How the Zebra Got its Stripes: Individual Founder Imprinting and Hybrid Social Ventures
Organizational Hybridity: Perspectives, Processes, Promises
ISBN: 978-1-83909-355-5, eISBN: 978-1-83909-354-8
Publication date: 7 December 2020
Abstract
We consider how the commercialization of social ventures may result from their founders’ personal experiences of commercial organizing. Building on theories of individual imprinting, we theorize that the commercialization of social ventures is influenced by two types of commercial experience: parental imprinting from the commercial work experience of a founder’s parents, and work imprinting from a founder’s professional experience within for-profit organizations. We find support for our theory based on analysis of a novel dataset of over 2,000 nascent social ventures and their founders. We further find that the marginal effects of additional work imprinting from a founder’s commercial experience decline with the longevity of this experience. We discuss implications of our findings for literatures on social ventures, imprinting, and hybrid organizations.
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Acknowledgements
Acknowledgments
We thank the co-editors of this volume, Marya Besharov and Björn Mitzinneck, for their helpful comments and guidance. Thanks also to Jesse Chu-Shore, Henrich Greve, Elizabeth Hansen, Monica Higgins, Christopher Marquis, Anne-Claire Pache, Lakshmi Ramarajan, Metin Sengul, András Tilcsik, Melissa Valentine, Jennie Weiner, and participants in the following workshops and conferences: the Work, Organizations and Markets seminar at Harvard Business School, the OMT-INSEAD-ASQ workshop on Organization Theory and New Venture Creation, the 2012 Community of Social Innovation workshop, and the 2013 European Group on Organizational Studies Track 44, for helpful comments on earlier versions. We also thank the Division of Research at Harvard Business School for funding to collect these data, and Peter Bracken, Stefan Dimitriadis, and Marissa Kimsey for their excellent research assistance.
Citation
Lee, M. and Battilana, J. (2020), "How the Zebra Got its Stripes: Individual Founder Imprinting and Hybrid Social Ventures", Besharov, M.L. and Mitzinneck, B.C. (Ed.) Organizational Hybridity: Perspectives, Processes, Promises (Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Vol. 69), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 139-165. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0733-558X20200000069007
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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