By Jennifer Wilkins
Enterprises have an important role to play in provisioning wellbeing and building prosperity. They also crystalise culture – a European business will differ from a Japanese business, despite globalisation, corporatisation and migration.
An emerging field of study into culturally unique enterprise is Indigenous entrepreneurship. In settler colonial nations, the Indigenous nation has been systemically destroyed through dispossession and deculturalisation, eliminating traditional modes of production and value creation. Modern Indigenous enterprise can contribute to rebuilding Indigenous identity, wellbeing and freedom, embedding economy into the socio-cultural space, not the other way round, as Westerners typically see it.
Indigenous enterprises are self-identifying. Keeping track of them, statistically, is not as easy as it sounds. Māori enterprises, for instance, combine features of Māori ownership, identity, values and contribution to Māori wellbeing. There is also a type within the type, the kaupapa Māori enterprise. It means having a commitment to the Māori agenda, which is “focused on addressing Māori aspirations first and foremost”, according to Kaupapa Māori theorist Graham Hingangaroa Smith. With the connection between kaupapa Māori enterprise and Māori aspiration being culturally explicit, I wanted to explore (for my master’s thesis) how exactly kaupapa Māori enterprises advance Māori aspirations.
As a non-Māori researcher investigating a Māori phenomenon, there are two golden rules: follow Kaupapa Māori Methodology and know your positionality.
Indigenous methodologies are a form of resistance in research. Now integral to credible research involving Indigenous peoples worldwide, their development was inspired by Māori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s seminal book Decolonizing Methodologies, released in 1999. A core function of Indigenous methodology is to frame research within Indigenous ontologies and epistemologies, without necessarily rejecting Western knowledge. It is a generous, anti-positivist approach to building our understanding of ourselves and the world(s). Cultural guidance is vital. The research outlined in this article would not have been possible without the stewardship of Dr Jason Mika of the University of Waikato.
Positionality, as a non-Indigenous researcher, means addressing unearned privilege that cannot be subtracted from the self. One solution is to adopt a decolonial approach, not only to one’s work, but to one’s worldview. This is not a do-it-once-and-be-done exercise, but a continual process of self-scrutiny and building allyship. Coming into this research as someone steeped in mainstream business, I recall the pleasure of the feeling of lightness – release, I think – that accompanied the effort of suspending my personal beliefs to listen with credulity as interviewees described kaupapa Māori enterprise through their worldview.
Kaupapa Māori theory has two sides, critical theory and constructivism. In the thesis, I chose to lean toward the constructivist stance, exploring kaupapa Māori enterprise and aspirations as they are perceived, deliberately without reference to non-Māori phenomena. I may be biased, but I think the findings are fascinating. Maori aspirations fall into themes of wellbeing, sustainability and empowerment, while the distinctive characteristics of kaupapa Māori enterprises fall into three realms – Māori frames of reference, Māori impacts and constituent inputs. How interviewees perceived the connections between enterprise and aspiration can be grouped into several types of construct, depending on whether they used an aspirational lens, applied a cultural framework or focused more on the constraints imposed by Western models.
The conclusion from an examination of these findings is that kaupapa Māori enterprises dance nimbly in the liminal space of hybridity between very different worlds, advancing and protecting Māori aspirations. There are four moves, so to speak. The first three are constructive: developing collective capacity to aspire through provisioning wellbeing, generating capabilities and freedoms to achieve aspirations and reproducing te ao Māori (the Māori worldview), defining and building spaces where Māori can be Māori. The fourth move is defensive: addressing tensions with the Western paradigm, shielding Māori aspirations from being diminished by the dominant culture that continually supresses Māori autonomy.
These learnings belong to the Māori people, who are unique. We cannot extract the results and assume they are applicable elsewhere, but we can replicate the research to discover how other forms of enterprise may act to advance the collective aspirations of other groups.
My next step is collaborating to bring together understandings of Indigenous and post-growth enterprise, seeing what knowledge we can ignite.
Jennifer Wilkins is an advocate, advisor and researcher in post-growth economics and enterprise. She is the founder of Heliocene, a post-growth advisory practice recognised across New Zealand, the UK and Europe for providing science-based, business-ready insights and for pioneering the understanding of degrowth principles in business professional and governance realms. In addition to obtaining a Master’s degree in Degrowth from the Autonomous University of Barcelona, she holds an MBA from the University of Warwick and is an accounting professional with corporate experience. Her post-growth work spans corporate environments, the financial system and Indigenous enterprises, aiming to establish knowledge beneficial to Aotearoa New Zealand’s economic resilience.
The opinions expressed in the text do not necessarily reflect those of R&D, but are those of the author.