Search results

This paper aims to document the nature of social enterprise models in Australia, their evolution and institutional drivers.

The paper draws on secondary analysis of source materials and the existing literature on social enterprise in Australia. Analysis was verified through consultation with key actors in the social enterprise ecosystem.

With its historical roots in an enterprising non-profit sector and the presence of cooperative and mutual businesses, the practice of social enterprise in Australia is relatively mature. Yet, the language of social enterprise and social entrepreneurship remains marginal and contested. The nature of social enterprise activity in Australia reflects the role of an internally diverse civil society within an economically privileged society and in response to an increasingly residualised welfare state. Australia’s geography and demography have also played determining roles in the function and presence of social enterprise, particularly in rural and remote communities.

The paper contributes to comparative understandings of social enterprise and provides the first detailed account of social enterprise development in Australia.

This paper aims to explore how social enterprises are treated in scholarly research on quasi-markets. In so doing, the paper aims to show that a number of critical knowledge gaps persist which require deeper engagement from researchers, practitioners and policymakers alike.

This study adopts a conceptual analysis of the existing literature concerning social enterprises and quasi-markets.

The paper finds that there are four main knowledge gaps in this area. First, there are moral dilemmas created by boundary shifts, arising from the development of quasi-markets. Second, the phenomenon of “tactical mimicry” (Day and Teasdale 2016) represents a key theoretical platform not yet fully explored. Third, the lack of clear, comparative assessments of social enterprises across quasi-markets, and other types of service providers is also apparent despite offering a significant methodological opportunity for scholars. Fourth, there is the issue of how social enterprises engage in, and resource the operational functions that will support their management of conflicting logics, especially rigorous impact measurement.

This paper uses a synthesis of key social enterprise and quasi-market studies to extend current debate in this area, which tends to be diffused and complex. By focussing on critical knowledge gaps, the paper contributes a meta-level appraisal of the key areas for future research, providing a focussed agenda for scholars to target their efforts in growing this important body of knowledge.

The purpose of this paper is to offer a theoretical framework of whistleblowing that gives due recognition to the emotional and reflexive processes that underpin it. Modes of anger are integrated into the model based on a reading of Geddes and Callister (2007), and developed by Lindebaum and Geddes (2016) work on moral anger.

The model is derived by interrogation of the extant literature on whistleblowing with due recognition accorded to emotional and reflexive dimensions that have been underrepresented in previous research. The model was tested by a qualitative study that uses memoir analysis to interrogate a board level whistle-blower’s account of the complex, traumatic and like-changing nature of his experience.

The paper identifies key stages in whistle-blower thinking before, during and subsequent to a decision to expose corporate wrongdoing. It demonstrates how emotional and reflexive processes influence a whistle-blower’s mode of anger expression, and how different perspectives by the whistle-blower and the focal organisation may view this expression as moral or deviant anger.

The complexity of the whistleblowing process, together with possible alternative perspectives of it, makes identifying every influencing variable extremely challenging. Also, reliance on a whistle-blower’s own account of his experience means that recall may be partial or self-serving. The model can be used to analyse other whistle-blower accounts of their experience, and further confirm its applicability.

This is the first application of memoir analysis to a whistle-blower’s account of his experience that relates modes of anger expression to stages in the whistleblowing episode. It addresses a significant imbalance in whistleblowing research that hitherto has emphasised rationality in whistle-blower decision making and downplayed the influence of reflexivity and emotion.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of the Board of Directors in encouraging entrepreneurship as a strategy for goal achievement among newly formed social purpose organizations.

In the absence of empirical work on board behaviour, a qualitative case study approach is adopted whereby multiple data collection methods – including in‐depth interviews and non‐participant observation – are drawn upon in the investigation.

Organizations found to be most effective in achieving their goal(s) had a higher level of entrepreneurial intensity than less effective organizations. Three opposing themes emerged when comparing the social processes adopted by the Boards. In embracing social processes that fostered entrepreneurial behaviour. Boards assumed the role of change agent, with the leveraging of social capital being instrumental. Other social processes encouraged behaviour that was reactive and risk adverse in nature, serving to reinforce the fiduciary role those Board had assumed.

