The troubles of the Murdochs and News International has kept the nation gripped this week. ClearlySo CEO, Rodney Schwartz, has used his latest post on Social Edge to ask what this might mean for the social economy. You can see the original version on Social Edge. The full text is also reproduced here.

Headlines in the UK, the US and many other parts of the world have been dominated by one item these past few weeks: the "phone hacking" and related scandals which led to the closure of the longstanding Sunday Tabloid newspaper the News of the World and their impact on the wider media empire run by Rupert Murdoch.

UK Politicians, hitherto too frightened to challenge the power of this media mogul, are rising up to call Murdoch and his lieutenants to account, and the concentration of voices in the media is being seriously questioned for the first time in years. It is not too dramatic to suggest that democratic forces in Britain are re-awakening from their slumber.

How similar this feels to the Arab Spring, where the forces of democracy rose up against those who ruled to demand that the national rather than the personal interest be paramount. Dictators were toppled and new political and economic models are being developed. Across the region, there is demand for change.

Interestingly, abusive practices in the UK and across the Arab world were tolerated for years, as many were victimised by the powerful. But the dominoes fell when two individuals, who embodied the very spirit of the innocent victim, brought us to our senses.

In Tunisia, it was the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi, the desperate fruit-seller, whose act brought down the Tunisian regime and others which followed. In the UK it was only when we learned that the News of the World hacked into the mobile phone of Milly Dowler, a murdered young girl, that our outrage gave us all the strength to challenge the seemingly unassailable Murdoch empire.

Our economy has tolerated such abuse for too long"where the societal interest is subverted in the interest of personal privilege. Consider the scene in Italy amid the many accusations of financial and sexual impropriety levelled against Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. In 2008, his opponents also argued that a law pushed through to grant the office of Prime Minister immunity from prosecution was tailor-made to help him avoid separate trials for corruption and fraud. He has also been accused of proposing other laws which would benefit his financial interests.

These stories are only the most flagrant violations of social interest in the name of the personal"there are hundreds of others. They may exemplify the most grotesque examples of how the greed of the few has been satisfied at the expense of the many, but they are very much the "spirit of the age""the age where profit maximisation and personal private interest came to be deified.

The Social Economy (which is how I describe the world where social businesses, enterprises and investment become the norm) is a very different model. Although far from perfect, and many of its principal actors are themselves flawed (as are we all), as a model it demands that both social and financial interests be considered.   Profits may be optimised, but not maximised. The risks of abuse hopefully thereby lessened.

• Is such a Social Economy a mere pipe dream or an emergent reality?
• What can be done within government to accelerate such a change?
• Will pressure on powerful individuals to act in a more socially responsible way continue"or does it take a Dowler or Bouazizi to catalyse action?
• Will social enterprises stay true to their objectives as they grow and prosper?

We live in hope!

You can view the original  article and join the discussion on SocialEdge now.