Gerding, J. M., & Vealey, K. P. (2017). When is a solution not a solution? Wicked problems, hybrid solutions, and the rhetoric of civic entrepreneurship. Journal of Business and Technical Communication, 31(3), 290-318.

Gerding, J. M., & Vealey, K. P. (2017). When is a solution not a solution? Wicked problems, hybrid solutions, and the rhetoric of civic entrepreneurship. Journal of Business and Technical Communication, 31(3), 290-318.

 Looks like this isn't original research. Looks more like a narrative review article. Dialectical tension versus CARS, as Matt Gold would put it. This is a tension paper. 

Problem. "How do you persuade or motivate people to be financially and socially invested in a problem that, by definition, cannot be solved?"

"Traditional understandings of civic entrepreneurship often depict civic entrepreneurs as highly skilled in cultivating what Waddock and Post (1991) described as “the necessary vision, drive, and resources to galvanize the efforts of a large, complex network of individuals and organizational actors toward resolution of a complex problem [emphasis added]” (p. 394). In other words, as reflected in both scholarly and popular depictions, the work of civic entrepreneurs involves identifying complex social problems, reframing them as opportunities for intervention, and directly implementing a solution that provides closure to a particular matter of concern." Closure. Tension. 

"Ultimately, we argue that civic entrepreneurship involves the deeply rhetorical work of designing hybrid solutions that may not necessarily resolve or provide closure to complex social prob- lems but that instead continually adapt and evolve to keep pace with them."

"by bringing to light the vast array of rhetorical activities involved in þPOOL, we further demonstrate the vital role that rhetoric and technical communication play in civic entrepreneur- ship—beyond that of delivering a persuasive pitch to investors or a proposal to stakeholders." Subtweet!

"Ultimately, we suggest that the work of rhetoric and tech- nical communication can be seen throughout the entire development of þPOOL as a hybrid solution, from the initial construction of water pollution as a wicked problem and the iterative process of testing filters to the design of public campaigns for raising financial and social support via crowdfund- ing and the development of relationships with members of the community, local government agencies, and environmental advocacy groups." It's a little more capacious, sure, but it's not like Spinuzzi is just focused on the pitch. 

Crowdfunding. "we examine þPOOL as an ongoing civic entrepreneurial venture to demon- strate how hybrid solutions function within large civic crowdfunding campaigns." "Our rhetorical analysis of þPOOL is not meant to be generalizable across all entrepreneurial ventures; rather, we situate crowdfunding as an exemplary model of civic entrepreneurship, one that foregrounds the deeply rhetorical work involved in developing and soliciting financial and social support for a hybrid solution."

"Such problems, as Rittel and Webber (1973) suggested, cannot be definitively formulated because their boundaries are always shifting and evolving. As a result, the creators of þPOOL sought to design a hybrid solution that offers a stable outcome for the civic entrepreneurial venture (i.e., the construction of a self-filtering community pool in the East River) that is also dynamic enough to continually adapt to the shifting and evolving contours of a wicked problem (i.e., through the ongoing collection of water pollutant data for scientific research)." Isn't this kind of like a habitus? A hybrid solution? Cf. schatzki.

Hu, talking about this source. Weber, R., & Spartz, J. M. (2014). Engaging entrepreneurship in technical communication using client and service learning projects. Programmatic Perspectives, 6, 52–85

OK, so there's a link between entrepreneurship and tech comm in that they are both problem solving fields. "Building on Weber and Spartz’s (2014) work, we foreground the ways entrepreneurship and technical communication overlap as forms of problem-solving work. Most understandings of entrepreneurship describe it as largely a process of identifying problems, reframing them as oppor- tunities for intervention, and developing innovative solutions that enact change for the benefit of stakeholders (Johnson, 2013; Shane, 2003; Stevenson & Jarillo, 1990). Likewise, Johnson-Eilola and Selber (2013) characterized the technical communicator as one who finds and solves problems."

