If You Can’t Let Go: The Role of Emotional Dependency in Global South–North Social Enterprises
通过乌干达-德国社会企业伙伴关系的纵向比较研究，揭示集体情感依赖如何导致后殖民影响，并说明集体情感在伙伴关系各阶段的双刃剑效应。
Abstract While social entrepreneurs’ pro‐social motivation and other‐oriented emotions often drive their collaborative efforts to tackle grand challenges like poverty or gender inequality in the Global South, we know little about how collective emotions shape Global South–North partnerships over time. Drawing on a comparative longitudinal study of two Ugandan‐German social enterprise partnerships with the joint goal of achieving the Southern partner’s self‐reliance, we problematize how collective emotions may lead to various stages of collective emotional dependency and hence foster postcolonial repercussions. We introduce collective emotional dependency as an inherent micro‐level mechanism that may manifest, surface, and become (dis‐)embedded beyond macro‐level dependencies. Our findings illustrate the double‐edged nature of the collective emotions in each phase of the partnership, as they can be both beneficial and detrimental. Our study shows that longstanding power inequalities, which South–North social enterprise partnerships set out to reduce in the first place, remain present in the everyday relational practices of organizing and collaborating.