bemoan. Symbolically, it signals a radical critique of all (other) organisations inhabiting this system which helps attracting public attention but arguably impedes collaborative action to achieve the ambitions flagged out by the project. In this context, the underlying ‘social business model’ – which combines strict organisational independence with market-oriented practices – comes with troublesome pressures to repeatedly instigate lighthouse projects that show-case an extraordinary commitment to making a difference to co-actors from the same field. Arguably, this exacerbates the project’s isolation in its surroundings.

In terms of hybrid organising, the project’s response to this imbroglio consists of accepting in its very practice that, for most vendors, the mere sale of street papers seldom paves the way (back) into a decent life. With the attention being shifted to less ambitious goals, the project demonstrates creative flexibility but changes its character. Thus, at some point, real practices tend to confirm images of the homeless as being ‘deviant people’ – which runs counter to the emancipatory philosophy of the project’s protagonists. Likewise, the project seeks pragmatic responses to what external stakeholders are calling for, for instance practical help with tangible outputs (food delivery; temporary housing; social work, etc.), rather than, say, policy change containing the power of the housing industry. Thereby, the political element in the above model becomes fuzzy as well. True, faced with immigrants as growing target group, the project’s protagonists are brave in publicly rejecting chauvinistic attitudes throughout the wider population and among vendors. However, they admit that, otherwise, their external communication (including in the magazine) has become softer over time, as the maintenance of the project presupposes a permanent flow of resources ‘traded’ in the charity sector.