An Identity-Based Approach to Social Enterprise

Social enterprise has gained widespread acclaim as a tool for addressing social and environmental problems. Yet because social enterprises integrate social welfare and commercial logics, they face the challenge of pursuing frequently conflicting goals. Studies have begun to address how established social enterprises can manage these tensions, but we know little about how, why, and with what consequences social entrepreneurs mix competing logics as they create new organizations. To address this gap, we develop a theoretical model based in identity theory that helps to explain (1) how commercial and social welfare logics become relevant to entrepreneurship, (2) how different types of entrepreneurs perceive the tension between these logics, and (3) what implications this has for how entrepreneurs recognize and develop social enterprise opportunities. Our approach responds to calls from organizational and entrepreneurship scholars to extend existing frameworks of opportunity recognition and development to better account for social enterprise creation

Masters of Disasters? An Empirical Analysis of How Societies Benefit From Corporate Disaster Aid

Corporations are increasingly influential within societies worldwide, while the relative capacity of national governments to meet large social needs has waned. Consequentially, firms face social pressures to adopt responsibilities that have traditionally fallen to governments, aid agencies, and other types of organizations. There are questions, though, about whether this is beneficial for society. We study this in the context of disaster relief and recovery, in which companies account for a growing share of aid, as compared to traditional providers. Drawing on the dynamic capabilities literature, we argue that firms are more able than other types of organizations to sense areas of need following a disaster, seize response opportunities, and reconfigure resources for fast, effective relief efforts. As such, we predict that, while traditional aid providers remain important for disaster recovery, relief will arrive faster and nations will recover more fully when locally active firms account for a larger share of disaster aid. We test our predictions with a proprietary data set comprising information on every natural disaster and reported aid donation worldwide from 2003 to 2013. Using a novel, quasi-experimental technique known as the “synthetic control method,” our analysis shows that nations benefit greatly from corporate involvement when disaster strikes

Funding Financial Inclusion: Institutional Logics and the Contextual Contingency of Funding for Microfinance Organizations

Microfinance is a promising tool for addressing the grand challenge of global poverty. Yet, while many studies have examined how microfinance loans affect poor borrowers, we know little about how microfinance organizations (MFOs) themselves finance their lending activities. This is a significant oversight because most MFOs do not self-fund their lending, but, rather, rely on loans from external funders. To better understand microfinance funding, we apply and extend the institutional logics perspective to analyze the lending practices of commercial and public funders, who together provide most of the capital for global microfinance. We argue that these funders adhere to financial and development logics, respectively, and that this leads them to invest in different types of MFOs. Yet, in the face of uncertainty, we suggest that the practices motivated by these logics will start to converge in ways that are problematic for a nation’s microfinance sector. Using a proprietary database of all traceable loans to MFOs from 2004 to 2012, we find strong support for our hypotheses. In particular, our findings show that the relationship between institutional logics and organizational practices is contextually contingent, and this insight contributes important understanding about the efficacy of microfinance as a poverty-reduction tool

Hybrid Vigor: Securing Venture Capital by Spanning Categories in Nanotechnology

This study develops and tests a set of novel theoretical predictions about the conditions under which category spanning is rewarded by external audiences. To do this, we revisit the assumption that comprehensible organizational identities are associated with individual categories. Drawing on insights from cognitive psychology, we suggest that category spanning does not necessarily lead to confusion, but, rather, to interpretations that rely on a “header–modifier” structure where one category anchors cognition but is modified by features of the other. Audiences may have clear understandings about how categories fit together and cognate schema for evaluating firms that hybridize by spanning between them. An empirical examination of venture capital in the carbon nanotechnology industry supports our approach: start-ups were rewarded or punished for hybridization contingent on how they mixed “science” and “technology” in their patents, top management team, and collaborations. As such, we show that the category a firm starts in, how it hybridizes, and the degree to which this affects core versus peripheral identity markers may all affect how it is perceived

Masters of disasters? An empirical analysis of how societies benefit from corporate disaster aid

