A Legacy of Brokering Entrepreneurial Tendencies: A Case Study

This paper explores how entrepreneurial legacies can have broader social impact beyond the identity of founders, the organization that they created, or their own philanthropic activity. Thus, we illustrate how, in the South African context, social entrepreneuring may be understood as the values-driven, relational brokering of societal legacies amongst a variety of entrepreneurs. At the heart of the layered legacies of Robbie Brozin, cofounder of Nando’s, lie his personal values, the organizational values of Nando’s, and South Africa’s constitutional values. Through our analysis of Brozin’s legacies, inspired by Levinasian ethics and Ubuntu principles, we can rethink how social entrepreneuring comes about, how it is nurtured, and the social impact it can have. Social entrepreneuring is an ethical-relational accomplishment, which requires engagement with histories and material realities on individual, organizational, and sociocultural levels. In practice, this means that our understanding of social entrepreneurship could extend beyond empowering individuals with a stated social purpose, to include the creative brokering of values-driven relational legacies on various levels of society. In this context, policy and practice should focus less on empowering individuals, and more on understanding and supporting the relational texture of social entrepreneurship, and the entangled legacies it responds to and recreates.