A review of the extant literature indicates that this is the first reported empirical investigation of board behaviour. In having access to Board meetings, unique insights into social processes were garnered that might otherwise have gone undetected if interview data were relied upon as the sole source of evidence. As such, this paper makes a key contribution in beginning to address the void in our understanding of social enterprise governance. In particular, it highlights the influence of governance on entrepreneurship and goal achievement among newly formed social purpose organizations. When viewed through a social constructionist lens, the results indicate that while organizations strive to achieve both legitimacy and identity, effectiveness was greater among organizations that emphasized the latter.

The purpose of this paper is to address the governance of “fair trade social enterprises” (FTSEs), i.e. the organisations exclusively dedicated to the import, distribution and/or labelling of fairly traded products. The aims are to describe and categorise the types of persons and stakeholder groups represented in FTSEs' governance structures and to look at the link between stakeholder involvement and other organisational features such as resources, goals and activities.

These questions are investigated through a qualitative field study based on face‐to‐face interviews with the managers of 15 Belgian FTSEs.

The paper distinguishes three governance models each entailing different governance paradigms: the managerial model, the volunteer‐based and the multi‐stakeholder models. In the three governance models, it is possible to link, to a certain extent, the composition of the governance structures, the access to resources and the goal priorities regarding the different dimensions of the FT activity. In brief, governance appears as an organisational entry revealing much information about the vision and the strategy of the FTSEs.

This paper is limited to Belgian FTSEs and must be considered as one of the first attempts in characterising the specific features and challenges of organisational governance in the FT context. International comparative studies exploring FTSE's governance in a more longitudinal perspective, combining the standpoints of diverse organisational actors, would be most welcome in the future.

As this paper shows, the multidimensional nature of FT and the coexistence of different types of FTSEs in the same country make this a very interesting field to investigate the challenges of governance in social enterprises. Social enterprises and those researching them should pay more attention to the importance of adopting and conceiving governance schemes that are adapted to their multiple missions and enable the access to multiple resources.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the prior work on social enterprise (SE) model comparisons by exposing the difficulties in producing universally comparative SE models. Furthermore, this paper seeks to trace different dominant stories of SE based on a combined historical and discursive analysis of Australian institutions shaping SE development.

This paper emulates the methodological approach taken by Kerlin (2013) and uses the same indices and measures adopted in this original model comparison. Although the valuable contribution of macro-level model comparison studies to the growing SE knowledge base is noted, it is proposed that categorisations are naturally exclusionary by their design, omitting emergent SE models and their institutional influences. These omissions pose difficulties for recognising and conceptualising hybrid organisations that often traverse institutional boundaries and frameworks (Doherty et al., 2014). A discourse analysis of SE policies in Australia was used to illustrate how micro-level appraisals of SE models differentiate from, and complement, the macro-level approach.

A combinatory analysis of Australian SEs, based on historical and discursive institutional theories, provides two stories about these organisations. The first story emerges that Australian SEs are partly shaped by institutions, the historical path-dependencies of which are associated with particular SE characteristics. Alternatively, using a discursive lens, the second story of Australian SEs emerges as a political subject, captured within a broader idea (e.g. social inclusion) that is coordinated between political domains and communicated within the public sphere. Therefore, it is argued that a combinatory approach shows SE models as they are, as well as how they might be – contingent on the implementation of identified policies.

The major contribution is to critique and extend Kerlin’s (2013) approach by complementing the macro-level study of SE models with an analysis that considers the local-level innovations that drive unique SE models and applications. To enact this, the authors explore how closely macro-level approaches to SE categorisation are the subject of discursive construction, as well as historical events. Consequently, this paper contributes to existing knowledge by advancing existing approaches to SE model studies, illustrating how different stories of SE can be drawn out from combinatory methods and local knowledge.

The practical implication arising from this paper is that SE discourses are both a subject of capture and a site of contestation, meaning that various institutional actors play a role in shaping the “reality” of the field.

The main social implication of this paper is that Australian SEs make a diverse contribution, but there are dangers that the discursive construction of civil society could narrow and constrain this.

The novelty inherent in this approach lies in bringing together two frameworks to explore the same field of action. By replicating Kerlin’s (2013) approach and bringing in a discursive analytical framework, it is shown that macro-level studies of SE sectors are enhanced by combinatory methodologies.