A social enterprise in Gomorrah-land : a tale of radical cultural entrepreneurship and social innovation management

Objectives. Ercolano is a town of about 50, 000 inhabitants, located only a few miles from Naples and worldrenowned for its gorgeous views of the Mount Vesuvius and the archaeological site of ancient Herculaneum. Yet until the early 2000s tourists carefully stayed away, preferring near-by Pompei for their Southern Italian archaeological trips. Ercolano’s economic and social life was then heavily dominated by local organised crime, which predominantly made its money from drug trafficking, contract killing and protection racket extortions. Whilst several Italian criminal groups have been known for investing in tourism and real-estate, the specific activities of Ercolano’s camorra (Neapolitan mafia-type organisation) were best carried out in an atmosphere of isolation, fear and economic underdevelopment. Ercolano’s clans long fought each other over the control of open-air heroine markets across town, as well as streets and neighbourhoods on which to impose protection racket. Two cartels of criminal families, known as AscionePapale and Birra-Iacomino, engaged into four brutal ‘mafia wars’, leading to over 70 murders between 1990 and 2009. Each criminal alliance controlled, and resided in, a part of Ercolano’s historical centre, turned into a no-man’s land and split by an imaginary line that no-one involved with either cartel ever dared to cross. The well-to-do people escaped to the relatively gentrified suburbs, and a sub-culture shaped by the Camorra’s language and symbols spread well beyond criminal families. It was in this traumatic field, however, that a rather unconventional social enterprise emerged as a powerful challenger to the dominance of organised crime. Cooperativa Siani’s founders were in their early 20ies during the most ruthless phases of the fourth Ercolano’s mafia war of the mid-2000s. Exasperated by the escalation of violence and frustrated by the lack of opportunities in their home-town, they were in search of a place to turn into a community centre for the local youth. Somewhat unexpectedly, they were offered by the City Council the use of a flat in the very centre of town, once belonging to a cold-blooded mafia boss. The decision to accept this offer one that exposed them to the risk of political controversies and, above all, retaliations from Camorra criminals split the original youth group. The survivors chose to use the confiscated flat in order to start an anti-mafia web-radio, the idea of which came from the discovery that mafia people in and out of prison had long exchanged messages through their own radio, so called Radio Nuova Ercolano. Throughout the years, Cooperativa Siani also started running educational activities for kids from mafia-dominated neighbourhoods, as well as awareness-raising workshops for students from all over the region. In 2014, they were allocated the use of a land confiscated from another criminal family, and gave rise to an agricultural coop producing honey and tomatoes (which now constitutes to founders’ main source of revenues). This new project also served the purpose of offering training and work opportunities to local teenagers recently come out of juvenile prisons, many of whom share a migrant background or a history of mental health issues. This article analyses the activities of this multifaceted social enterprise as an example of radical cultural entrepreneurship work. We use this concept to propose that disruptive innovation, marketing and narrative strategies may be required in an ‘extreme’ field, as well as when an emerging category of entrepreneurs possesses perhaps moral legitimacy, but still lacks wide-spread legitimation (Vergne and Wry, 2014). In fact, whilst certainly serving appropriate social goals, an anti-mafia social enterprise was unprecedented in Ercolano, and did not conform to the consensual schemata of a large part of the town’s population (Hudson and Okhuysen, 2009; Vergne, 2011). It is our main contention that, under these conditions, successful entrepreneurs (and social innovators in particular) will elaborate differentiated cultural entrepreneurship strategies, in order to address the various audiences from which they seek legitimation (or legitimacy) (Vergne, 2012). These theoretical propositions, which we developed inductively, are organised into a dynamic model. In so doing, our approach builds on, and contributes to, three main areas of research. Not only do we make contributions to the scholarship on cultural entrepreneurship (Lounsbury and Glynn, 2001), expanding our understanding of how this emerges and develops in traumatic or extreme settings, and in the absence of legitimation.