How social enterprises gain cognitive legitimacy in the post-pandemic period? Social welfare logic and digital transformation
Industrial Management & Data Systems
ISSN: 0263-5577
Article publication date: 6 September 2021
Issue publication date: 10 November 2021
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to propose a social enterprise legitimation mechanism by combining the established logic and transformational logic to test the validity of the conceptual model.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors construct the theoretical framework based on integrating organizational identity theory, attention-based view and collected 128 social enterprises data during the post-pandemic period in China. The authors applied multiple hierarchical regression analysis and mediation analysis to test the research hypothesis.
Findings
The results show that strong organizational identity contributes significantly to the cognitive legitimacy of social enterprise. Besides, we found that social welfare logic and digital transformation can positively mediate the correlation between organizational identity and cognitive legitimacy.
Practical implications
Social enterprises enhance legitimacy significantly by social welfare logic comparing with commercial logic, which indicates that social enterprises should allocate more internal resources and attention to present the organization's social value through various distributions. More importantly, social enterprises should embrace digital transformation to enhance transparency and efficiency, decrease transaction costs, enlarge organizational social impact to strengthen cognitive legitimacy.
Originality/value
The paper first proposed and empirically tested that digital transformation is an important mechanism to enhance the social enterprise's cognitive legitimacy.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
This paper is supported by the Key Program of National Social Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 20AJY008); China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (Grant No. 2018M641947). The authors contributed equally to the paper and author names are in alphabetical order. The authors would also like to express appreciation to the anonymous reviewers and editors for their very helpful comments that improved the paper.
Citation
Aisaiti, G., Liang, L., Liu, L., Xie, J. and Zhang, T. (2021), "How social enterprises gain cognitive legitimacy in the post-pandemic period? Social welfare logic and digital transformation", Industrial Management & Data Systems, Vol. 121 No. 12, pp. 2697-2721. https://doi.org/10.1108/IMDS-01-2021-0065
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2021, Emerald Publishing Limited