"three common qualities of both social and civic entrepreneurialism that together foreground the rhetorical work of civic entrepreneurship."

• driven by a social mission
• accumulates social capital
• enacts social change

It seems like what G & V do is, they talk about how social and civic entrepreneurs are the same and then how they are different. At the end of the day, "The solutions offered by civic entrepreneurship, then, seem to confound, or at least run counter to, our expectation that such solutions should in some way explain, alleviate, or provide closure to a particular problem." Tension again. 

Yes, the two are different. "Dees’s (2007) characterization of the social entrepreneur as a lone innovator and pioneer working outside of governmental constraints is not as prevalent in civic entrepreneurship. Rather, civic entrepreneurs are most often char- acterized by their commitment to forging relationships and building com- munities across disciplinary, institutional, and cultural contexts. Indeed, Leadbetter and Goss (1998) saw civic entrepreneurs as operating from within the public (or governmental) sector rather than within traditional businesses."

The section "Civic Entrepreneurship and Its Wicked Problems" also seems to recapitulates this idea that the problem or tension in the intro gets repeated in more detail later in the paper. 

This was from the intro too, this is getting repeated. "We believe that by examining the hybridity of ideas and solutions crafted by civic entrepreneurs, we can better under- stand how their approach to problem-solving calls for and is sustained by a wealth of rhetorical work."

Oh, methods. Kind of. "To better understand how þPOOL acts as a model hybrid solution, we examine various documents from the multiyear project, including 

• social media accounts, 
• two Kickstarter campaigns, 
• an official Web site, 
• press releases, 
• blog posts, 
• magazine and newspaper articles, 
• interviews, and 
• videos pub- lished between 2010 and 2016."

"As a complex civic infrastructural project, þPOOL is an ideal model of what we call a hybrid solution (see Figure 2). By hybrid, we mean a venture or enterprise that offers simultaneously a stable and tangible entrepreneurial outcome designed to dynamically adapt to the shifting and evolving con- tours of wicked problems. We develop this notion of hybrid solutions in order to foreground the rhetorical work of social entrepreneurship, which we suggest involves maintaining a consistent perception of the overarching vision even when the dynamism of iterative solutions undermines this perceived stability. That is, the stable component of a hybrid solution is performative in that a civic entrepreneurial venture always unfolds as an iterative process whereby the overall solution being developed is subject to revision, reinterpretation, or even failure. In the early phases of a new venture, for instance, nothing is certain or guaranteed. Moreover, when dealing with a wicked problem, a civic entrepreneur’s proposed solution (in the form of a venture) cannot be entirely set in stone because the para- meters of the wicked problem are always shifting and being redefined over time. To establish a sense of credibility and generate both financial and social capital for a new venture, then, civic entrepreneurs must persuasively communicate a well-developed, singular vision for their initiative. Without components that are more or less fixed and unlikely to deviate significantly, an idea can be perceived as unwieldy, underdeveloped, or too much of a risk for investors." So it has to be both flexible and stable at the same time. 

Ok, so the rest of the paper is broken up into stable versus dynamic aspects of the hybrid solution. 

Stable

• Architectural renderings
• Environmental activism
• History of public pools in NYC

Dynamic

• contributions to scientific research
• Catalytic social alliances
• Funding methods

Oh wow, so they present a methodology. "We present here a methodology for better understanding how civic entre- preneurs rhetorically grapple with wicked problems, specifically by fore- grounding four interrelated characteristics that we see at the core of hybrid solutions."

• slow solutions
• subtle solutions
• scalable solutions
• sustainable solutions

Notice all the "solutions" too, harking back to the literature review. 

I'm trying to remember why this was in the synchronic paper at one point. Why? There's no expanding technology to new markets in this... You were thinking of the zebra muscles one. 

https://utexas.box.com/s/za8qjexk5nmy4qwm7dcs7r9i61zcs24y