Corporations have become increasingly influential within societies around the world, while the relative capacity of national governments to meet large social needs has waned. Consequentially, firms are being asked to adopt responsibilities that have traditionally fallen to governments, aid agencies, and other types of organizations. There are questions, though, about whether or not this is beneficial for society. We study this in the context of disaster relief and recovery; an area where companies account for a growing share of aid as compared to traditional providers. Drawing on the dynamic capabilities literature, we argue that firms are better-equipped than other types of organizations to sense areas of need following a disaster, seize response opportunities, and reconfigure resources for fast, effective relief efforts. As such, we predict that—while traditional aid providers are important for disaster recovery—relief will arrive faster, and nations will recover more fully when locally active firms account for a larger share of disaster aid. We test our predictions with a proprietary dataset comprising information on every natural disaster and reported aid donation worldwide from 2003 to 2013. Our analysis uses a novel, quasi-experimental technique known as the synthetic control method and shows that nations benefit greatly from corporate involvement when disaster strikes.Accepted manuscrip

The Transformation from Traditional Nonprofit Organizations to Social Enterprises: An Institutional Entrepreneurship Perspective

The development of commercial revenue streams allows traditional nonprofit organizations to increase financial certainty in response to the reduction of traditional funding sources and increased competition. In order to capture commercial revenue-generating opportunities, traditional nonprofit organizations need to deliberately transform themselves into social enterprises. Through the theoretical lens of institutional entrepreneurship, we explore the institutional work that supports this transformation by analyzing field interviews with 64 institutional entrepreneurs from UK-based social enterprises. We find that the route to incorporate commercial processes and convert traditional nonprofit organizations into social enterprises requires six distinct kinds of institutional work at three different domains; these are—“engaging commercial revenue strategies”, “creating a professionalized organizational form”, and “legitimating a socio-commercial business model”. In elaborating on social entrepreneurship research and practice, we offer a comprehensive framework delineating the key practices contributing to the transformation from traditional nonprofit organizations to social enterprises. This extends our understanding of the ex-ante strategy of incorporating commercial processes within social organizations. Furthermore, the identification of these practices also offers an important tool for scholars in this field to examine the connection (or disconnection) of each practice with different ethical concerns of social entrepreneurship in greater depth.British Academ

Does Business and Society Scholarship Matter to Society? Pursuing a Normative Agenda with Critical Realism and Neoinstitutional Theory

critical realism, institutional theory, social responsibility,

Anchors Aweigh? Then Time to Head Upstream Why we Need to Theorize “Mission” before “Drift”

Going beyond a narrow focus on social enterprise, Grimes, Williams, and Zhao (2019) advance a model of mission drift that they argue is relevant to understanding why—and with what consequences—all types of organizations might act in ways that are inconsistent with their identity and image. We applaud this effort, and agree that it is important to develop a theoretically rigorous approach to mission drift.Yet while the treatment that Grimes et al. (2019) develop is likely relevant to some organizations, their argument is built on a shakyfoundation, where “mission” is conceptualized in simplistic terms as an organization’s single, orienting purpose. In turn, this leads theauthors to make a number of problematic inferences about “drift” as a general phenomenon. This dialog details our concerns, and suggests thatit is vital to go upstream, and theorize mission as a nuanced and variegated construct if we are going to generate meaningful insightabout the nature, causes, and consequences of drift.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishe

Crowdfunding Social Ventures: Who Will Reward (or Punish) Hybridity?

Unlike traditional investing, where decisions follow a clear financial calculus, it is unclear how and why funders support hybrid ventures. To address this question, we analyze the varied priority that investors place on social impact versus financial returns and draw on categories theory to argue that different priority orderings associate with different perceptions of how hybridity aligns with different investment goals. Results show that funders who prioritize financial goals react positively when they perceive a venture exhibits greater hybridity, whereas funders who prioritize social impact do not. Our findings contribute to research on impact investing, hybrid organizations, and categories theory