Organizing for Commons-Enabling Decision-Making Under Conflicting Institutional Logics in Social Entrepreneurship

Abstract Social entrepreneurship develops innovative opportunities and solutions aimed to (re)generate the common good. This emerging organizational form poses unprecedented challenges to group decision and negotiation studies. This article lever- ages conceptual tools from the literature on the commons and institutional logics as it explores the organizational conditions of social entrepreneurship that trigger commons-enabling decision-making in its organizational field. Through an inductive analysis of a longitudinal case, this study proposes a model that highlights the critical role of the bridging organization that can be introduced by the social entrepreneur in a previously fragmented organizational field. This bridging organization is in the con- dition to develop an innovative co-creation logic that can serve as a common ground to enable collaboration between actors from diverse and even conflicting institutional logics. The proposed model suggests that a practice-driven path to the construction of such a common ground for decision-making is more effective than a disclosure-driven path, which is based on classical conflict analysis techniques. The ICT-enabled activ- ity system developed by the social entrepreneur injects transparency and traceability into a previously opaque field, thus creating the conditions for distributed, flexible, and complementary sense- and decision-making processes that develop and protect the commons

Learning Orientation and Performance Satisfaction as Predictors of Small Firm Innovation: The Moderating Role of Gender

Research on innovation in the context of small entrepreneurial firms is limited. Limited available studies on innovation in small firms are devoted mostly to firms operating in knowledge-intensive or technology industries and ignore the vast majority of small firms operating in traditional and less knowledge-intensive sectors of the economy. The rapid pace of technological change and the intensifying environmental turbulence in our economy influence all firms, including the majority of small firms that are perishing at a faster rate. Innovation is a key competitive tool for survival in a turbulent environment. Thus, it is important to understand factors influencing innovation in small firms. In this paper, we explore how learning orientation, a small-firm owner’s satisfaction with firm performance, and the firm owner’s gender influence innovation in small firms. We test the proposed model on a sample of small firms located in the United States of America