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The purpose of this paper is to explore how social enterprises as an emerging organizational form in market economies acquire legitimacy to attract the support of their constituents and stakeholders.

Employing a qualitative case study of ten UK-based social enterprises, data for the empirical inquiry was collected using semi-structured interviews and documentary evidence (e.g. Internet web pages, newsletters, and marketing materials).

We found cross sector partnerships, community engagement and capability building and, compassionate enterprise narratives as quintessentially embedded managerial initiatives and practices which give form to the legitimating activities of social enterprises.

Proactive investment in the practices identified could help social enterprises to shore up their legitimacy to garner more societal support. In particular, they can draw on their partnership ties to locate, and recruit benevolent co-optees, strategically manipulate their community engagement activities to avoid goal displacement, and employ their compassionate enterprise narratives as an external communication tool to highlight their social objectives to their audiences.

The study highlights relevant organizing practices and activities that social enterprises employ to build legitimacy to attract the necessary support, relationships, and investments they require to function and grow.

The rapidly increasing number of older adults cycling through local criminal justice systems (jails, probation, and parole) suggests a need for greater collaboration among a diverse group of local stakeholders including professionals from healthcare delivery, public health, and criminal justice and directly affected individuals, their families, and advocates. The purpose of this paper is to develop a framework that local communities can use to understand and begin to address the needs of criminal justice-involved older adults.

The framework included solicit input from community stakeholders to identify pressing challenges facing criminal justice-involved older adults, conduct needs assessments of criminal justice-involved older adults and professionals working with them; implement quick-response interventions based on needs assessments; share findings with community stakeholders and generate public feedback; engage interdisciplinary group to develop an action plan to optimize services.

A five-step framework for creating an interdisciplinary community response is an effective approach to action planning and broad stakeholder engagement on behalf of older adults cycling through the criminal justice system.

This study proposes the Criminal Justice Involved Older Adults in Need of Treatment Initiative Framework for establishing an interdisciplinary community response to the growing population of medically and socially vulnerable criminal justice-involved older adults.

The purpose of this paper is to assess corporate social responsibility (CSR) implemented via social partnerships between professional sports teams and not-for-profit organizations according to current theoretical perspectives. Limited resources and outcomes often mean there is a gap between theory and practice, the implications of which are not well understood.

Five partnerships in Australian football were analyzed via case study methodology which incorporated interviews, analysis of websites, social media and annual reports.

Despite being used as a CSR tool, findings showed most organizations enter these arrangements to achieve instrumental outcomes. Further, such partnerships mostly operate at a basic stage often described as philanthropic. One partnership was seen as more advanced consisting of a workplace plan to enhance diversity.

It is advocated that managers adopt a more integrated partnership model consisting of formalized objectives, activity implementation, evaluation mechanisms, frequent interaction, top-level leadership involvement and promotion to sufficiently achieve CSR goals.

Addressing calls from past research into an examination of the variation of CSR in sports, this research is one of the first to compare multiple case studies to assess the strategic implementation of social partnerships in a professional sporting context. Accordingly, the study demonstrates how such partnerships can be evaluated against a prominent theoretical model, the Collaboration Continuum, enabling more robust social partnership strategies.

Performance measures are an important mediating mechanism that influences the design and delivery of care. Unfortunately, it is still commonly the case that acute care indicators are employed to assess the efficacy of integrated care. This hinders the ability to accurately assess and continuously improve integrated care efforts for priority populations, including older persons who live with complex health and social care requirements. A core set of indicators is needed from which to assess the quality and impact of integrated care on these older persons and care partners.

A modified Delphi process was employed that comprised of the following steps: (1) selection of an indicator inventory (2) defining criteria for ranking and achieving consensus, (3) recruiting participants, (4) iterative voting rounds and analysis and (5) selection of a core indicator set.

The study produced a core set of 16 indicators of integrated care that pertain to older persons who live with health and social care requirements. The set can be applied by health and social care organizations and systems to assess the quality and impact of integrated care for this population across the continuum of care.

