Everyday aesthetics and visual methods for enlarging our approach to social impact

Abstract

Existing research on the social impact of entrepreneurship lacks theory that adequately incorporates the subjective experience of social impact. We build from Mexican philosopher Katya Mandoki's comprehensive everyday aesthetics model to broadly understand various subjective experiences of social impact. This everyday aesthetics view of social impact allows understanding social impact through those whose voice has largely been missing in research, such as social entrepreneurs, vulnerable communities, and beneficiaries. We outline various ways in which social impact is manifested using Mandoki's four modalities of everyday aesthetics (proxemics, kinetics, emphatics, and fluxion), illustrating using examples from social entrepreneurs in Latin America. We show how four visual methodologies (researcher-led photography and video, photo elicitation, photovoice, and participant drawings) can be used to visually capture these aesthetic manifestations of social impact, illustrating with examples from Africa and Asia.