Building alternative futures: The role of prefiguration in social entrepreneurship

Enterprises claiming a social mission face increasing scrutiny over whether their innovations drive genuine transformation or rather reinforce existing problematic systems. Building on the distinction between compensatory and transformative social entrepreneurship, this research note proposes prefiguration as an appropriate framework for theorizing the latter. Prefiguration names the pursuit of societal transformation by materializing alternative systems within local initiatives, which then together function as decentralized laboratories developing system-level solutions. This strategy is adopted by many social enterprises today, as illustrated by our case study of Equal Care Co-op, a platform-based care cooperative combining digital, social, and democratic innovations to challenge the exploitative UK care system. We argue that, by integrating prefiguration theory into social entrepreneurship scholarship, researchers can better distinguish genuine transformation from superficial disruption, yielding both more accurate models and greater support for enterprises pursuing emancipatory alternatives to contemporary capitalism's systemic failures.