Although the gap in the availability of relevant indicators was the impetus for the study, this also meant there was a dearth of validated indicators to draw from. There are significant gaps in commonly used data sets with respect to indicators of integrated care as it relates to older persons and care partner.

The indicator set is intended to follow the older person and care partner throughout their health journey, enabling a whole systems view of their care. The set can be used in full or in part by health and social care systems and organizations across various primary, acute, rehabilitative and community settings for program development and evaluation purposes.

The core set of indicators that emerged out of this study is a first step toward ensuring that older persons who live with complex health and social care requirements and their care partners receive quality integrated care across the continuum of care.

The findings are informed by the perspectives of older persons, care partners and healthcare professionals. Future research is needed to test, validate and potentially expand the indicator set.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how customer socialization strategies can help social enterprises (SEs) to establish different types of organizational legitimacy and how different types of organizational legitimacy in turn can encourage customers' positive in-role behavior (such as repurchasing) and extra-role citizenship behavior (such as referral, feedback and forgiveness of quality problems).

A survey of 381 customers in Chinese SEs is used to examine the research questions. The paper uses structural equation modeling and bootstrap method to analyze the hypothesized relationships among customer socialization strategies, organizational legitimacy and customers' in-role and extra-role behaviors.

This study finds that various customer socialization strategies can differentially enhance different types of organizational legitimacy of a SE, which in turn positively affects customers' in-role repeated purchase behavior and extra-role citizenship behavior. The study also finds that three types of organizational legitimacy are highly accumulative; gaining relational and market legitimacy might be a precondition for obtaining social legitimacy for SEs.

This study is one of the first to empirically investigate the important role of customer socialization strategies in the acquisition of different types of organizational legitimacy in the context of SEs. It also shows how different types of organizational legitimacy, in turn, can positively affect customers' in-role and extra-role behaviors. In addition, this is one of the first empirical studies to investigate the accumulative nature of three types of organizational legitimacy in SEs: relational legitimacy, market legitimacy and social legitimacy.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the important role of cross-sector partnerships and collaboration in global emergency management, relevant in situations such as the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and grand global challenges.

The paper utilizes exploratory historical methods and examines cross-sector partnerships from three key emerging markets – Pakistan, Turkey and Nigeria. The context of the emerging markets is important given the institutional fragility such markets encountered.

The authors offer a conceptual discussion that explicates the vital role of such partnerships in global emergencies. The authors also highlight the instrumental role of adaptive learning in cross-sector partnerships, which can help multiple stakeholders create and deliver value in response to an emergency like a global health pandemic caused by the COVID-19. Along with the conceptual discussion, the authors further offer practical examples of cross-sector partnerships in emerging economies of Pakistan, Turkey, and Nigeria – undertaken in response to the recent pandemic – emphasizing that such partnerships are crucial to mitigate the emergencies and their consequences on society. Finally, this paper offers theoretical and practical implications for cross-sector collaboration and partnerships in response to the global crisis.

This research is limited to emerging markets context and further research is needed on this important topic.

This paper is relevant given the current global pandemic caused by the COVID-19. There are relatively limited research studies on the cross-sector partnerships and their role in global emergencies, grand challenges and global crisis, thus this paper offers important insights on cross-sector partnerships and their value creation in global crisis situations.

While it has long been established that social factors, such as housing, transportation, and income, influence health and health care outcomes, over the last decade, attention to this topic has grown dramatically. Reforms that promote high-quality care as well as responsibility for total cost of care have shifted focus among health care providers toward upstream determinants of health care outcomes. As a result, there has been a proliferation of activity focused on integrating and aligning social and medical care, many of which depend critically on cross-sector alliances. Despite considerable activity in this area, cross-sector alliances in health care remain largely undertheorized. Both literatures stand to gain from more attention to carefully knitting together the theoretical and management literature on alliances with the empirical, health policy and health services literature on cross-sector alliances in health care. In this chapter, we lay out what exists in the current scientific literature as well as a framework for considering much needed work in this area. We organize the literature and our commentary around the lifecycle of alliances: alliance formation, including factors prompting alliance formation, partner selection, and alliance goals; alliance maturity, including the work of these cross-sector alliances, governance, finance and contracts, staffing structure, and rewards; and critical crossroads, including alliance timelines, definitions of success, and dissolution. We also lay out critical areas for future inquiry, including better theorizing on cross-sector alliances, developing typologies of these cross-sector health care alliances, and the role of policy in cross-sector alliances.

Social procurement policies are an emerging policy instrument being used by governments around the world to leverage infrastructure and construction spending to address intractable social problems in the communities they represent. The relational nature of social procurement policies requires construction firms to develop new collaborative partnerships with organisations from the government, not-for-profit and community sectors. The aim of this paper is to address the paucity of research into the risks and opportunities of entering into these new cross-sector partnerships from the perspectives of the stakeholders involved and how this affects collaborative potential and social value outcomes for intended beneficiaries.

This case study research is based on a unique collaborative intermediary called Connectivity Centre created by an international contractor to coordinate its social procurement strategies. The findings draw on a thematic analysis of qualitative data from focus groups with 35 stakeholders from the construction, government, not-for-profit, social enterprise, education and employment sectors.

Findings indicate that potentially enormous opportunities which social procurement offers are being undermined by stakeholder nervousness about policy design, stability and implementation, poor risk management, information asymmetries, perverse incentives, candidate supply constraints, scepticism, traditional recruitment practices and industry capacity constraints. While these risks can be mitigated through collaborative initiatives like Connectivity Centres, this depends on new “relational” skills, knowledge and competencies which do not currently exist in construction. In conclusion, when social procurement policy requirements are excessive and imposed top-down, with little understanding of the construction industry's compliance capacity, intended social outcomes of these policies are unlikely to be achieved.

This research draws on theories of cross-sector collaboration developed in the realm of public sector management to address the lack of research into how the new cross-sector partnerships encouraged by emerging social procurement policies work in the construction industry. Contributing to the emerging literature on cross-sector collaboration, the findings expose the many challenges of working in cross-sector partnerships in highly transitionary project-based environments like construction.

This study aims to understand how businesses can contribute to the achievement of the UN sustainable development goals (SDGs) by implementing Local Agenda 21 (or equivalent) plans in partnership with other organizations situated in their city. To this end, the present study examines drivers and outcomes from the perspective of business partners, as well as their relationships to the SDGs.

Through a mixed-methods approach this research studies 71 businesses from four large cross-sector partnerships formed to achieve local sustainability goals. Data were collected through a survey to determine why firms partner and what outcomes they obtain from partnering. Qualitative content analyses are used to determine the relationships between business drivers and outcomes from partnering for local sustainability and the SDGs.

From a resource-based view (RBV) perspective, findings show the value of local sustainability partnerships in relation to the SDGs. Many SDG targets are aligned with the top reasons why businesses join large community sustainability partnerships. Also, through the outcomes achieved by participating in the partnership businesses can further the SDGs.

This research contributes to the literature and to practice through the understanding of businesses partnering for local sustainability, and its relationships to global sustainability. Firstly, the connections of business partners to local and global sustainability are better understood. Of note is the contribution made to the literature on sustainability-related drivers and outcomes expanding and refining RBV literature. Secondly, a positive connection has been established between businesses and the SDGs, proposing a virtuous model of relationship that summarizes the findings from this research. And thirdly, large cross-sector social partnerships are better understood.

Small- and medium-sized enterprises and large corporations with local offices can further both local and global sustainable development by engaging in local cross-sector sustainability partnerships.

These research findings are crucial for those leading sustainability initiatives, so they can engage businesses actively in light of the important role they play in society improving their contributions and the chances for sustainability partnerships to achieve their goals.

This research contributes to the scale conversation by exploring community sustainability partnerships as a means to understand how business engagement in sustainability at the local level can contribute to the achievement of the SDGs and, ultimately, to global sustainability.